Sotheby's and the unionized art handlers who move its clients' prized Warhols and de Koonings ratified an agreement today on a three-year deal that brings a 10-month lockout of the workers to a close, Crain's reports. The deal increases wages one percent each year, raises the starting salary to $18.50 an hour and maintains benefits for the 42 workers who are members of Teamsters Local 814.
And then this happened: Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Engle played Mark Fiore's satirical advertisement for a fictional pharmaceutical called ContagionEx—"sovereign transmitted debts don't have to be embarrassing or keep you from other financial relationships"—at the end of a highly technical lecture on systemic risk today at the NYU/Moody's Credit Risk Conference today. Heidi Moore says the wonks were nearly rolling in the aisles…
Ikea just published a new YouTube video on Thursday that reveals a few more details about the Uppleva TV set it is going to start selling in select European stores next month. The video was shot at the Milan Furniture Fair, where Ikea showed the device to the public for the first time.
The clip concentrates mostly on the TV’s integration into Ikea’s furniture and the company’s design choices, but also offers a few more technical details.
Today, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) closed its window for new generic top-level domain name applications. ICANN will publish a list of all the applied-for strings in two weeks, but Google today already announced some of the names it applied for. Among these are, as expected, .google and .youtube. According to Google's chief Internet evangelist and "father of the Internet" Vint Cerf, however, the company also applied for domains it thinks " have interesting and creative potential," including .lol.
Reblogged from Yale Books Blog: Yale University Press London:
Losing Small Wars by former military intelligence officer Frank Ledwidge was published last year to acclaim and controversy in equal measures. The book is out soon in paperback, accompanied by a 99p ebook Punching Below Our Weight. To celebrate this, we thought we'd re-publish an article he wrote for the Yale Books Blog back in August 2011. Ledwidge discusses his time in the armed forces, describing his realisation that senior military officers are fallible and that the British military operations in Afghanistan were lacking a coherent strategy.
Reblogged from Business & Money:
“I can't think of another presidential candidate in history who has ever tried to win the presidency by running against capitalism.” So said Rush Limbaugh of President Obama last week. Asked for a response during a Fox News interview, Governor Mitt Romney said, “There’s no question but that attacking capitalism.” Romney has also described the Obama presidency as a “debt-and-spending inferno.”
It's midnight before your final exam and you need help. Do you know where your tutor is? InstaEDU, says a $1.1 million seed round from former Facebooker Chamath Palihapitiya's fund The Social+Capital Partnership and several angels. Stumped high school and college students pay InstaEDU by the minute to video chat with tutors from top universities at any hour of the day.
You may remember the internet going mildly crazy for this video of a tortoise with sexual identity issues. (Not his identity, just the identity of his chosen mate, which is a Croc.) It had all the hallmarks of a blockbuster -- sexy sexy romance, dubious fashion choices, animals making adorable "enh!" noises. But what it didn't have was David Attenborough.
Freelance designer Luke Clark Tyler keeps all his worldly possessions in the same amount of space that McMansion-dwellers allot for clothes and shoes. His Manhattan apartment is the size of a walk-in closet -- 78 square feet, just enough space to park a Mini Cooper.
Grubwithus, the social dining network and 2011 Y Combinator grad, announced today that it has secured $5 million in new funding to snack on, led by GRP Partners with contribution from Lebanese entrepreneur Michel Daher, who is best known as the founder of Daher Foods and its Master Chips and Poppins cereal brands, two of the largest consumer packaged goods brands in the MENA region.
Technology has helped bring about a retail shift that now means I can buy my consumer goods without ever leaving my house, my husband's shaving gear without ever thinking about it and now, thanks to True&Co, my bras without ever having a lady in a department store wrap a tape measure around my chest. I love the Internet.
New robotic buoys are being tested along the coasts of Oregon and Rhode Island—tested? what does that mean?—reports Digital Trends. The robots look like boat-shaped life vests, and they apparently can travel at 25 m.p.h. to reach struggling swimmers 12 times faster than your typical sunscreen-swathed lifeguard. The lifeguard is supposed to swim after the buoy, which the would-be drowner can cling to as he or she scans the horizon for sharks.
Reblogged from National Post | News:
Peter Carl Fabergé is celebrated in today's Google Doodle, so we decided to delve into five interesting facts about the world-famous jeweler:
1 Peter Carl Fabergé — the legendary Russian jeweler — was born 166 years ago today, which places his life at the very end of the Czarist era of Russian history. Fabergé was most famous for his ornately jeweled and priceless Easter eggs that were produced through his company, The House of Fabergé, which he took over from his father.
Reblogged from Business & Money:
Common wisdom is that the best managers are collaborative. After all, nobody likes to be bossed around. But that’s not true for rookie managers. New leaders who are perceived as having low status — because of their age, education, or experience — lead better when they tell subordinates what to do. If as a new manager you sense that your team doesn’t yet have confidence in you, you’re better off setting the agenda, establishing clear direction, and putting people to work on what you think needs to be done.
Reblogged from Business & Money:
Back in the days of Mad Men, the business lunch was essential. Offers were made, partnerships formed, and deals were closed daily over lunchtime martinis.
For the most part, that type of midday meeting is long gone. But with today's communication technology overload, the face-to-face business lunch is still an important way to build relationships--and is perhaps even more valuable today than it was 50 years ago.
Here's what you don't know about the prank being pulled in this video: It is you who is the dupe, because it's Wednesday and you're likely stuck at your desk convincing yourself that you're having a good time watching other people having a great time on Venice Beach. We're all suckers here.
As an aside, this may be the first time we've seen a prank video spliced together as a found footage supercut.
In his new book on growing inequality in America, UC Berkeley economist Enrico Moretti says that Silicon Valley has an outsized influence on employment growth and that it has created more jobs than it has destroyed.
The Internet sector has been growing 200 times faster than the rest of the labor market, Moretti notes in “The New Geography of Jobs…
Starting Wednesday, San Diego-based mobile app maker MeLLmo is unveiling a new feature of its mobile enterprise hit Roambi. The software is no longer simply a tool for creating cool, interactive data visualizations or real-time business intelligence reports that your boss or colleagues will read on their iPhone or iPad. Now Roambi is becoming something of a mobile app development and publishing service with a new feature called ESX Platform.
We reviewed (and loved!) Logitech's full-sized Wireless Solar Keyboard K750 for Mac ($60) that allows you to never worry about wireless keyboard batteries again. Logitech also announced a Wireless Keyboard iPad case last month ($129).
Logitech announced a smaller version of the keyboard today called "the K760", which not only shrinks the footprint considerably by dropping the numeric keypad, but it also addresses the No.
Daily deals were on the rise last year, and for a few heady months everyone got really excited about them. Groupon's copy was still cute and quirky and hadn't yet begun to tip over into cloying; 2-for-1 skydiving lessons were still a happy novelty; this reporter even interviewed for a Google Offers copywriting gig (and no, she didn't get it).
AllThingsD just posted clips of almost the entire Apple CEO Tim Cook interview from D10. Our live blog of the event is here. The first video (above) is Cook's comments on former CEO Steve Jobs as a "flip-flopper," followed by a second video (below) where he discussed tablets and the PC legacy.
Links to the rest of the videos are below, where Cook talks about doubling down on privacy, the "Pain in the ass" patent wars, etc.
The startup world is seriously displeased with the status quo in higher education. Brainworth, a scrappy startup out of Australia, is the latest to throw its hat in the ring, taking a novel approach to solving the problem.
Brainworth is a company two years in the making which aims to use a visual gaming environment to map the knowledge in a given subject for students.
Last Tuesday, Slate DoubleX founding editor Hanna Rosin and New York Times op-ed columnist Gail Collins sat down before a packed house at the New America Foundation to discuss Ms. Rosin’s long-anticipated book, The End of Men, due out September 11 from Riverhead.
As the two journalists tried to explain the persistent wage and power gap between men and women in America, their conversation returned again and again to our more progressive friends in California and Scandinavia.
Google, together with its partner Samsung, launched a new Chromebook and its first desktop Chromebox today. The most important change to the new Samsung Series 5 Chromebook is that it is significantly faster. While earlier versions featured a battery-friendly Intel Atom chip, these first Chromebooks often felt underpowered. This new version features an Intel Core chip, as well as 4GB of RAM, an HD camera, two USB 2.0 ports and a 1280x800 display.
Reblogged from Fortune Tech: Technology blogs, news and analysis from Fortune Magazine:
FORTUNE -- Updating a chart he first posted last year (see here and here), Asymco's Horace Dediu on Monday tried to estimate how long three badly wounded veterans of the smartphone wars -- Research in Motion (RIMM), Nokia (NOK) and LG -- might survive.
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