Twitter just hit a $124 million bump in the road to its hotly anticipated initial public offering.
The startup was sued by two financial firms that claim Twitter used them to arrange a private sale of its shares to inflate its market value without any intention of closing the deal.
Precedo Capital Group and Continental Advisors accused Twitter of using the aborted share sale to set a higher $19 a share price tag ahead of the IPO.
The firms claim Twitter never intended to complete the private offering and should pay for lost fees and damage to their business reputations. The suit seeks $24 million in compensatory damages and $100 million in punitive damages.
“Twitter’s intention was to induce Precedo Capital and Continental Advisors to create an artificial private market wherein Twitter could maintain that a private market existed at or about $19 per share,” according to the complaint filed Wednesday in Manhattan federal court.
Last week, Twitter set the price range for its IPO at between $17 and $20, valuing the company at around $11 billion.
A Twitter spokesman denied the allegations and said the company had no relationship with the firms.
“We’ve never had a relationship with these plaintiffs. Their claim is completely without merit,” Jim Prosser said in an e-mailed statement.
The suit makes it clear that the firms never dealt directly with Twitter. Instead, they were brought into the deal by a third firm, GSV Asset Management, which they said was dealing directly with Twitter and its law firm Wilson Sonsini.
GSV and Twitter both use Wilson Sonsini, according to the complaint.
The plan was for GSV, which currently owns about 0.4 percent of Twitter’s stock in a different fund, to manage the Twitter-only fund.
The firms were in charge of finding investors for it, with Precedo focusing on private investors in the US and Continental reaching out to on European and Asian institutional investors, according to the suit.
But after months of pitching the deal to prospective investors, including a road show in September 2012, the share sale was canceled.
GSV said Twitter wanted to pull out because a Merrill Lynch broker in New York had been reaching out to clients offering them a guaranteed spot in the Twitter IPO, according to Andreea Porcelli, managing partner with Continental Advisors.
“It made no sense and I have been in this business for 20 years,” Porcelli told The Post.
The suit could shed light on what Twitter thought of its stock just last year. Precedo, which was first approached in March, was initially instructed to price the stock at $15.50, according to the complaint.
After a few months, “Twitter authorized GSV Assets to raise the price to $16.50 a share,” the suit claims. When Continental joined the effort, the price was bumped to $19 a share.
According to the suit, Precedo’s Timothy Moran asked GSV’s Matt Hanson about the price increase and was told, “Twitter is controlling the secondary market because they do not want another Facebook,” referring to the social-networking site’s botched IPO.

teens losing interest in facebook

For about an hour Wednesday afternoon, it looked like Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg did it again.
Mobile advertising revenue, closely watched by Wall Street, continued its surge in the third quarter and profits exceeded forecast.
Other metrics — overall revenue, its monthly active users and total advertising revenue — were also strongly ahead.
The positive results, released after the markets had closed, sparked a 15 percent spike in its share price, to a new 52-week high over $56.Cue the champagne.
But during a 5 p.m. conference call with analysts, the company said that during the July-September quarter it saw a decrease in daily usage among teens, a crucial demographic.
Facebook’s CFO David Ebersman told analysts that while the number of teens using the site remained stable from the second quarter to the third quarter, there was a slight drop in how often they came to the site.
“We did see a decrease in daily users, especially among younger teens,” Ebersman said.
By the time the hour-long call ended, Facebook shares had returned to Earth with a thud.
They had given back all their gains and were slightly down after hours.
A slowdown in Facebook’s ad load could also have played into the stock-price turnaround.
The Palo Alto, Calif., company’s ad load in the third quarter rose only slightly above 5 percent, Ebersman told analysts, from about 5 percent in previous quarters.
The CFO hinted that it would not increase much more going forward.
“There seems to be concern about the ad load not going up,” BTIG analyst Richard Greenfield told Reuters.
Still, Facebook investors, in anticipation that the social network giant would continue its strong growth in mobile, had pushed the stock up to a high of $54.22 earlier this month — double the price in July.
Meanwhile, advertising budgets for mobile remain at a measly 3 percent even as social-media usage on smartphones climbs, suggesting room for revenue growth, said Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.
“We are in the early stages of a major transition in advertising” and Facebook is “in a position to capitalize” on that shift, Sandberg said.
Total revenue in the quarter that ended Sept. 30 surged to $2.02 billion as the company continued inroads, first seen last quarter, toward convincing advertisers to buy mobile ads.
Wall Street analysts were expecting that the social-networking site, which just went public last year, to post total revenues of $1.91 billion.
Facebook also posted better-than-expected net income excluding charges, such as stock-based compensation, of $621 million, or 25 cents a share, compared to $311 million, or 12 cents, last year.
Revenue from mobile phones brought in $880 million last quarter, or 49 percent of Facebook’s total advertising revenues, up from $150 million in the year-ago quarter.
From New york post

   Scientifically Proven Steps to Building a Better Relationship

1. Dance with the one you brought. Remember, you chose this person "for better or for worse, during good times and bad..." This difficult time may pass, but with a sense of determination and communication on both sides.
2. Recognize that everyone is flawed...including you! We are all human and we chose our partners with the understanding that they too are imperfect.  Understanding these imperfections may allow us to forgive ourselves for our own, leading to greater self compassion and compassion in the relationship. Learning to accept your partner's limitations with tenderness is the opening to a true love.
3. Let your partner know how blessed you are. Love is a gift which your partner is giving! This often goes out the window with resentments. If we can begin to access the lovingkindess that is within us and actually begin to do loving gestures, this can be a powerful path toward forgiveness and happiness in a relationship.
4. To know them is to love them. Try to see your lover's flaws and failures with loving eyes. When we begin this path of commitment it's with the understanding that we will be forgiving. Sometimes we get caught up in only seeing our partner's flaws, but we also need to acknowledge their good intentions. We all have flaws and failures and treating our own and our lover's flaws with love can be enormously helpful in healing. If you disagree, with forgiveness, you disagree as friends, not enemies.
5. Accept what you can't change and grieve your loss. It's important to be able to discern when we cannot change another person or what happened in the past. However, we can change ourselves. One thing we know is that when we change, it changes the dynamic of the relationship and things begin to shift in the relationship. We can go from anger to understanding. We begin to stop dwelling on wounds from the past and begin to engage a more present-moment focus, opening up to possibilities in the marriage.
6. Choose to recommit. Life becomes routine and sometimes we need to remind ourselves of what we started out with, a commitment. It can help that this is a daily reminder. If it's a good relationship, it's worth the effort. Even in the midst of some major challenges, we can choose to dance with our partners on a daily basis. Forgiveness depends on this recommitment.
7. Please give yourself a break. We are often so hard on ourselves and our partners. Sometimes we just need to step back and see the bigger picture that we are all imperfect and flawed. What would it be like to begin treating ourselves and our partners with more kindness? Life can be hectic and traumatizing enough, we could all benefit from a bit more forgiveness. 

Post from mentalhelp.net

          7 STAGES OF FORGIVENESS

1. Recognition – a belief that an offense has occurred. Recognition doesn’t always happen immediately. Sometimes it occurs only after a victim has reflected on what happened or following a period of denial.

2. Response – an experience of at least one intense, negative emotion such as anger, hurt, shame, etc. What emotion a person experiences varies with their usual response style and the nature of the offense.

3. Re-evaluate – a re-evaluation of the meaning of the offense and one’s relationship with the offender. In order to keep the relationship, the offended party looks for explanations such as mitigating circumstances, excuses, and his or her own role in the process, and tries to recall past happy memories.

4. Reframing – the hurtful offense is defined differently. Whatever positive feelings were generated during the evaluation phase are contrasted with the bad feelings. To resolve this conflict, the person now tries to change the way he or she views the offense and the offender. By changing his or her beliefs about what happened or about the offender, the person reduces the intensity of his or her bad feelings.

5. Reduction – a softening of bad feelings about the offense and toward the offender. There is some ill will, but the person tries to set aside some or most of the negative feelings to re-establish the relationship.

6. Restoration – a partial restoration of the relationship. The primary purpose of forgiveness is an attempt to restore the relationship in some form. At this point a meaningful dialogue may lead to apologies and/or restitution along with a renegotiation of the relationship.

7. Release – bad feelings surrounding the offense have dissipated. The relationship is fully restored and can grow to new levels. This means valuing and trusting the offender enough to risk being hurt again.

DIFFRENT KINDS OF FORGIVENESS

 

Detached forgiveness. The bad feelings are gone, but there is no reaffirming of the relationship. People forgive in this way when they realize their negative emotions are sapping their own energy and preventing them from moving on to more positive pursuits.
This is self-protective. This type of forgiveness happens when the offender has not apologized or made restitution, when the original relationship was not close, or when the victim believes the offender cannot be trusted.
Limited forgiveness. Both positive and negative feelings exist toward the offender. Forgiveness is limited because it interferes with the growth and intimacy of the relationship. The hurt party is careful, cautious and looks at things differently since the offense occurred.
During times of stress, bad feelings about the past surface. Limited forgiveness happens when a person is unsure about the offender’s actual ability to change or when the offense has profoundly disrupted the relationship.
It is appropriate to remain angry or hurt; especially when the offender is unlikely to change. Bad feelings are held onto as reminders to be careful.
Quasi-forgiveness. Forgiveness is given out of a sense of guilt, duty or low-self-esteem. The relationship is partially restored even though the intensity of the bad feelings remains. This often happens when the offender is in a position of power over the person offended.
Resentments also persist when forgiveness is granted too quickly without the offender having done his or her part to earn forgiveness.
Full forgiveness. There is a total absence of ill will and a full restoration of the relationship. This type of forgiveness occurs when the emotional investment is valued and the relationship is allowed to move forward unrestrained.
There is a willingness to be vulnerable and trust that the other person will not exploit this vulnerability. The offender has to be repentant and has proven by his or her subsequent actions that he or she is now reliable.
This takes time, depending on the gravity of the offense. To completely restore the relationship, trust also becomes a factor. Trust is earned. Trust won’t occur until the offender has done his or her part to show that true change has occurred.
Whose problem is it, anyway? People often get stuck with bad feelings and need help to forgive. They have to let go of their anger or hurt. Until they do, they hold back, and their relationships can’t grow and flourish.
The offender may have done everything possible in terms of remorse, apologies, restitution to the extent possible, and demonstrated by his or her actions that true change has occurred.
When a victim holds on tenaciously to aggrieved feelings and refuses to re-evaluate the offense or the offender, the lack of forgiveness becomes a greater problem than the original offense.
Post from val farm clinic

Apple Targets Microsoft Office With Free Apps

From the New york times
  At an event meant to feature its latest iPad tablet computing devices, Apple on Tuesday took aim at one of the biggest and seemingly unassailable businesses of its rival Microsoft, its Office software for tasks like word processing and spreadsheets.  

Apple said iWork, a set of applications for Macs, iPads and iPhones that essentially duplicates what Microsoft’s Office offers customers, would be free to anyone who bought a new Macintosh computer or mobile device from Apple. Each Apple app used to cost $10 apiece.  The latest version of the Macintosh operating system, Mavericks, will also be free.

The pricing maneuver was perhaps the lone surprise at an Apple new media event here at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. As expected, Apple souped up its iPads with faster processors and zippier Internet connections.

The company upgraded its iPad Mini, the smaller tablet, with a higher-resolution, 7.9-inch display. The full-size iPad, with a 9.7-inch screen, was renamed the iPad Air, because it has a slimmer design and has lost some weight. The smaller iPad starts at $400 and the bigger iPad will cost $500. Both will ship in November.

“This is our biggest leap forward ever in a full-sized iPad,” said Philip W. Schiller, senior vice president for marketing at Apple.

With its free software offering, Apple is capitalizing on strong growth in tablet computing sales and Microsoft’s reluctance to offer Office for the iPad.

Tablets are devouring the PC market, which has long been Microsoft’s playing ground. About 120 million tablets were shipped in 2012, nearly seven times as many as in 2010, when the first Apple iPad was released, according to Gartner, a market research company. IDC, another research company, predicts that sales of tablets will surpass those of PCs in the fourth quarter of this year and on an annual basis in 2015.

So far, Microsoft has had little success in that growing market. Its attempts to sell tablets have been failures, and Windows 8, which it has marketed as a software system for tablets and PCs, has gotten a chilly reception. What’s more, Microsoft still charges $120 for people who want to upgrade from the older Windows 7 system to Windows 8.

That shift to mobile devices and low-cost software is why Microsoft is trying to shift from being a traditional software company into one that sells Internet services and devices, said Ross Rubin, an independent consumer technology analyst for Reticle Research. The company could reduce the upfront price for its software and charge people more over time for the services through subscriptions. And with the release on Tuesday of Microsoft’s new Surface tablets, the company is more aggressively marketing the online services available for it, like SkyDrive, a service for storing files on the Internet.

Microsoft’s chief executive, Steven A. Ballmer, said recently that the company would bring a version of Office to the iPad and other touch devices, but the company has not said when that will be. It sells an annual subscription to Office 365 on other devices for $100 a year.

Asked about Apple’s decision to give away its iWork apps, Heather Knox, a spokeswoman for Microsoft Office, said in a statement that a Web-based version of Office was the best free alternative to Microsoft’s traditional Office applications. “They extend the Office experience you know and love with anytime, anywhere online editing and collaboration,” Ms. Knox said. 

The new iPad Mini also gained a high-resolution Retina display. The new tablet costs $400 — $70 more than the previous iPad Mini. But Apple said it would continue selling the older iPad Mini without a Retina display for $300.

The iPad Air is about 20 percent thinner than the previous iPad and weighs one pound, down from 1.4 pounds. Both new iPads will include new chips, called A7 and M7, which Apple introduced last month in its latest high-end iPhone. The A7 is a faster processor with a new architecture that makes it better at multitasking. The M7 is dedicated to sensing movement, which could allow for new capabilities in software or games that incorporate motion, like a car racing game.

The iPads have an improved antenna system for faster Wi-Fi connections. They will come in white and silver and in black and gray, similar to the colors of the iPhone 5S (though the iPads will not come in white and gold like the iPhone). The iPad Air goes on sale on Nov. 1, but the new Mini will ship later in November.

The new iPads do not include the fingerprint sensor technology, TouchID, that Apple introduced in the iPhone 5S. Analysts say that may be because parts are in limited supply, as the iPhone 5S is selling so quickly.

The Mac computers have taken the back seat of Apple’s business, but the company also released upgrades for some of its Mac hardware on Tuesday. The MacBook Pro notebooks with Retina displays are now thinner and faster, with better battery life. The 13-inch version will cost $1,300, down $300 from its original price, and the 15-inch model will cost $2,000, down $200 from the original price.

Apple also said the high-end Mac desktop computer, the Mac Pro, which was introduced in June, will begin shipping in December, for $3,000.

Apple is No. 1 in the tablet market with about a 32 percent share, according to IDC. But the company faces fierce competition from companies like Amazon, Samsung Electronics and Google, whose tablets undercut the iPad in price. Samsung, the No. 2 tablet maker, is quickly gaining traction, with 18 percent of the market in the second quarter, compared with 7.6 percent in the period a year earlier, according to IDC.

Smartphones are still more popular than tablets: Gartner predicts manufacturers will ship one billion smartphones and 184 million tablets this year.

But Carolina Milanesi, an analyst for Gartner, said she expected smaller tablets to continue gaining in popularity as the smartphone market becomes saturated.

“We expect this holiday season to be all about smaller tablets as even the long-term holiday favorite — the smartphone — loses its appeal,” Ms. Milanesi said.

Nick Wingfield contributed reporting from Seattle.

NEW APPLE IPAD

 











From The  N.Y Post
It’s the iPad on a diet.
Apple’s new super-thin iPad Air weighs nearly half a pound less and operates twice as fast as the previous model, the company revealed on Tuesday.
The fifth-generation iPad weighs exactly one pound, nearly 30 percent less than the iPad 4 — making it the lightest full-sized tablet and among the fastest, company honchos said at an event to unveil the new gadget in San Francisco.
“From the original iPad, we’re up to over eight times faster. In terms of graphics performance, we’re 72 times faster,” said company vice president Phil Schiller.
“[It’s] thinner, lighter and more powerful than ever before. So new, it deserves a new name,” he said, adding it won’t simply be called the iPad 5.
The high-tech toy is also 20-percent thinner than the iPad 4 and runs on a higher-speed A7 chip, also featured in the new iPhone 5s. It also comes complete with a high-resolution “retina display” screen surrounded by a thinner-than-before “bezel” border, which gives the look of an iPad Mini, even though its height and width are roughly the same as the iPad 4.
A 16GB iPad Air costs $499 and comes in silver, white, gray and black. It will “start to ship” on Nov. 1 and will hit the stands soon after, Apple representatives said.
CEO Tim Cook also revealed a new iPad Mini, set to hit the market “sometime in November.” The new Mini runs on the same A7 chip and features the same retina screen and operating system.
Company reps said the original iPad Mini will stay on sale, dropping in price from $329 to $299. The 16GB iPad Mini with retina will sell for $399, Apple representatives said.
Apple unveiled the new gadgets the same day Nokia announced a possible competing product — the company’s first tablet ever. The 10-inch Lumia 2520 runs on Windows and starts at $499.
Apple representatives don’t seem worried.
“Regardless of what you might hear or read about how many other tablets are bought or sold or activated, iPad is used more than four times more than all the others put together,” Cook said to an audience of thousands at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco on Tuesday.

causes of selfishness

                                                        

     Fear of Losing Control

The fear of being vulnerable or losing control is the most common cause  of selfishness. Part of being human is the need to be in control of everything in your life. If  at any time there's a feeling of not being in control based on the circumstances around there's an impulse to react. any time this sense of control is threatened or taken away, some people will do anything to get it back. This can cause a major case of selfishness

 

 

                                             Fear of Becoming Irrelevant

this happens more in the corporate environment a certain employee might decide not to teach the new staff the tricks of the trade or the workplace ethics because he/she feels that the new staff will understand his edge and will render he/she irrelevant. if there's any sense of irrelevance they'll try everything in their power to remain relevant

  Self-Satisfaction

People are always trying to prove themselves to someone. Whether it be friends or family, people are always trying to find pride in the work they do. Because of this, they form self-satisfaction.

There's always a cure for everything if your spouse is selfish do not worry there's a cure all it needs is a little understanding and patience and all will be well.if you understand the cause it will be so easy to solve the challenge and this blog is always open and ready to listen to any of your challenges. we will solve it together you don't need to drop an i.d,email addy or phone no or contacts just put down your comments on anyone of this post as anonymous and check back on that same post and your challenge will be solved. your privacy is very important to us. you deserve to be happy, you deserve to be loved and  pampered. 

                                     Now if you wish to know how to help your selfish spouse's weakness   

                                     check  luvdo  for next weeks post on how to help your selfish spouse

                                    have a wonderful and love filled week cos that's how it should be... chao 

                                     

signs to know if your partner is selfish

               HOW TO IDENTIFY A SELFISH PERSON

               Selfish people are always  nice and really sweet..

               you may be in love with a selfish person right now,

               or perhaps you have a best friend who’s selfish.

               Unfortunately for you, the traits of a selfish person aren’t

               easy to notice, because they cover their darker side so 

               well and some of them dont even know they are or their

               actions are. the latter are the hardest to change

               they feel its a way of life
                                

                 When  the relationship starts to grow,

                 u'll always feel emotionally drained and weak because

                 all you are doing is giving emotionally and nothing

                 is coming back.

                The unfortunate thing about this situation is that if you 

                truly love this person you might not notice that and then you

                get so attached to this person  and dont wanna let go

                And before you know it, they could suck the happiness 

                out of you, and all you can do is watch helplessly.

                the question now is how do i know if my partner is

                selfish

• He/she talks about his or herself most of the time what he/she wants needs
• He/she is only concerned with how things relate with him or her and nothing else
• He/she does not consider the impact of his/her actions on people ( you inclusive)
  and when you try to tell the person he/she cant make a link of how his or her actions are affecting you
•  He/she gives only when something has been given to him or her or expecting something back
• He/she wants to force you to do what he/she wants and not what both of you want and expects to do it wholeheartedly
• He/she wants your support emotionally and wants you to worry about
  how he/she feels and never takes time to do this things for you
• He/she is concerned with what he/she is entitled to in the relationship
  (a mentality of entitlement) which is followed by demands 
• He/she manipulates people (including you) emotionally and feels there's nothing
  wrong with it
  All this and more are signs that will make you know if your partner is a selfish person but, incase you are already in a relationship with this kind of person or even married to this person dont worry there's a solution just look out for next weeks post and all will be well. A relationship whichever type is meant to be enjoyed and that will happen when both parties actively get involved in it for the other person or people and not themselves. you get into a relationship to give and not the other way around each parties has to invest in eact other.
  i'll like to apologise for the break in transmission as regards my post on this blog , had to go offline for some issues but am back and we will cultivate together a healthy relationships with our partners and everybody cos thats how it should be ...... chao