BusinessInsider24

WICHITA, Kansas (Reuters) - Sometime on Sunday morning, a Pennsylvania high school student will be presented with the keys to a black Honda Civic just for going to a party after the school's annual prom dance. In Roanoke, Virginia, one student will drive away next month with a new car and two others will get iPads. At a high school outside Dallas, two students received $500 college scholarships. Around the country parents, schools and civic organizations are using extravagant door prizes to encourage high school students to attend supervised, alcohol-free events after their annual high school proms in a bid to keep them away from wild private parties. "Proms are a lot like a rite of passage in America," said Sherry Hamby, research professor of psychology at Sewanee: The University of the South in Tennessee. "It signals your maturity as a sexual person. Often it's the first time that they might go out to dinner independently." Supervised after-prom events have been around for years,...

There have been reports that Yahoo's board will meet tomorrow to decide whether or not to make a $1.1 billion cash offer to buy Tumblr. There have been other reports that Facebook may swoop in with its own offer. After having conversations with two sources, we believe Facebook is not going to make an offer. There is speculation that Tumblr's banker, Frank Quattrone, leaked word of Facebook's interest in hopes of starting an auction and driving up Tumblr's price with Yahoo. We're told no such "auction" is happening.  Tumblr could threaten to walk away from Yahoo's $1.1 billion, and force a higher bid that way, of course. Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook. Join the conversation about this story »

While dining out for Japanese food in NYC doesn't often require grilling up a whole cow like at West Village trailblazer Takashi, there's no shortage of solid options offering some adventurous takes on sushi and more. Check out NYC's 12 best Japanese restaurants. No. 12: Blue Ribbon Sushi 119 Sullivan St. Food: 26 Decor: 20 Service: 23 Cost: $59 Long a “standard bearer of cool” in SoHo, this Bromberg brothers Japanese slices “top-flight”, “work-of-art” sushi along with a “wonderful array” of cooked items; “proactive service” and “cozy”, “denlike” digs offset “pretty-penny” price tags and that “frustrating” no-rez thing. No. 11: Morimoto 88 10th Ave. Food: 26 Decor: 27 Service: 24 Cost: $86 Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto’s “phenomenal” Japanese cuisine at this Chelsea destination is as “beautiful and creative” as the “must-see” “modern” duplex space; “excellent”, “almost-psychic” service is part of the “unforgettable” experience, as are “eye-popping prices” – especially for the “oh my”...

In 2007, David Karp started a creative blogging platform, Tumblr. Now, it's a behemoth. It's home to more than 86 million blogs and it receives about 5 billion monthly pageviews, according to Quantcast. Recent reports state that Facebook and Yahoo are both interested in acquiring Karp's company for $1 billion. For a 26-year-old who's already worth more than $200 million on paper, Karp lives a modest life. He prefers a night in with his girlfriend to a crazy night out. Most days, he rides a Vespa or walks to Tumblr's headquarters. But he's also traveled the world and enjoys taking fancy cars for weekend getaways. What's like being the 26-year-old found of Tumblr? Here's a look into Karp's life as depicted (how else?) in his Tumblr blog. David Karp was born and raised in Manhattan. He dropped out of high school with his parent's blessing at the age of 15, was home-schooled for three years, and joined the work force. By the time Karp's friends were off to college, he was Head of Product...

Raha Moharrak has broken not one, but two records with her summiting of Mount Everest. The 25-year-old Saudi Arabian made it to the top of Everest — along with 34 other climbers from around the world and their 29 Nepalese Sherpa guides — Saturday morning. Moharrak is both the first Saudi Arabian woman and the youngest Arab to reach the summit, which at 8,850 meters or 29,035 feet is the highest in the world. She was part of a four-person expedition that also included the first Qatari man and the first Palestinian man to reach the summit. The group is aiming to raise $1 million to help fund education projects in Nepal. They climbed from the Nepal side, leaving from the highest camp on South Col. The mountain can also be scaled from Tibet. May is the most popular month for climbers to attempt Mount Everest because of the favorable weather conditions. Originally from Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, where women are heavily restricted by the conservative Islamic society, Moharrak said she had to...

At the Mio Buenos Aires hotel, the bathtubs are works of art: Argentine Mario Dasso personally selects only the most beautiful pieces of calden wood (naturally felled by fire) and carves them into luxurious, oversize soaking tubs. The coolest bathtubs give guests a sense of their own private in-room spa and look nothing like that old shower-tub combo you may have left back home. Nothing screams “I got away from it all” quite like slipping into a bubble bath—in a basin polished to a sparkle by anyone but you—and admiring a gorgeous view. See the world's coolest bathtubs > The glass-bottomed bathtubs at Six Senses Laamu in the Maldives treat you to an intimate look at hawksbill turtles, lolly fish, and—if you’re lucky—dolphins. In California, savvy road-trippers pull over from Highway 1 at Big Sur Cabin, a one-bedroom with a private outdoor courtyard. Twin claw-foot tubs await, surrounded by a wood-burning fire pit, Adirondack chairs, and a redwood picket fence fringed by cacti, ferns,...

Ben Bernanke has delivered his commencement speech for this year's graduates of Simon's Rock, a quirky graduate school in Massachusetts. The whole thing is here. It might be the only commencement speech all year to contain footnotes. The speech is about economics, but rather than discuss the short or medium term, he talks about the very long run, and whether things are likely to change a lot over the next 50 years, and what role technology or innovation will play. And in doing that, he looks back at some of the amazing changes from the past centuries and decades. A few of the facts that Bernanke cites: Between 1700 and 1970, he notes, worker productivity has jumped approximately 30x. Just in the last 50 years, life expectancy has jumped by 8 years, from 70, to 78. In 1913, life expectancy was a mere 53 years. In 1913, 60 hour work weeks at exhausting manufacturing jobs were the norm. So then Bernanke asks whether the long-run will see massive changes in technology and life improvement...

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer will make some kind of an announcement on Monday. The press conference was first tweeted by CNBC, and confirmed by other publications. Obviously, some people think that Mayer will announce that Yahoo is buying Tumblr for as much as $1.1 billion. Word has been circling that the deal that may get approved as soon as Sunday night, according to AllThingsD. The billion-dollar price tag, if it proves true, seems shocking given that Tumblr has reportedly only generated $13 million in revenue in 2012, after taking $125 million in investor funding. But, as Business Insider's Jim Edward's points out, Tumblr has become a cool tool among young people. They use it as blogging platform, a custom-news feed and a social network and it would be easy to monetize with advertising in the right hands. Then again, Bloomberg says that this hastily scheduled event will bring us news about updates to Yahoo's photo sharing service Flickr. Stay tuned. Please follow SAI on Twitter and...

One out of every six women in the US has been the victim of a sexual assault. Elsewhere in the world, the statistics are even more appalling. Yet advertisers often make light of sexual violence towards women. They disguise it as innuendo, humor, or artistic expression, and hope the shock factor will work promotional magic for their product. Back in the Mad Men era it was unsurprising to see women treated poorly in ads. But we've found some modern day promotions that glorify sexual violence. Some of the brands are repeat offenders; some are merely one-time gaffes. Often, clients and agencies defend them as "edgy" fantasy scenarios. Fair enough. But there sure are a lot of them. And so few involving violence against men ... The context: This is a famously bad old ad from the 1960s. Surely, nothing like this would be approved for paid media today? Wrong! Dolce & Gabbana consistently tries to market itself as an "edgy" brand. This ad ran in Esquire. The company retracted it after people...

Yahoo's board is meeting Sunday evening to decide whether to buy Tumblr for $1.1 billion in cash, Kara Swisher and Peter Kafka reported last night. So that means there are only a few hours left for Facebook to submit a compelling counter-offer. Anecdotally, young people are deciding that Facebook is no longer cool and are decamping for Instagram and Tumblr. Facebook already owns Instagram. So now the question is whether it also wants to own Tumblr. The man who broke the original Yahoo-might-buy-Tumblr story (along with Ms. Swisher), Peter Kafka, told us this morning that thinks the chatter that Facebook will swoop in with a massive wad of cash at the last moment is overblown. Facebook has had plenty of opportunity to buy Tumblr, Mr. Kafka suggests. If Facebook actually wanted Tumblr, in other words, Facebook would have already bought Tumblr. So that leaves Yahoo. According to Ms. Swisher and Mr. Kafka, the Yahoo-Tumblr deal is already fully baked, with Tumblr founder David Karp...

Last year, Facebook marked a new milestone in its nine-year history. It lost users. While the network did pass the 1 billion monthly active user threshold globally in 2012, Facebook also lost 1.4 million U.S. monthly active users late last year, a small but symbolic decline. Nor was it the only network experiencing a slowdown. After years of double-digit expansion, social media use in the U.S. leveled off markedly last year. American social media users grew an estimated 6.8% in 2012, a far cry from 30 percent growth rates just a few years ago. With so many of the country’s 221 million netizens already logging into social networks, growth is forecast to slow to a trickle in the years ahead. Overseas, however, the social media landscape is entirely different. In India, social media users grew by an estimated 51.7% in 2012, no small change in a country of 1.25 billion people. Indonesia followed closely behind with a 51.6% growth rate. China’s social media user base expanded 19.9%. Latin...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - Back on Earth, Canadian astronaut and cyberspace tweeter Chris Hadfield is getting a rough re-introduction to gravity after a five-month stint aboard the International Space Station, the former commander told reporters during a video webcast from Houston. Hadfield became a social media rock star with his zero-gravity version of David Bowie's "Space Oddity" and a continuous stream of commentary on Twitter about his life in orbit. But living without gravity for five months has left him feeling dizzy, weak and prematurely aged. A veteran of three space flights, he is wearing a pressure suit under his clothes to help his circulation as his body re-adapts to getting blood back to his brain. "Without the constant pull-down of gravity, your body gets a whole new normal, and my body was quite happy living in space without gravity," Hadfield, 53, said in a video conference call with Canadian reporters on Thursday, three days after returning to Earth. The...

A former Amazon Web Services engineer recently conducted an Ask-Me-Anything session on Reddit, and one of the more surprising things he said was just how much of a threat Google's cloud computing service is to Amazon. That's because Google's cloud is faster than Amazon's, he said. With cloud computing, where apps run on rented servers over the Internet, performance is very important. Not that Google is going to topple Amazon's cloud business anytime soon. Amazon is by far the biggest cloud in every way, from the number of companies that use it to the number of apps and third-party management tech for it. Still when asked if Microsoft's cloud, Azure, which recently announced it would match Amazon's low prices, is a real threat, the engineer answered: "Well, no, I don't consider Azure a threat to AWS, but I consider Google a threat to AWS. Google's cloud has been outperforming AWS since very private beta and performance means a lot in the cloud. "Anyone who thinks there is a 'cloud war'...

I'm in Philly for the weekend, determined to prove I can have a great time for less than $100. So far, I'm having a blast and I've still got 80 bucks to play around with. One of my biggest concerns in planning this trip was figuring out how to get around in the cheapest way possible. Luckily, Philly is very pedestrian-friendly, so I've been getting away with walking just about everywhere. But last night, I really needed a ride. It was after midnight, train service had stopped, and I didn't want to fool with buses without knowing which line to take or how to get back to my host's apartment. It didn't help that everyone at the downtown bar where I was hanging out gave me those big "Oh, girl, NO!" eyes when I told them I was thinking about legging it home. So I decided to take a gamble on a free ride-share service called SideCar I heard about. It's supposed to be the anti-taxi. Launched in San Francisco less than a year ago, the SideCar app hooks up willing drivers with people who need a...

This weekend I attended a wedding where smartphones being used as cameras were everywhere. It really highlighted for me how people don’t live in the moment anymore. The idea of removing the barrier between you and the moment you are enjoying has always been a dream of mine. I resent spending time at my kids’ birthday parties watching the candles be blown out on a 4-inch screen instead of being fully immersed in my children’s happiness. Until now there hasn’t been a potentially legit way to live in the moment AND preserve the memory. Enter Google Glass. In my day job, I oversee the future of the product direction at Aviary. Our company mission is to democratize creativity. We provide a powerful photo editor that is relied on by thousands of companies and millions of people each day. So I’m not going to miss an opportunity to immerse myself in new photographic mediums we might need to develop for. We were one of the first in line to buy Glass at Google IO last year. To be candid, my...

When you travel the world, like it or not, you are a representative of your country, and your behavior—good or bad—can reflect on your nation as a whole. That’s why, while we’re all for spontaneity, sometimes it’s a good idea to stop and think before you chug that eighth beer and start dancing in the streets. Recently, we at Triposo conducted a survey to learn more about bad tourist behavior abroad. We asked respondents to confess to their own travel sins—which included everything from stealing to public urination—and also to report on the misbehavior of others. We also asked them which countries they thought behaved the worst while traveling. The answers might surprise you... 10. Brazil: A significant percentage of respondents felt that Brazilians were the most naughty of all world travelers. We’re betting that number spikes come World Cup season... 9. Italy: At number nine, Italy demonstrated a solid reputation for exporting tourists who are among the rudest and lewdest of all world...

In 1994, Steve Jobs sat down in front of a camera for the Silicon Valley Historical Association and offered a lot of awesome advice about success and failure from his own personal experience. We previously posted a clip from this interview, less than two-minutes long, where Jobs gave the best tip ever on how to succeed: ask for help. He told the story of being a 12-year-old kid who picked up the phone and called legendary tech founder Bill Hewlett and asked for help. Here's another clip now making the rounds on the Internet, too. It is also less than two minutes long, and shows Jobs talking about the secret to his famous "reality distortion field." That secret is to realize that "Everything around you that you call 'life' was made up by people that were no smarter than you."   SEE ALSO: 15 Enterprise Tech Rock Stars You've Never Heard Of But Should Know Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook. Join the conversation about this story »

Last week, Bang With Friends proudly announced Android and iPhone versions of its controversial and super popular dating app, but now Apple has pulled the app from its app store. It's not exactly clear why Apple has banned the app. We'd guess the reason is that BWF is a brutally honest way to go about dating. The app helps you find a Facebook friend to hook up with. It sends the person a "nudge" that indicates your interest. If that person likes the idea, then the rest is up to you. BWF's new mobile app makes it easy to swipe up to hang out and swipe down to "bang." BWF grew wildly with almost no promotion. It now has more than 900,000 members after just 90 days and has matched 200,000 couples, its founders say.  It also raised about $1 million from investors. Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook. Join the conversation about this story »

For the past week, there's been a big brouhaha at Bloomberg over how reporters for the business news service have been using the company’s terminals to monitor employees on Wall Street. Some reporters have apparently used that information to find leads for the articles they write. Now Bloomberg has gotten former IBM CEO Sam Palmisano involved. Palmisano will conduct a review of Bloomberg's privacy policies and help Bloomberg come up with rules on what reporters can and cannot do with terminal subscriber data, reports the New York Times' Amy Chozick. Palmisano is a friend of Bloomberg founder Michael Bloomberg and sits on the board of his charity foundation, Bloomberg Philanthropies. To recap: Goldman Sachs complained when it learned that Bloomberg staffers could see which of its employees had been logging into Bloomberg’s proprietary terminals. One reporter used that info as a lead for a story. She called Goldman asking if one of its employees had left the company, based on the fact...

There's a major revolution going on right now in enterprise technology. Apps, devices, cloud computing, big data, networks, software are all being overhauled. There are lots of well-known people leading the charge like Cisco's CEO John Chambers, Salesforce.com's CEO Marc Benioff and Box's CEO Aaron Levie. But they aren't working alone. Behind the big names are thousands of people doing their part to change the IT world. Among them, some stand out for handing critical areas for their respective companies. Fred Luddy, founder and chief product officer, ServiceNow Fred Luddy describes himself as "just a programmer" but he's known as the quiet genius behind ServiceNow, a super successful enterprise cloud company that helped cure the IPO market after the Facebook disaster. ServiceNow is a cloud tool that let's IT departments manage their help desk and other technology projects. Luddy started the company out of near desperation, he told Business Insider. He had been the CTO of Peregrine...

What's it like when two well-known startup founders live under the same roof? Brit and Dave Morin first met a few years ago. Their first date was over coffee, talking about technology. Now they're married. Both worked for Apple. Dave went on to work for Facebook, then he launched mobile social network Path. Brit founded Brit & Co, a site that teaches people how to embark on creative projects. It isn't all fun being a well-known couple in tech though. Snark is on the rise in Silicon Valley, and Morin says you need a thick skin to deal with it. "I don't know why Silicon Valley is so snarky!" Morin says. But there are a lot of perks that come with marrying a fellow entrepreneur. "I think it's nice to have someone who will always be your beta tester and has been in all the same situations," says Morin. Here's what it's like to be a well-known couple in tech: // <div>Please enable Javascript to watch this video</div> Produced by Business Insider...

Google's big keynote at its I/O developers conference this week wore me out. Not because it lasted a grueling three hours and fifty minutes, but because of what was announced. With every new product update, every new feature, every new virtual service, it became more and more clear that Google isn't just a search company that makes loads of cash by showing you ads. It's creeping into every aspect of our digital, physical, and private lives at an exponential rate. I'm still trying to wrap my mind around it. Google isn't just the backbone of the Internet anymore. It's rapidly becoming the backbone of your entire life, all thanks to data you're voluntarily giving up to a private company based on your Web searches, photos, Gmail messages, and more. After spending three days at I/O this week, it became more apparent than ever that unless millions (billions?) of people suddenly change their mind and start using alternative tech tools, or unless the government steps in waving the anti-trust...

Advertising is hardly ever the right answer to building a sustainable, profitable startup. Yet so many do it. Instead, startup founders and CEOs need to focus on what they could charge for that people would actually pay for. The Board of Innovation — a startup consultancy — recently posted a great deck detailing 17 money-making techniques every startup should know. The common theme is that companies need to understand the emotional context of its customers.  Any smart, digital revenue model will combine at least few of the forthcoming techniques, according to the Board of Innovation. See the rest of the story at Business Insider Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.

Warner Brothers spent 10 years in Leavesden, U.K., filming eight Harry Potter films. The studios are massive and reveal how the movies were made using the most incredible special effects in the film industry. Over the course of filming, five warehouses full of props were used. There was an Animal Department, A Creatures Department, a Visual and Special Effects Department, and more, which made each detail of J.K. Rowling's magical wizarding world come to life. We visited the studios last month and learned the secrets. Here's how the producers did it. The floating candles in the great hall were originally hundreds of real candles suspended by wires, which were digitally removed. But while the first movie was being filmed, there was a problem. The heat from the flames burned through the wires and caused candles to drop onto the tables. Afterward, all the floating candles were created digitally. During the epic feast in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, tons of desserts covered the...

Microsoft has formed a new "deep tech" team of executives whose duties will include recruiting non-Microsoft developers to build apps using its products. The idea is to get Microsoft closer to next-generation developers who are making tons of money building Web and mobile apps on other companies' platforms. But according to some developers who've worked with Microsoft for years, the company will have become a better listener in order to achieve this goal. ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley was first to report on the deep tech team earlier this week. With Windows 8, Microsoft started focusing on smartphones and tablets and pushed developers to use the "Modern" API to build apps for these devices. At the same time, Microsoft effectively killed off Silverlight and XNA, two popular programming languages that developers had spent years learning, and which can be used to build mobile apps. Ziliang Guo, a third party Windows developer, told Business Insider that Microsoft alienated many developers with...

Marketo had a good, good day. Its stock launched on Nasdaq, rising nearly 78% from the opening price of $13 to over $23. Bruce Cleveland and Doug Pepper from venture capital firm InterWest Partners did particularly well. InterWest had a 33.3 percent stake that was worth $302 million pre-sale and now tallies up to more than $565 million, reports AllThingsD's Arik Hesseldahl. Marketo makes marketing automation software which does things like manage marketing budgets, evaluate how well a marketing campaign went, manage email and social media campaigns and the like. It competes with companies like Eloqua, which had its own IPO last year, and Salesforce.com's Marketing Cloud, formed through its acquisitions of Radian6 and Buddy Media. It wasn't the only enterprise tech company to go public today. Tableau Software hit the New York Stock exchange, too, and popped big. Its $31 opening price is over $50 right now in after-hours trading. SEE ALSO: The 19 Best Enterprise Tech Venture Capitalists...

I landed in Philly about four hours ago, fresh off a short (and cheap!) two-hour bus ride from Manhattan, courtesy of Bolt Bus. I already love it. It has nothing to do with the flawless weather –– though I can't deny it doesn't help –– or the fact that I've gotten dozens of e-mail from Philly fans imploring me to write amazing things about their city. Here are a few reasons why: I can walk downtown without having to dodge tourists like landmines. There was a big food truck rally outside the bus station and I wouldn't have had to wait 2 hours for a gourmet taco if I wanted one. I could have even had a SEAT. To myself. (You try finding more than one open seat at a public watering hole in Manhattan or Brooklyn. I dare you.) I feel like I could bike here and not fear for my life. (Look ma, no helmet!) I saw ZERO people (yes, zero) in line at Trader Joe's. I was so confused without the usual team of crowd wranglers to shepherd me along that the manager had to point me toward an open...

When CNet editor and reviewer Brian Bennett lost his "lovely HTC One test unit" while traveling, he was forced to use the other test phone he brought with him, a BlackBerry Z10. He expected to be miserable missing out on Google Drive, Google Talk, Google Now and other Android apps. But he was shocked at how much he liked the phone, once he was set up with Google Apps for Business. ("It requires you to configure your Gmail as an exchange account.") He particularly liked BlackBerry Hub ("made missing important communiques very difficult") and the long battery life. He was less pleased with having to give up Netflix and Instagram and he struggled with a not-always intuitive gesture system. Still, after actually using it as a daily device, he liked it, though he's not quite ready to ditch the HTC One, with its bigger screen and Android apps. "My key takeaways from this experience are; the Z10 is a smoothly operating and highly functional smartphone which is particularly adept at mastering...

It's been one year since Facebook went public. We assume a lot of IPO investors aren't happy with how things turned out. But, from Facebook's perspective, it all worked out. It got a good price on its IPO, and now it has plenty of time to develop its business. If CEO Mark Zuckerberg does a good job with the business, this rough first year will be no big deal in the long run. Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook. Join the conversation about this story »

Last week, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie confirmed that he had lap band stomach surgery in February to lose weight. Christie is not alone in his struggle to lose weight through diet and exercise. So he, and many others, have turned to surgical options. The lap bad is one of the fastest growing weight-loss surgeries, in large part because it is one of the least invasive. Lap band involves placing a plastic band around the upper part of the stomach to make it smaller, which both reduces appetite and limits the amount of food you can eat. As with any medical procedure, patients should be aware of the risks associated with lap band surgery before getting on the operating table. Lap Band Talk forum gives patients who have undergone the life-changing surgery a way to connect and share their stories. A section devoted to before and after pictures allows men and women to post their progress. According to the manufacturer LAP-BAND, after surgery patients can lose 1.5 to 2 pounds per week...