Monday, January 31, 2011
Behind The Scenes: Rick Ross Ft. Wale x Meek Mill “Pandemonium” [Video]
BEHIND THE SCENES: RICK ROSS FT. WALE AND MEEK MILL 'PANDEMONIUM' from DRE FILMS / MAYBACH FILMS on Vimeo.
Cory Gunz Reality Show Debuting In April
"After a year of waiting, Cory Gunz’s reality show, Son Of A Gun will air on Thursday, April 28 at 11pm on MTV. Executive produced by Nick Cannon, the six part series will document Cory’s journey to super stardom." - Amaya
http://rapradar.com/“Cory’s story is inspiring, one that boldly paints the many trials and tribulations he’s had to endure in pursuit of his dreams.” said Nick Cannon, executive producer of “Son of a Gun.” “I’m grateful for the access that Cory and Peter allowed us to have in order to create a series that we feel will really resonate with MTV viewers.”
[Video] Rick Ross Blows A Million At K.O.D.
"Following Ross’ bash at Club Play, he took his show to Miami’s famed King of Diamonds gentleman’s club. Along with Diddy and Pharrell, Rozay blew an estimated million dollars. In fact, it wasn’t long until they Brinks truck came. Blowing money fast, indeed." - B.Dot
Chris Brown Wants Restraining Order Removed
"Nearly two years after his assault on Rihanna, Chris Brown appeared in a L.A. courthouse Friday for his progress report and requested a removal of his restraining order. Although it hasn’t been granted, the judge has suggested a modification with the approval of Rihanna’s attorney." - Big Homie
Friday, January 28, 2011
New Video: Rick Ross “Devil In A New Dress”
"Kanye couldn’t make it, so Ross took matters into his own hands and shot a video for his portion of “Devil In A New Dress” from My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Directed by SpiffTV and Dre Films. After the jump, Gunplay and Waka Flocka go “Rollin”." - B.Dot
Tuesday, January 25, 2011
Big Advance? From a Record Label?
Trying to get a music career off the ground can be an extremely expensive affair, and living hand to mouth is a fact of life for most indie bands. When a label starts sniffing around, the promise of a big advance check can sound like sweet relief. Even if your band is struggling financially, however, an advance may be just a mirage. If you're signing to a major label, an advance of some sort is a forgone conclusion, but if you're signing to an indie label, it is a different story. Many indie labels are fighting to keep their heads above water just as much as the bands are, and to stay afloat, they have to spend money wisely. In terms of releasing a new album, the smart money goes on promotion. You can shoot yourself in the foot if you push a label to give you a big advance - it might get cash in your pocket in the short term, but if your label doesn't have enough money left to promote your album properly, then your career begins and ends with that advance check. Your album won't sell, you'll lose your deal, and you'll be back to square one. When you're signing to a label, it is best to take a long term view, and to remember that for you to succeed, your label has to succeed as well.
One more thing to remember about advances - an advance is really an ADVANCE. It is not free cash or a "signing bonus". You'll be paying that advance back out of the profits from your album sales.
Sunday, January 23, 2011
6 Web Pioneers on What the Internet of the Future Will Look Like
Throughout 2010, I made a habit of wrapping up interviews with what I am sure was perceived as a cruelly broad question: “What do you think the future Internet will look like?”
The responses I received varied a great deal, but usually began with something along the lines of “Wow. That’s a big question.”
And it is — one with an answer that is surely beyond the capacity of a single person’s imagination. But at some point in the past, when these six people were faced with the same question, they got at least part of it right. Barry Glick digitized location when he launched MapQuest. Jeremy Stoppelman bet on local tips and reviews with Yelp. And Steve Case literally brought America online.
Here’s what the people who shaped today’s Internet have to say about its potential for tomorrow.
Steve Case, Co-Founder of AOL
I think that it will continue to evolve. In 25 years it has gone from a first phase, which was really a pick and shovel phase, to simply building the basic platform, the basic technology, the basic network, the basic tool to do well. The second 10 years really was about expansion and really taking it to the mainstream. And … the last few years, and I think the coming decade really, will be about — now that the internet really is ubiquitous, people are relying on it in increasingly habitual kind of ways — how do you not just create Internet businesses, but create businesses that can impact every aspect of people’s lives using the Internet as a tool.
…Someday it would be great if instead of being e-mail, it would just be called mail. Instead of being e-commerce it will just be called commerce, just because it is so ubiquitous that it is just taken for granted, much as we take for granted electricity or water or other kinds of utilities.
We’re not quite there yet. But we’re getting there. When you get there, it’s less of a focus on the Internet and a particular technology or industry because that’s faded into a part of your daily life. It’s more focused on what you can do with that and how it impacts important things: education, transportation, health care, communication — big things that affect people’s everyday lives. We just scratched the surface in terms of the Internet as a platform to disrupt those non-Internet businesses.
In a way, I think the future of the internet will basically go away in the same sense that you couldn’t really ask the question, what is the future of electricity? I think certainly in the developing world and in parts of the world the Internet hasn’t reached, that’s certainly going to be part of the future, to get to be as ubiquitous as possible.
Right now the Internet has been very computer oriented. There’s been this association, like you need a computer to be connected, and I think that’s rapidly, of course, going away. You need a handheld device, and in the future you need a home entertainment system, TV, all connected to the Internet. So I think the Internet is going to be the invisible present power supply, and the boundary between some things that have boundaries today, like telephones, will go away. Television will go away. It will be the Internet, and there will be different display devices and different user interface or interaction devices, but that’s kind of how I see it.
Wikipedia Celebrates 10 Years, But Will It Survive Another Decade?
Wikipedia is just the latest in a long line of encyclopedias. In fact, encyclopedias have been around in some form or another for 2,000 years. The oldest, Naturalis Historia, written by Pliny the Elder, is still in existence.
How do I know this? I looked it up on Wikipedia, of course. Is it true? Possibly.
Ten years after its founding, it’s hard to imagine what life was like before Wikipedia. When I was growing up, our family had a dusty set of encyclopedias that were at least 10 years old, which is fine if you’re looking up dinosaurs, but not so good if you want to know, for instance, who the current president of the Congo is. But though the limitations of the old encyclopedias were obvious, they were authoritative in ways that Wikipedia is not.
Like most people, I’ll take the tradeoff. I have no desire to go back to the days of printed Funk & Wagnalls. If someone would have told me back in 2001 that, within a few years, there would be a comprehensive, free online encyclopedia, I wouldn’t have believed them. Why would someone do that? How?
Origins
By now, we all know the story: Two Ayn Rand devotees, Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger, created Wikipedia in January 2001. The founding can be traced to a post by Sanger entitled “Let’s Make a Wiki” that was intended as a feature to Sanger and Wales’s other project, Nupedia. Wiki, Sanger explained in the post, was derived from “wikiwiki,” a Polynesian word for “quick.” “What it means is a VERY open, VERY publicly editable series of web pages,” Sanger wrote in the post.
As often happens, the feature grew out of proportion with its original intent. Wales, who was originally against the idea of a Wiki, became a strong proponent of it, while Sanger, who became estranged from the project in 2002, now charges that Wales hogged the credit for the venture. (Wales could not be reached for comment. To his credit, Sanger is mentioned as a co-founder on Wikipedia’s entry about its founding.)
Rooted in open source thinking, Wikipedia contributors began penning a voluminous number of entries (the site claims there are now 17 million such articles), which began showing up in Google searches, furthering the site’s growth and notoriety. Meanwhile, a subculture developed around Wikipedia, with self-appointed guardians doing their best to make sure entries were accurate and free of vandalism. As an authoritative 2006 Atlanticarticle on Wikipedia noted, “A study by IBM suggests that although vandalism does occur (particularly on high-profile entries like ‘George W. Bush’), watchful members of the huge Wikipedia community usually swoop down to stop the malfeasance shortly after it begins.”
“Truth” on the Internet
All of this made Wikipedia a pretty good reference, but one that you’d be wise not to take completely at face value. Wikipedia works best as an introduction to a subject. Since the articles usually cite references, readers can investigate further whether the claims are actually true. Despite this, Wikipedia soon earned a reputation for loopy reportage, an aspect best expressed in The Onion headline “Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years of American Independence.”
Such criticism, though, has it backwards. Wikipedia is, in the best-case scenario, an antidote for the echo chamber of the web. After all, good luck finding “truth” on the Internet. Facts may be facts, but they’re subject to so much spin that it can be hard to get a handle on what’s objectively real.
All the more reason why the idea of Wikipedia is laudable, albeit a bit impractical. Though Jimmy Wales could have made a fortune selling ads on the site, he decided to make the Wikimedia Foundation a non-profit charitable organization. But someone has to keep all those servers running and pay those 50 full-time staffers, which is why Wales appeared in a ubiquitous banner ad on Wikipedia asking for donations. The site eventually collected $16 million.
The Future
Can Wikipedia sustain itself for another 10 years? As The Economist recently pointed out, the number of Wikipedia’s English language contributors fell from 54,000 in March 2007 to 35,000 in September 2010, but here Wikipedia may be the victim of its own success. As the site gets more comprehensive, there are fewer entries that need to be written. One thing’s for sure — if Wikipedia ever does go away, it will be hard to believe it. After all, where will we go to confirm such a thing?
Apple App Store Surpasses 10 Billion Downloads
It’s official: Apple’s App Store has hit 10 billion app downloads.
Apple recently started a countdown for the 10 billionth app and launched a contest to give a $10,000 iTunes gift card to the person who downloaded it.
At the end of September 2009, the App Store hit 2 billion apps downloaded and by January 2010, there were 3 billion downloads from the App Store.
However, it took just over a week for the app store to generate 250 million downloads, a testament to the incredible growth of Apple’s iPhone and iPad App Stores and, most recently, its Mac App Store. At this pace it will be able to hit 20 billion app downloads before the end of the year. It will probably grow even faster than that though, thanks to the Verizon iPhone.
No word yet who the lucky winner of the $10,000 iTunes gift card is.
The Internet is Running Out of Space…Kind of
by
On February 2nd around 4 a.m., the Internet will run out of its current version of IP addresses. At least that’s what one Internet Service Provider is predicting based on a rate of about one million addresses every four hours.
Hurricane Electric has launched Twitter and Facebook accounts that count down to what it has termed the “IPcalypse.”
Every device that is connected to the Internet gets a unique code called an IP address (it looks like this). The current system, IPv4, only supports about 4 billion individual IPv4 addresses.
As PC World’s Chris Head explained in a blog post yesterday, some of these addresses are reusable. The problem, however, is that their one-time use counterparts will eventually lead to the complete depletion of IP addresses.
Fortunately, some smart folks foresaw this problem long before we did and invented IPv6, a system that invokes both letters and digits to handle 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 addresses (shall we just call it “a zillion?”).
Hurricane Electric’s doomsday campaign encourages other Internet service providers to transition to that system. Fortunately, the Internet Society‘s Wiki assures us that IPv4 and IPv6 can coexist during the transition despite being largely incompatible. Software and hardware developers are working on transition mechanisms, and most operating systems install support for IPv6 by default.
Since many of us still have some canned food and bottled water stacked up in our basement from the Y2K era, we should be OK either way.
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Having a baby without insurance.
Having a baby is expensive with insurance, what about if you do not have insurance? What can you do? These are normal thoughts and concerns if you were not ready for having a baby. The happiness you have about your pregnancy should not be greatly affected by the costs. Therefore it is a good idea to have a plan in place to help with the expenses.
The costs that you will need to think about are the costs of the prenatal visits, the ultra sound, the birth, the hospitals stays for you and the baby and the postnatal visits. This can be somewhat pricey even with insurance. These prices do vary with the amount of visits you need, the type of delivery you have and how the postnatal health of you and the baby are. The average cost of a pretty normal pregnancy is around $7000-$15,000. Again this can vary a great deal depending on the circumstances.
I know that this sounds like a great deal of money, however there are options to help with this. First of all if you qualify, the state you live in may offer some assistance in the medical costs. You can contact the state assistance program in your state usually by calling, looking on the Internet or going into their office.
If this is not something that fits your income limits, there are other programs like Baby your Baby at http://www.babyyourbaby.org/financial/financial.htm to check to see if they are an option you can try. There are services like this in many states.
There are also options like http://www.bestdiscountbenefits.com/maternity.htm that have savings benefits to help you with the expenses of having a baby with out insurance.
You can also plan out the payment plan from the beginning of your pregnancy. The best way to do this is to separate the costs into different categories and figure out what you can pay for ahead of time.
Here is an example of what this means:
The prenatal visits will be around $50-$100 each visit and these visits are every four weeks until the third trimester and then it goes to every two weeks, then finally every week for the last few weeks. So this price is something you should anticipate paying at each visit.
The best thing to do, is prepare for the cost of the final visits in advance by saving the money up and paying it at the time of service. Often times if you talk to your Doctors office they can set up a payment plan in advance, and they can also work a flat rate for the entirety of the prenatal visits, delivery and postnatal visits.
You will also want to work out a payment plan for the cost of the delivery in the hospital. You can contact the hospital and they can tell you an estimated cost and you can start paying for that in advance, or you can start by splitting that money up in advance per the amount of months or paychecks you have between now and the birth and you can start putting the money in the bank.
The cost for a C-section is about:
$6200 including the anesthesia
The hospital stay being several days with a C-section is about:
$6000
The cost for a standard vaginal birth is about:
$4000
The hospital stay for one day is about:
$1000
The Ultra sound is about:
$200
Many times there is a cash payment savings if you work out to pay the majority of the bill in cash. Ask what plans the hospital and your doctor has available to help with the prepayment of your bill.
I know this sounds like a great deal of money, and having children is not cheep, however for the same amount you will be spending on the living child, you can anticipate paying in the month prior to the birth. It is not that big of a deal. The price divided up will be around $800 per month.
Even if you cannot afford all of that, it is a good idea to come up with as much of that as you possibly can. Often times the hospital will let you pay part up front, about 40% and then the rest in payments after. Though I would use caution where this is concerned because the expenses after a baby is born is going to be higher than you expected.
$800 per month sounds like so much money, but if you calculate the costs you will pay when a child is actually born, it is not much different from that. Say a family when both parents work with a baby in their family, here is what they will usually pay out.
$450 per month day care
$80 in diapers
$80 in formula
$50 in clothing
$20 in wipes
$70 for insurance
$30 in toys
$50 in miscellaneous
For a total amount estimated at about $830. Therefore getting used to these expenses by thinking of the medical costs in the same terms will help you build the habit you need.
Another option that will help is that if you can get family insurance even when you are pregnant, it may not cover the cost of the pregnancy and birth, but it would cover the post birth for the mother and baby in many circumstances. It is worth asking questions to find out.
Either way, these expenses may be hard, but the reward in the end will be more wonderful than anything else you could spend your money on. There are many options to help. So what ever you do, remember the joy and use your research abilities to find the best plan to help you pay the bills.
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