LONDON OLYMPIC 2012: Young people audition to take part in the Opening Ceremony

The Opening Ceremony is a celebration showcasing the best of the Host Nation. It also features a parade of all competing nations and the highly anticipated entrance of the Olympic Flame, which ignites the Cauldron and signals the start of the Games.

The eyes of the world will be on London for the Opening Ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games. The Ceremony will provide an opportunity for the world to view the artistic expression of the Artistic Director (Danny Boyle) and his team, and the culture of our Host City and the UK. There are certain elements that must feature in every Ceremony, as outlined in the International Olympic Committee (IOC) charter. The artistic performance of the Ceremony then gets underway and welcomes the world to the London 2012 Games.

The name of the Olympic Opening Ceremony show will be ‘Isles of Wonder’ and the worldwide broadcast will commence at 9pm. The Ceremony will kick off with the sound of the largest harmonically tuned bell in Europe, produced by the Whitechapel Foundry, and the Stadium will be transformed into the British countryside for opening scene ‘Green and Pleasant’, which includes real farmyard animals. The Ceremony will also include a special sequence celebrating the best of British, featuring volunteer performers from the NHS.

Danny Boyle, Artistic Director of the London 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony, said: ‘Our Isles of Wonder salutes and celebrates the exuberant creativity of the British genius in an Opening Ceremony that we hope will be as unpredictable and inventive as the British people.’

Creative team

A host of world-class British directors and producers are leading the artistic team to stage the Opening Ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games.

Performers

A total cast of 15,000 will take part in the London 2012 Opening and Closing Ceremonies, which will be watched by an estimated audience of four billion. 

NASDAQ: Facebook stumbles on 1st trading day as shares

Facebook stumbled on its first trading day on Friday as shares ended barely above the starting price after a glitch-plagued market debut on the Nasdaq that failed to live up to its enormous hype.

The stock, priced at $38 on Thursday in the largest-ever initial public offering (IPO) for a technology firm, eked out a gain of just 0.61% to end at $38.23, amid record volume of more than 575 million shares traded.

Shares in the social network titan saw roller-coaster action in what was one of most keenly awaited stock issues in history. The day began with a 30-minute delay in trade, an incident which regulators are still reviewing.

Shares jumped 12% to $42.55 in opening trade but within minutes fell back to the offering price. A midday rally failed to sustain its momentum and the price tailed off before the close.

"The negativity in the market overall has put a damper on the IPO," said  Darren Hayes, a Pace University professor and former investment banker.

"It's not uncommon in an IPO to see a big rise and then for the price to come back down, but I'm a bit surprised after all the hype to see such a small gain."

A report on the Business Insider financial blog said the price held at $38 because of a large number of standing orders at the offering price. The Wall Street Journal said the underwriting investment banks stepped in to support the price.

"It's hard to know what would have happened if the banks hadn't stepped in," said Lou Kerner of the Social Internet Fund, raising questions about what will happen to Facebook's share price when the Nasdaq reopens on Monday.

James Hughes, chief market analyst at London's Alpari, said "the real value of Facebook is not likely to be known until the hype of the IPO has died away and investors have been able to digest how the company is going evolve to be the money-making machine many expect it to be."

Investors were expected to be hungry to get a piece of Facebook, which has become a global phenomenon since its humble beginnings in 2004 as a project of then-Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg and his classmates.

Zuckerberg, 28, wearing his trademark hooded sweatshirt, remotely rang the bell to open the Nasdaq, marking the start of trade.

He told the crowd at the company's new campus in Menlo Park, California, that going public is a "milestone" but added: "Our mission isn't to be a public company. Our mission is to make the world more open and connected."

The market debut was disappointing compared with some recent tech IPOs. LinkedIn, a business-oriented social network, doubled its share price on its first day, and Groupon, a discount deal aggregator, jumped 30%.

Others have not fared so well. Pandora, an Internet radio site, rose a more modest 8.9% and online gaming site Zynga lost five% on its first day.

Trip Chowdhry, who follows Facebook for Global Equities Research, said the "lackluster" opening was because the company had failed to answer crucial questions about how it will boost revenues and adapt to the mobile Internet.

"Management cannot sing and dance around the key issues," he said.
There are concerns about Facebook's long-term ability to generate ad revenues, fueled by General Motors' decision earlier this week to pull its advertising.

GM had been spending about $10 million on paid advertising and $30 million on unpaid marketing on Facebook.

Another shadow hanging over Facebook is privacy.

Some consumer and privacy advocates say Facebook has been too loose with user data and hope that as a publicly traded company it may change its tune.

The IPO gave Facebook a dizzying value of $104 billion at its market debut.

It raised more than $16 billion, making it the richest after that of financial giant Visa in 2008, according to Renaissance Capital. The addition of a possible stock "over-allotment" could boost the total to $18.4 billion.

With its current market value, Facebook is now among the most valuable US companies, ahead of sector giants Amazon ($96 billion) and Cisco ($89 billion), and more than twice the value of Ford Motor Co. ($38 billion).

But it remains behind Google ($196 billion) and Apple ($496 billion).

Under the share plan, Zuckerberg holds 55.8% of the voting power of Facebook shares, and over 18% of the value of the company.

Despite the lingering concerns, some still see huge potential for growth.

"Facebook is a business that can succeed with far fewer employees than the technology behemoths of old," said Victor Basta of London-based Magister Advisors.

"Facebook's IPO filing implies a value per employee for its own business of $33 million. Microsoft, by contrast, has a value per employee of $3 million, reflecting the fundamental structural differences between the businesses."

Facebook posted a profit of $668 million last year as revenue vaulted to $1.06 billion.

 

Samsung Galaxy S III Launching Today

Will It Come to U.S.?

Samsung is expected to announce its Galaxy S III smartphone at 2 pm ET in London today.

The Galaxy S III is the most-anticipated Android smartphone launch of the year so far. It's the follow-up to the two most commercially successful Android phones ever, Samsung's Galaxy S and Galaxy S II. Samsung is now the world's largest phone maker, and according to Horace Dediu of Asymco, it's by far the most profitable maker of Android-powered mobile phones.

Very little is known about the new phone, and rumors have been frantic and contradictory. It may use a quad-core Samsung Exynos processor. It may use a dual-core processor. It might have a large 4.7- or 4.8-inch screen. (Samsung has had success with large screens of late, selling millions of the 5.3-inch Galaxy Note phone.) That screen may be Super AMOLED, Super AMOLED Plus, or an even newer technology. One thing is clear, though: to impress the phone market it's going to have to compete blow-by-blow with HTC's glamorous new One X phone, which we've currently rated the best smartphone on AT&T.

What makes the announcement a little frustrating for Americans hoping to get their hands on the phone, though, is that it's in London. Typically, announcements held in Europe tend not to discuss the U.S. market much, because our market is so carrier-dependent and so different from other countries'.

In previous years, Samsung has released a global version of its Galaxy S that has shown up on T-Mobile (for the original) or AT&T (for the S II), and then each of the other U.S. carriers has gotten a customized version. Sprint's Galaxy S, the Epic 4G, had a QWERTY keyboard, for instance. T-Mobile's Galaxy S II had a larger screen and different processor from the global version. Verizon didn't get a Galaxy S II at all. So we'll be looking to see if there are any clues about the U.S. models, and whether they'll be different from the global device.

YouTube Cofounder Steve Chen Explains What He's Doing With His New Company

About a year ago, YouTube cofounders Steve Chen and Chad Hurley bought bookmarking service Delicious from Yahoo, and used it as the basis to form a new company called Avos Systems.

We haven't heard much from them since. Until today, when Avos announced its first round of outside funding. (PDF here.)

The company isn't saying how much it raised, but it got a group of pretty big names on board, including Google Ventures, NEA, and Madrone Partners, and Kai-Fu Lee, who previously set up Chinese research offices for both Google and Microsoft. (Lee's incubator, Innovation Works, was an investor.)

We talked to Chen today, and he explained a little more about what the company wants to do.
Basically, it's all about helping users make sense of the flood of new content coming on to the Web every day.

"Having worked with YouTube, there were already about 40 hours of video being uploaded every minute. That's doubled. There are now 60 to 80 hours of new video content being uploaded every minute -- on one web site. There's new content on Twitter, it comes from RSS feeds, from blogs, from Facebook, from social networks.... There are lots of new products and new services making adding content easier. But there's not many people on the other side, helping users digest that content."

Delicious and a Chinese-language equivalent, mei.fm, are parts of the equation. Those products are still about "people manually adding bookmarks and sharing sites in their social network. We want to try to make that process easier, more fun."

But Avos is also building a mysterious product called Zeen.  It sounds like a personalized collection of content arranged in a magazine-type format.

There are lots of other services doing similar things, from Flipboard and Zite on the display side, to Wavii and Trap.it, which focus on different ways of making sense of all the new content showing up online.

Chen said that Zeen would be similar to Flipboard "on the UI level" but different on the publishing side --  "We want to make sure you don't have to call our head of business relationships to strike a relationship before you publish something. Every user has something to say."

Sounds cryptic, but we'll hear more in the coming months, Chen told us.
The company currently has about 30 developers spread between San Mateo in Silicon Valley, Dunedin in New Zealand, and Beijing. The new round will be used to hire more talent, as well as to leverage connections from Google Ventures and NEA.

San Francisco 49ers president -- and former CFO of Facebook and YouTube -- Gideon Yu has also joined the board

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2012

HAPPY NEW YEAR to all Visitors :) Have a Blessed New Year.

Be Connected and Updated With Arsalan Jilani ,,,

FarmVille Christmas Save the Children Campaign: Everything you need to know

This week marked the launch of Zynga's "A Very Merry Christmas" holiday video in FarmVille, which gave us just a taste of the game's "Save the Children" charity event for this year. Now that the event has actually launched in your game, you'll be able to give yourself the warm and fuzzies by knowing that you've helped those in need through one of three programs (or a combination of the three).

The next time you login to FarmVille, you'll be greeted with a window like the one below, asking you to consider donating one of three dollar amounts ranging from $10 to $20 to the Save the Children charity, which works to help impoverished children across the United States. You'll see exactly which area of the program your donation will benefit, with 100% of the proceeds going to support Save the Children's efforts.

At the $10 level, you'll receive a Teddy Bear Tree, with your $10 going to provide "Healthy Snacks" to children. At the $15 level, you'll help stock a Library and will receive a Holiday Pony. Finally, at the $20 level, you'll receive a permit to plant the Green Peppermint Crop, a limited edition crop that will be yours for a week. You'll be able to plant as many Green Peppermints as you like, with each rewarding you with 2 XP and 120 coins when harvesting after their 8-hour growing time. That contribution goes to fighting poverty in general, giving children a chance to participate in after-school activities or early learning programs (as two examples).

There's no time limit listed currently for how long you'll have to donate, but we'd assume the promotion will end shortly after Christmas. If you'd like to help those less fortunate, and receive something in your own game in the process, make sure to login to your game and check these options out in the store.

Income inequality for dummies

And by dummies, I mean me. Analyzing income inequality has become a national pastime in recent years and threatens to remain so, since the extent of increased inequality seems so hard to put to rest. Some point out that high-income individuals are pulling in a greater share of total income than in the past. Others argue that the picture isn’t so simple, since tax reforms in the 1980s presented incentives to shift what was previously business income into personal income. And these questions only scratch the surface. What’s a simple man like me to make of it all? Here’s how I think about it. When you get a dollar of income, you can do one of two things with it: spend it or save it. So rising income inequality should lead to rising inequality of either consumption (the spending part) or wealth (the saving part). But has it?
Wojciech Kopczuk of Columbia University and Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley, show that the share of wealth held by the top 1 percent of households has remained roughly constant since the 1940s and is actually somewhat lower today than it was in the mid-1980s. So if the rich are gaining more income, it doesn’t seem that they’re saving it.
So they must be spending it, right? Maybe not. Dirk Krueger of Stanford and Fabrizio Perri of NYU find that “from 1972 to 1998 the standard deviation of the log of after-tax labor income has increased by 20 percent while the standard deviation of log consumption has increased less than 2 percent.” Krueger and Perri argue that part of the measured increase in income inequality is a function of higher income volatility from year to year. But if households can borrow in bad years and save in good years, consumption can be smoother than income. And ultimately it’s consumption that matters.
None of this puts the question to rest. Survey data on consumption isn’t as high quality as for income, so it’s possible we’re missing something important. But it’s also possible that the income data that shapes our perceptions of inequality are missing something as well.

> By Andrew Biggs