Blog

President Obama appeared at an event Tuesday night for Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. At the event, it was seen that Obama had lipstick on his collar. You would maybe think it was a good luck charm from the First Lady, but the president said its origins lie elsewhere.

During his speech, Obama pointed to the lipstick on his collar and blamed it on Jessica Sanchez. He quickly corrected himself to say it was the aunt of Sanchez. He said he was calling her out in public so as not to get into trouble with the First Lady. The short bit elicited laughs from the crowd. Here’s the full video:

Regardless of what you think of the man, he definitely knows how to work a crowd. He’s also incredibly calm and collected when dealing with hecklers.

[h/t: MSN]

Ever eat a cheeseburger and think, “The only thing this big chunk of meat is missing is bacon with a soft pretzel on top”?

Wendy’s has the answer to your quandary, my friend, and it could be coming to a restaurant near you. The fast-food chain says they tested a Pretzel Bacon Cheeseburger in a few stores around the country and it did very well. So well, in fact, that it was the best-selling “limited time” deal they’ve had in decades.

While the company doesn’t comment on test-products, analysts predict it will be the next item they roll out nationally.

“Our industry sources inform us that the Pretzel Bacon Cheeseburger, to be launched nationally at some point during 2013, was one of Wendy’s most successful test products from the last 20 years,” analyst Mark Kalinowski wrote. “As such, we believe the national launch will lead to some meaningful acceleration in Wendy’s same-store sales.”

Wendy’s did confirm that the burger will be a part of their 2013 promotional rollout, so look for it soon. As for how sales will go, some aren’t so sure a special bun will make a huge difference when it comes to competing against giants like McDonald’s and Burger King.

“It’s hard to imagine that a new bun is going to make a huge impact given what Wendy’s, McDonald’s and Burger King all spend on advertising,” said Darren Tristano, executive VP of Technomic Inc . “This fits with Wendy’s positioning, but it would take a huge amount of pretzel burgers to affect their stock price significantly.”

Image: Wendy’s

As my colleague Eliza Kern has reported, Facebook has apologized for the way it handled “hate speech” against women on the social network, after repeated complaints from advocacy groups alleging that it was turning a blind eye to what was clearly offensive behavior. This has been hailed by some as a victory, since Facebook has admitted that its policies around such content are weak. But even if its policies are improved, do we really want Facebook to be the one deciding what qualifies as hate speech and what doesn’t?

What makes this kind of topic so difficult to discuss is that much of the content Facebook was accused of harboring is unpleasant in the extreme: some of the pages that were mentioned in the complaint by the group Women, Action and the Media advocated violence against women, promoted rape, and made jokes about abuse (one of the tamer examples was a page called “Kicking Your Girlfriend in the Fanny Because She Won’t Make You a Sandwich”). No one in their right mind would argue that this kind of content isn’t offensive.

Facebook decides what speech is free

The larger problem in making Facebook take this kind of content down, however, is that it forces the network to take an even more active role in determining which of the comments or photos or videos posted by its billion or so users deserve to be seen and which don’t. In other words, it gives Facebook even more of a licence to practice what amounts to censorship — something the company routinely (and legitimately) gets criticized for doing.

To take just a few examples, Facebook has been repeatedly accused of removing content that promotes breast-feeding, presumably because it is seen as offensive by some — or perhaps because it trips the automatic filters that try to detect offensive content and send it to the team of regulators who actually police that sort of thing. The social network has also come under fire for removing pages related to the Middle East, as well as pages and content published by advocacy groups and dissidents in other parts of the world.

As Jillian York, the director for international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, has pointed out, the entire concept of “hate speech” is a tricky one. In France, posting comments that are seen as homophobic or anti-Semitic is a crime, and Twitter is currently fighting a court order aimed at having the social network identify some of those who posted such comments. The company is resisting at least in part because it has staked its reputation on being the “free-speech wing of the free-speech party.”

It’s an increasingly slippery slope

Some groups have tried to convince Facebook that pages promoting heterosexuality qualify as hate speech, while others have complained that pages making fun of people who are overweight should fall into the same category. Many people would undoubtedly see the kind of content that Women, Action and the Media are complaining about as being clearly offensive in a way that these other pages aren’t — but not everyone would agree.

Where does Facebook draw the line on this particular slippery slope? Is it only the content that draws the most vocal criticism that gets removed, or the campaigns that influence advertisers?

As more than one free-speech advocate has noted, if popular protests about offensive content were what determined the content we were able to see or share a few decades ago, anything promoting homosexuality or half a dozen other topics would have vanished from our sight. There is at least a case to be made that the simplest course of action for a network like Facebook would be to only remove content when it is required to do so by law. But then what happens to the kind of content it just apologized for?

Private entities making their own rules

To its credit, the social network has tried to find other ways of discouraging these kinds of pages — including requesting page administrators to identify themselves (although the company’s “real name” policy raises some equally troubling questions). And while Facebook’s behavior looks and feels like censorship, it isn’t legally an infringement of free speech because Facebook is a corporate entity, and free-speech rules only apply to governments.

And that fact about Facebook — that it is a proprietary platform controlled by private interests — is part of what makes this situation so complex. For large numbers of people, the social network is a central method for connecting with and sharing information with their friends, a combination of water cooler and public square. But like Twitter, it is not a public square at all: it is more like a shopping mall, with private security that determines what behavior is tolerated what isn’t.

That’s not a problem when you want security to remove the people who are offending or disturbing you, or when you agree with the company’s decisions — but it’s quite different when you are the one who is being accused of being offensive or disturbing. And Facebook has provided plenty of evidence that it can make just as many wrong choices as it can right ones.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Hoggarazi

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• NewNet Q2: Google closes the quarter with a bang
• What Enterprise Software Vendors Could Learn from the Consumer Space
• Survey: How apps can solve photo management

Fashion icons Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana face two years of jail time to the tune of $1.3 billion in taxes that weren’t declared.

The luxury fashion house sold their brand to Gado SRL, a holding company established by the designers; authorities believe Dolce and Gabbana did that to avoid paying taxes in Italy.

“They are the ones who profited most from the operation,” prosecutor Gateano Ruta said. “Gado was an artificial construction made for the tax advantage that was obtained.”

The designers maintain their innocence, however, and may appeal the charges to avoid an upcoming trial.

“To be accused of something untrue is not a beautiful thing. But in the end who cares, we will all finish up six feet under,” Gabbana said in a personal Twitter statement. “I am interested in making clothes and that’s all. They can do and say what they want.”

Whoa! Thats a tall order RT @huffingtonpost: Dolce & Gabbana designers face jail time po.st/rYNk1c

— Erik Thompson Sr.(@theConfidant) May 29, 2013

At the Xbox One unveiling event, Microsoft said that it had 15 exclusives, with eight being new IPs, planned in the first year of the console’s life. Now the company has come forward to discuss those games and the associated costs.

In an interview with Official Xbox Magazine, Microsoft Studios head Phil Spencer said that the company has been preparing its Xbox One launch lineup for the past two years. Part of its plan saw Microsoft opening three new studios in Washington, London and British Columbia. That’s on top of the projects being worked on internally at Microsoft, Lionhead Studios and Rare. Speaking of Rare, the once great developer is revisiting one of its classic franchises for the Xbox One. What that franchise is will presumably be unveiled at E3.

Outside of its own studios working on exclusives, Microsoft has secured some exclusive games and content from its third party partners. Remedy, the development team behind Alan Wake, is creating Quantum Break for the console. Activision will continue to provide timed exclusive DLC for Call of Duty on Xbox platforms. EA is also partnering with Microsoft to deliver exclusive content in its various sports titles.

You could argue that the Xbox 360 had a lackluster launch. Games like Perfect Dark Zero and Project Gotham Racing 3 were good enough to hold off the stagnation that the Wii U is currently experiencing, but it sounds like Microsoft is hoping to avoid the drought that usually comes after a console’s launch. At least it better avoid such a pitfall if it’s willing to invest $1 billion into games.

If you miss using Sparrow, you may well be interested in a new app that just arrived in the Mac App Store. Airmail is a new native email client for OS X from app developer Bloop. Available now for $1.99, the developers state you’ll get a “powerful mail client with a minimal design” providing a “modern and easy-to-use experience.”

As a staunch Gmail user I find myself making extensive use of labels — among other key features — to manage, sort and archive the multitude of incoming messages hitting my inbox. Due to this seemingly unwavering dependency on Gmail’s more advanced feature set, I’ve never really found favor with Apple’s default Mail application — yup, it may well suit many, but it isn’t for me — instead I find myself constantly seeking alternative solutions beyond that of the default web interface, despite its humble effectiveness.

Sparrow was one such hope, offering to scratch the itch of a neat desktop mail client that worked well with Gmail, and for a while it definitely fit the bill. Sparrow presented a clean and straightforward design, along with enough features to keep most avid Gmail users happy. However, following Google’s acquisition of the Sparrow team, development on the app came to a sudden halt and thus my search continued. After Sparrow’s death last summer, Ellis Hamburger of The Verge looked at what alternatives were available, concluding that very few clients were actively contending for “the Mac mail crown.”

Now it seems Airmail is ready to take its shot at said crown, quietly launching on the Mac App Store this Wednesday.

Taking it for a spin

Airmail has an impressive feature set, most noticeably its well integrated multiple account support and general speediness. A more thorough run-through of features includes the likes of support for folders — nested or otherwise — aliases, keyboard shortcuts, including support for Gmail shortcuts, drag and drop, filters, Notification Center support, full-screen mode and more.

Prior to hitting the Mac App Store, Bloop’s app has been available in a free public beta since earlier this year, and I’ve been using it on and off for a while now. During my time with Airmail, despite a few issues with slow startup, I have been pleasantly surprised at how unassuming the app is. Once it’s actually up and running Airmail is fast, works exactly as you would expect and has a few neat touches, such as the filters to quickly see new mail, mail messages with attachments, or those from a selected sender for example. Switching between multiple accounts works great, but currently Airmail only supports IMAP mail services.

While in beta the app received updates at a rapid pace, and it seems this welcomed fast development process is going to carry over to the Mac App Store build — while writing this article an update was pushed out, going from 1.0 to 1.0.2 in its first day.

Airmail strikes a favorable balance between offering a selection of great features and a simplistic interface. Like Sparrow that came before it, Bloop’s Airmail is a mail client striving to retain a certain straightforwardness to the act of sending email.

For a $1.99 it’s worth a try, especially for the devoted Gmailer.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Forecast: Tablet App Sales To Hit $8B by 2015
• Survey: How apps can solve photo management
• Social networks will displace business processes, not socialize them

A California teen who missed a Memorial Day trip with his friends is now coming to grips with how close his life came to ending.

According to an Associated Press report, 17-year-old Tamer Mosallam’s friends were the teens that died in a fiery Memorial Day car crash in Los Angeles. The teens, who have now been identified, were all students from the Irvine Unified School District.

Police now believe they have pieced together some of the details of the deadly crash. 17-year old Abdulrahman Alyahyan was reportedly driving the car in Newport Beach on Monday when it hit a tree in the road median. The force of the impact split the car in two, and one half of what remained caught fire. Four of the passengers were thrown from the car and died at the scene. One of the teens was only partially thrown from the vehicle, and died after being taken to a nearby hospital.

The other passengers in the car included 17-year-old Cecilia Zamora, 17-year-old Nozad Al Hamawendi, 17-year-old Robin Cabrera, and 16-year-old Aurora Cabrera. The Cabreras were sisters.

Mosallam told the AP that he was to have been the sixth passenger in the car, to make the trip a triple date. His father, however, would not let him go because he was studying for a test.

Irvine Unified School District Superintendent Terry Walker this week issued a statement on the deaths of the students, calling the tragedy an “unimaginable loss.” From the statement:

Our community bears an unimaginable loss today as we mourn the passing of five students who were tragically killed on Monday in a horrific car accident.

There are simply no words to convey the sorrow felt by our students and staff, nor are there sufficient answers to explain the loss of five vibrant teenagers from our schools and this community.

On behalf of the entire organization, our thoughts and prayers are with the families and loved ones of each of these young men and women. We will do everything possible to help our schools cope with this tragedy in the emotional times ahead.

Do you want the mansion belonging to Bruce Willis? That will be $22 million.

TMZ reports that Willis has put up his Beverly Hills mansion on sale for $22 million. He paid $9 million for the mansion back in 2004.

So, what will you get for $22 million? It’s a 10,379 sq. ft. home with 11 bedrooms and 11 bathrooms. It’s surely large enough for anything you could possibly have planned in the Beverly Hills area.

If you want another piece of Willis’ housing, you can grab his home away from home in Trump Tower for a cool $11.65 million.

Earlier this year, Willis picked up a place in New York for $8.85 million. He’ll probably get a new place on the West Coast if he’s successful in selling his current home. Even if he doesn’t sell it anytime soon, he probably got a pretty decent amount for a down payment after starring in this year’s G.I. Joe film. He could always toss together another Die Hard film as well if he’s really desperate for a bigger home.

[Image: Caroline Bonarde Ucci]

Motorola CEO Dennis Woodside confirmed Wednesday at D11 that Motorola will introduce the Moto X smartphone later this year, calling it a “hero” device that the Google-owned company hopes will make Motorola relevant once again. The device will also be built in the U.S. just outside of Fort Worth, Tex., in what Woodside called “a first.”

The Moto X is “more contextually aware of what’s going on around it,” Woodside said, teasing attendees by saying he’s carrying the phone in his pocket but declining to show it off. Other products are coming later, but expect this device to be the centerpiece of Motorola’s strategy this fall. Reports have been circulating for some time about the “X” project inside Motorola but this is the first time the company has confirmed it.

The smartphone industry is famously concentrated in China, where low-cost manufacturing and a lot of specialized factories and suppliers have set up shop. Motorola will assemble 70 percent of the Moto X in Texas, with other component work having to be sourced and manufactured elsewhere. It will employ 2,000 people at the plant.

Woodside reiterated that Motorola, despite being owned by the creator of Android, has “no access to Android code. … There is no advantage that has been conferred to us.” He defended Google’s decision to invest $12.5 billion in Motorola by saying “we don’t need necessarily to see the exact strategic fit with our current business” in order to pull the trigger on a deal; it’s more about investing in technologies that will help shape the future, he said.

Woodside was joined onstage by Regina Dugan, formerly of DARPA and now currently senior vice president for Advanced Technology & Projects at Motorola. She showed off an “electronic tattoo” that could be used for authentication as well as a concept called “vitamin authentication,” producing a tiny pill with a tiny chip in it that apparently can be swallowed and kept inside the body to unlock something. It appears to be a take on the “ingestible sensor” developed and marketed by Proteus Digital Health.

Here’s a look at the electronic tattoo courtesy of AllThingsD’s Asa Mathat:

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Analyzing the wearable computing market
• A global mobile handset forecast: 2011-2015
• Is Android broken and if so, will Google fix it?

Hortonworks isn’t about to get off the Apache Hadoop elephant just because everyone around it is now trying to ride impalas. The company released version 1.3 of its Hortonworks Data Platform on Wednesday, a major aspect of which is an improved iteration of Apache Hive that the company claims runs 50 times faster the previous version. Over the next year or so, Hortonworks expects to improve the speed of Hive by 100x its previous limits — this while its competitors are all but leaving Hive in the dust in favor of newer, faster analytic systems.

If you’re unfamiliar with Hive, it’s a project that Facebook developed in 2008 to make Hadoop function more like a traditional enterprise data warehouse. Hive stores data inside the Hadoop Distributed File System in structured format, and then allows users to query it using a language very similar to SQL. Until very recently, Hive has been the de facto method for querying (in a traditional sense) data stored in Hadoop, and it has proven immensely popular as more companies have begun tackling their big data woes with Hadoop.

Hive wasn’t built for speed

However, as more companies got used to Hadoop, they also began to notice its shortcomings. One of them is around MapReduce, a powerful but not-exactly-speedy method of processing data that requires running the job across every node in the cluster in order to find the right data. Although the Hive interface is that of a SQL query, it relies on on MapReduce as the processing engine.

(For more on how Hadoop and its flavor of MapReduce came to be, read this post on the history of Hadoop. To see me speak with Google Fellow and MapReduce creator Jeff Dean about how far Google has moved from a MapReduce-centric computing model, come to Structure next month.)

Users wanted faster, more-interactive query processing on top of Hadoop, similar to what they had grown accustomed to with data warehouse systems such as Teradata, Greenplum and Netezza. Hadoop vendors such as Cloudera (with Impala), MapR (with Drill), IBM (with Big SQL) — as well as a spate of startups — have obliged with their own new technologies that in various ways blend the familiarity of SQL with the scalability of Hadoop. EMC Greenplum, now Pivotal, has transplanted its existing database system inside of Hadoop.

Even Qubole, a cloud-based startup from Hive creators Ashish Thusoo and Joydeep Sen Sarma, is keeping an eye on how projects such as Impala and Shark (from the University of California, Berkeley’s AMPLab) might factor into its plans.

Giving Hive a better “Stinger”

Hortonworks, the Yahoo spinoff dedicated to driving the Apache Hadoop bus, is sticking with Hive. But is has a plan, and a point.

Essentially, VP of Products Bob Page told me during a recent briefing, “It just makes more sense from our view to have everything done in one place.” He means that Hive is already the method by which most people are already comfortable using SQL to access Hadoop data, so there’s no use rocking the boat by adding yet another technology into the mix. Hortonworks will just make Hive faster to the point (100x) where it’s at least in the ballpark of what these entirely new systems are capable of doing, but where users still use the same tools for interactive and batch queries.

It has in place a three-phase plan, under the “Stinger” codename, in order to make this happen. The first phase, now available as part of the Hive 0.11 release, is a new set of analytic functions and a columnar file format that Page says has resulted in a 50x performance increase over the previous version. The next phase is to move YARN off of MapReduce and onto a still-under-development processing framework called Tez.

“You’ll see phase two come to bear later this year,” Page said, once YARN — a new resource manager that lets Hadoop clusters run multiple processing engines simultaneously — is ready for production.

The third phase is a whole new vector query engine for Hive and new tools for intelligent query planning. Page didn’t have a target date in mind for that phase, except to note that “we’re not talking about a five-year cycle.”

SQL isn’t the end game for Hadoop

It would be easy to dismiss Page’s and Hortonworks’ optimism about Stinger as a sweet lemons type of rationalization — the company was founded around Apache Hadoop and can’t really go about developing entirely new products outside that foundation — but they also appear to have their eyes focused on a future where SQL isn’t too big a differentiator.

SQL is the way folks used to data for the last 30 years can see how Hadoop fits in their environment, Page said, but the compelling thing about Hadoop “is it really unlocks a new way about how one thinks about storing and processing data.” Once YARN is ready to go, he added, there will be new avenues of innovation in areas like graph analysis and stream processing.

Page comes from a place of credibility when he talks about this evolution in thinking. Before coming to Hortonworks in March, he was vice president of analytics platform and delivery at eBay, a company that knows its way around big data. When people get all their data in one place, they want to do more things with it, he explained. The thinking becomes less about using Hadoop to lower cost and more about “How do I use Hadoop to increase my top line?”.

Besides, Page noted (echoing the sentiment of just about everybody else in the Hadoop space, including Cloudera CEO Mike Olson), even as companies turn Hadoop into their primary data store, it’s difficult to see Hadoop ever entirely replacing high-value relational data warehouse systems like Teradata. One could argue, then, that there’s no real purpose in trying too hard to match those systems in terms of capabilities.

At eBay, he said, they ran an in-depth analysis to see if it was economically or technologically feasible to collapse its big data workloads onto a single system. eBay has dozens of petabytes stored in Hadoop and possibly more within various Teradata appliances. The result: “We just couldn’t find a way in which we could justify collapsing everything we do into one system.”

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user vblinov.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• A near-term outlook for big data
• Sector RoadMap: SQL-on-Hadoop platforms in 2013
• 2012: The Hadoop infrastructure market booms

It had been reported that Facebook was looking to acquire social navigation company Waze for between $800 million and $1 billion. The talks were said to have hit a major roadblock in recent weeks, however, as Facebook was reportedly interested in shutting down Waze’s research and development center in Israel and transferring employees to the United States. According to AllThingsD, the talks have dissolved in recent days and the billion-dollar deal may no longer be on the table. The latest report reiterates earlier claims that Waze was uncomfortable having its employees transferred to work at Facebook’s headquarters in the United States. A deal with Waze would help Facebook continue its push into mobile, while complementing its already popular photo and messaging applications.

The Today Show got rid of Ann Curry back in 2012, but the details surrounding her departure have only recently started to come to light. The latest has former Today host Katie Couric saying she was asked to come back.

Speaking on Howard Stern’s show, Couric said that Matt Lauer approached her in 2011 about coming back to the morning talk show. The plan was to have her host a daytime talk show as well as the morning news.

At some point during those talks, the plans to have Couric come back were ditched. In her own words, the plans “evaporated.” After Curry’s firing, Lauer started hosting Today alongside Savannah Guthrie.

Despite that, she says that The Today Show was a great experience for her. She even said it was the “best job.”

Another fun fact, Couric says that she had a “crush” on Lauer before he joined The Today Show.

Here’s the relevant part of the interview with Stern courtesy of The Daily Mail:

Bain Capital is contemplating a Latin America-focused investment fund in the next three to five years, one of its managing directors said on Wednesday, making it the latest private equity firm to consider such a move, Reuters is reporting.

May 29 (Reuters) – Bain Capital LLC is contemplating a Latin America-focused investment fund in the next three to five years, one of its managing directors said on Wednesday, making it the latest private equity firm to consider such a move.

Buyout firms such as Carlyle Group LP and Advent International Corp have flocked to the continent, lured by its growing middle class as they invest primarily in consumer-related sectors, though also in healthcare, technology and financial services.

Private equity and venture capital firms committed $7.9 billion to investments in Latin America in 2012 – a five-year high and a 21 percent increase from 2011, according to the Latin American Private Equity and Venture Capital Association.

“I think after we do a couple of more investments, we may look down the road at doing a specific regional fund in the next three to five years,” Bain managing director Stephen Pagliuca told Reuters on the sidelines of the association’s Chile forum.

Bain closed the purchase of Telefonica SA’s Latin American call-center business, Atento, for an enterprise value of about 1.1 billion euros ($1.36 billion) in December. Pagliuca said that transaction encouraged Bain to consider more deals in the region.

“We take a kind of a toe-in-the-water approach and we expand from there. I think that our toe in the water in this region has been Atento,” Pagliuca said.

“We try to size the funds small so we can be selective. So even in Asia our first fund was $500 million and our first fund in Europe was $500 million, and our fund in Asia is now $2.3 billion… but I don’t think we have a specific range yet,” Pagliuca added, when asked about the possible size of a Latin American fund.
Last summer, Bain said it had completed fundraising for its second Asia fund, raising $2.3 billion, which included $300 million contributed by Bain executives.
Bain’s third European buyout fund raised 3.5 billion euros ($4.5 billion) in 2008.

In the absence of a specific fund for Latin America, Bain has the option to tap its North America-focused private equity fund. Bain has secured about $2.35 billion from investors for its latest flagship North America-focused fund, excluding a $600 million commitment from the firm’s fund managers, according to a regulatory filing released last month. The fund has a $6 billion target.

“We can take out as much as we need, but we’d probably bias the (North American) funds to be 80 percent to 90 percent North American, but that’s still a lot of capital because it will be a $6 billion fund,” Pagliuca said.

In Latin America, Bain would likely look at business sectors in which it is already active in the United States, Pagliuca said.

“Businesses that take advantage of regional scale in technology are interesting. We have a lot of expertise in healthcare so… we’re starting to look at some opportunities in healthcare and insurance,” Pagliuca said.

“We’ve done financial services, we own WorldPay in London. It’s the largest credit-card processor in the United Kingdom. So things like credit-card processing, we’ve looked at opportunities in Latin America,” he added.

With about $70 billion of assets under management, Bain is one of the world’s largest buyout firms. Its investments include retailer Toys ‘R Us, child care provider Bright Horizons Family Solutions and television network The Weather Channel.

The Boston-based buyout firm has eight offices on three continents, according to its website, including in New York, London, Munich, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tokyo and Mumbai.

The post Bain Capital Eyes Latin America Private Equity Fund appeared first on peHUB.

Patrick Stewart is an intriguing man. For all his prestigious acting accomplishments and fame, it seems the X-Men actor had never, until today, eaten a slice of pizza.

The 72-year-old actor today posted a picture to his Twitter account of himself enjoying a slice of pizza. He claims that it’s his first-ever slice of pizza, though the statement is unclear enough that it could just be his first-ever slice of authentic New York-style pizza:

The actor, famous for playing roles such as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation, has not yet provided a follow-up tweet to review his meal, or to explain how someone could go over 70 years without trying pizza. Judging from the grease on the paper plate in front of him, however, the slice was probably fantastic.

Stewart is expected to marry his fiance Sunny Ozell sometime this year. The wedding will be officiated by Stewart’s friend and X-Men co-star, Ian McKellen.

Verizon Wireless is still months away from rolling out LTE network No. 2 using its recently acquired cable company airwaves, but that hasn’t stopped it from seeding its customer base with devices that will support the new 4G frequencies. Other press reports have claimed this new network will double speeds available to those supported devices, but that’s not the case. This is more of a capacity upgrade than a speed boost, but customers will definitely see their mobile internet experience improve.

Verizon is selling seven devices that sport LTE radios in the Advanced Wireless Services (AWS) band – including the popular Samsung Galaxy S 4 and Nokia’s latest Windows phone, the Lumia 928. When the new network goes live, Verizon will ship out a software update that will activate its dormant AWS radios, Verizon spokesman Tom Pica said.

The other AWS-capable devices are Samsung’s two 10-inch Android tablets, two Verizon Jetpack mobile hotspots and a USB dongle. The current LTE iPhone 5 iteration used by Verizon doesn’t support the AWS band, but that could change with future versions. Meanwhile, the forthcoming BlackBerry Q10 will be able to access the new network, Pica said.

Customers won’t necessarily get faster speeds (though they might experience some initial bandwidth gains over these less-crowded AWS airwaves), but they will have access to a lot more network capacity. Verizon will be adding anywhere from 20 MHz to 40 MHz of new spectrum to its LTE systems – either doubling or tripling its current 4G capacity.

What’s more, Verizon will be focusing the new LTE systems in congested urban centers. It will overlay capacity at cell sites where demand is highest and in some cases surgically inserting bandwidth into highly trafficked indoor and outdoor areas using small cells. Bottom line: customers with newer AWS-capable devices will have access to a hell of a lot more network and enjoy a better mobile data experience in the exact places that experience tends to suffer.

Eventually Verizon will be able to use new LTE-Advanced carrier aggregation techniques to combine its two 4G networks into a single superfast system, but we’re still a year or two away – and another generation of handsets – from seeing that capability.

Going forward, Pica said, Verizon will require its device makers to include AWS support for most new LTE devices. So even if your current smartphone won’t work on the forthcoming network, your next Verizon smartphone most likely will.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• 2012: Data, spectrum and the race to LTE
• A Global Mobile Handset Platform Forecast, 2011 – 2015
• How to deliver the next-generation web experience

It’s clear to many people, and obviously to Facebook itself, that the company mishandled the process for removing gender-based hate speech on the social network. The company wrote in a blog post Tuesday that it would be re-evaluating its policies as a result, and has resolved to “do better” in the future.

But even as activists call for Facebook to take action on removing hateful speech from the platform, others will surely criticize the company for making judgment calls when it comes to deciding what is hate speech and what is simply offensive content. Making this call is a challenge, as Facebook has demonstrated. Even in Facebook’s post on Tuesday, it explained that there’s plenty of distasteful or offensive content on the site, but not all of it deserves to be taken down unless it specifically encourages real-world violence or qualifies as hate speech, which can be a challenging thing to define on a platform with 1 billion users.

“There’s a bunch of stuff that stays up because it’s not hate and it’s not inciting violence, but it’s just distasteful,” Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg said at the D11 conference on Wednesday morning. She said the company hopes that users will speak up about content they find offensive, creating the kind of “self-cleaning oven” atmosphere my colleauge Mathew Ingram has written about. Which is convenient, because that means less work on Facebook’s part.

But the company certainly acknowledged that when it comes to hate speech, as opposed to just distasteful content, its current approach was not adequate, as it wrote in the statement it gave Tuesday:

“In recent days, it has become clear that our systems to identify and remove hate speech have failed to work as effectively as we would like, particularly around issues of gender-based hate. In some cases, content is not being removed as quickly as we want.  In other cases, content that should be removed has not been or has been evaluated using outdated criteria. We have been working over the past several months to improve our systems to respond to reports of violations, but the guidelines used by these systems have failed to capture all the content that violates our standards. We need to do better – and we will.”

We’ve written about this issue before, and how companies like Google or Twitter have struggled to establish platforms that allow for free speech and conversations around things like political dissent without going so far as to encourage violence or hate, or skirting any laws. Facebook presents a slightly different challenge than Twitter because it focuses on having users present their real identities, wheras Twitter has fought in court to protect the identify of users who remain anonymous.

Facebook might have apologized and revamped it policies this time, but don’t think for a minute that we’ve reached some resolution on how tech companies negotiate offensive content and free speech.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Survey: How apps can solve photo management
• Social networks will displace business processes, not socialize them
• Sector RoadMap: Social customer service in 2013

Berkshire Hathaway Inc’s power production unit MidAmerican Energy will pay $5.6 billion for NV Energy Inc, the electric utility that serves Las Vegas and its power-hungry casinos, Reuters reports.

(Reuters) – Berkshire Hathaway Inc’s power production unit MidAmerican Energy will pay $5.6 billion for NV Energy Inc, the electric utility that serves Las Vegas and its power-hungry casinos.

MidAmerican Energy Holdings Co will purchase NV Energy’s common stock for $23.75 per share, a 23 percent premium to NV’s Wednesday closing price.
“This is a great fit for Berkshire Hathaway, and we are pleased to make a long-term investment in Nevada’s economy,” Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett said in a statement.

Las Vegas-based NV Energy, which serves about 2.4 million people in Nevada, said last month it would accelerate the retirement of its coal-fired power generating facilities and the construction of natural gas and renewable power plants.

“By joining forces with MidAmerican, we will gain access to additional operational and financial resources,” NV Energy Chief Executive Michael Yackira said.
Once the deal is complete, MidAmerican Energy will have assets of about $66 billion and its regulated electric and gas utilities will serve 8.4 million customers.

The post Buffett Picks Up Las Vegas-based NV Energy for $5.6 billion appeared first on peHUB.

Sports surgeon Dr. Lewis Yocum has died at the age of 65. According to the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, Yocum died in hospice care Saturday after a battle with liver cancer.

“The Angels family and Major League Baseball have lost one of baseball’s finest gentlemen and truly outstanding professionals with the passing of Dr. Lewis Yocum earlier this weekend,” said the Angels in a statement. “His talents extended the careers of countless professional athletes and provided extended quality of life for so many others he advised, treated and operated on during his distinguished career.”

Yocum was well-known throughout Major League Baseball (MLB) for his skill at Tommy John surgery, which replaces an elbow tendon with another tendon from elsewhere in the body. The surgery is used to extend the usable life of the elbow, and is particularly common for aging pitchers.

Yocum worked as an orthopedist for the Angels for 36 seasons, some of it under the tutelage of Dr. Frank Jobe. In addition to providing Angels players with medical care, Yocum also worked at the Kerlan-Jobe Orthopaedic Clinic in Los Angeles and consulted with MLB players throughout North America.

MLB commissioner Bud Selig stated that Yocum was a “giant in the field of sports medicine” and an “invaluable resource” for MLB players.

(Image courtesy the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim)