Tomorrow's Newspapers Online 10-21-2013 | Sc

"I didn't really get the point of it at all," said the Las Vegas resident. "Most of them were people I wasn't interested in hearing what they had to say anyway." He said, however, that he does check Facebook every day to see what his friends are up to.

Hovasse's experience highlights a risk for investors as Twitter Inc marches towards this year's most anticipated initial public offering in the United States, expected to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange in mid-November.

According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll, 36 percent of 1,067 people who have joined Twitter say they do not use it, and 7 percent say they have shut their account. The online survey, conducted October 11 to 18, has a credibility interval, a measure of its accuracy, of plus or minus 3.4 percentage points.

In comparison, only 7 percent of 2,449 Facebook members report not using the online social network, and 5 percent say they have shut down their account. The results have a credibility interval of 2.3 percent.

People who have given up on Twitter cite a variety of reasons, from lack of friends on the service to difficulty understanding how to use it. Twitter declined to comment for this story, saying it is in a quiet period ahead of its IPO.

Twitter's attrition rate highlights a challenge that has dogged the online messaging site over the years: while it has managed to enlist many high-profile and avid users, from the Pope to President Barack Obama, Twitter has yet to go truly mainstream in the way Facebook has.

Convincing ordinary people to think of Twitter as an indispensable part of their lives is key to the company's ability to attract advertisers and generate a profit.

Twitter reported it had 232 million "active" users - people who access the service at least once a month - at the end of September, up 6.1 percent from the end of June. Twitter's quarter-over-quarter growth in active users has not exceeded 11 percent since June 2012.

When Facebook was a similar size, its active users were increasing by more than 20 percent every quarter, and it was not until the social network neared the half-a-billion member mark that its user growth decelerated to 12 percent.

"Luckily, we have instruments of torture, which we will use if necessary," Andreas Mundt, the president of the German cartel office, was quoted as telling daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung.

A struggle with competition authorities in its second-largest market after the United States would add to Amazon's woes.

Its German operations have been rattled by a dispute over employees' pay and a trade union has warned that staff could strike during the Christmas holiday season.

"The terms of Amazon's Marketplace in effect obstruct competition," Mundt said, according to a pre-release on Sunday of the newspaper's Monday edition.

"We are in talks with Amazon to eliminate these impediments to competition...If necessary, we will issue a crystal clear decree."

Separately, Amazon has been criticized over its tax payments and leading policy makers have called for a new German government to crack down on tax avoidance by multinational firms without waiting for its European partners to act.

Fresh from the U.S. budget battles, Obama on Monday will turn his attention to convincing Americans that the healthcare program can be fixed, despite the initial problems.

Speaking on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew said the administration was determined to repair the technical glitches in the online insurance exchanges that are a central part of the program known as "Obamacare," which launched on October 1.

"I think that there's no one more frustrated than the president at the difficulty in the website," Lew said. He said the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services "has got plans to fix this and it has to fix this. It has to be done right."

Obama told aides in a recent Oval Office meeting that the administration had to take responsibility for the fact that the website was not ready on time. He is expected to address that in his remarks on Monday.

Administration officials are expected to travel the country in the coming weeks to encourage people to sign up on the exchanges, targeting areas where there are high percentages of uninsured, according to one official.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is expected to provide private health coverage to an estimated 7 million uninsured Americans through the new online marketplaces that opened for enrollment in all 50 states on October 1.

But the website, healthcare.gov, the administration's online portal for consumers in 36 states, was hobbled by technical problems - including error messages, garbled text and delays loading pages.

Administration officials blame the problems partly on an unexpectedly high volume of visitors in its first 10 days. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, there were more than 19 million visits to the website.

"We are committed to doing better," the department said in a blog post on Sunday.

Despite the problems, it said, other parts of the system were function well.

"Individuals have been able to verify their eligibility for credits, enabling them to shop for, and enroll in, low- or even no-cost health plans," the department said.

"We have updated the site several times with new code that includes bug fixes. Our team has called in additional help to solve some of the more complex technical issues we are encountering."

DAMAGE CONTROL

Late on Saturday the White House reported nearly half a million Americans had applied for health insurance through the federal and state exchanges provided by Obamacare.

Speaking on NBC's "Meet the Press" program, Lew said he was confident the economy, which he described as resilient, would recover from the 16-day partial shutdown of the federal government.

He described events leading to the shutdown, which eroded both business and consumer confidence, as a political crisis rather than an economic one.

"We know that from the shutdown, there was a loss of economic activity," Lew said. "We need to make sure that government does not go through another round of brinkmanship. This can never happen again."

A last minute deal in Congress pulled the country from the edge of an unprecedented debt default. It restored government funding through January 15 and extended its borrowing authority through February 7, though the Treasury Department might be able to stave off a default for several weeks past that point.

There are worries that Wednesday's deal may have set the stage for another standoff in the future.

Lew, the administration's front man during the stalemate over increasing the country's borrowing limit, has attempted to separate the debt ceiling from other policy conditions.

"I think the message that we have to send going forward is that there was a turning point on Wednesday night and this won't happen again. It can't happen again," he said.

Similar sentiments were echoed by Republican John McCain, who told the NBC's "Meet the Press" program that the shutdown hurt his party. McCain said there would be no second shutdown.

"Those involved in it went on a fool's errand, that's just a fact," McCain said. "This has harmed the lives of millions of people and thousands of people in my state ... I have an obligation to them to try to prevent that from happening."

Lew did not quantify the damage to the economy.

Economists estimate the shutdown shaved as much a half a percentage point from fourth-quarter gross domestic product growth, with much of the direct hit through the loss of output from the federal government.

"It took an economy that is fighting hard to get good economic growth going, to create jobs for the American people, and it took it in the wrong direction," Lew said. "This one was a little bit scary because it got so close to the edge."

There's a need to shift the focus away from fiscal policy, Lew said, arguing that the budget deficit as a share of the economy has been reduced significantly.

Students had blocked the main road leading to the campus and threw rocks as security forces drew near.

Clashes at the country's top Islamic institution erupted when students tried to take their protest off the campus.

Supporters of former President Mohammed Morsi have staged regular anti-army protests since he was ousted on 3 July.

There were no immediate reports of casualties at the al-Azhar protest.

The campus is close to Rabaa Square where Islamists set up a huge protest camp that security forces raided in August, leaving hundreds dead and sparking days of unrest.

A Reuters witness said some of the students were trying to reach the square, when they were cut off by the security forces.

There were also reports of scuffles at a demonstration at Cairo University between supporters and opponents of Mr Morsi.

Hundreds of people demanding his reinstatement - mostly Muslim Brotherhood supporters - have been killed in clashes with security forces since his ousting.

This gadget - which many fitness buffs deem the "gateway drug" - soon led him to try several different workout-tracking apps and software programs.

After several weeks of recording the data without bothering to analyze it, Sommer gave up.

"It was too much of a hassle," Sommer says. And worrying about the numbers, or worse - being "married" to them - took away from the workout experience.

"Too many people are distracted and controlled by the data. I wanted to be present," Sommer says.

Liz Pulver, a landscape architect and entrepreneur in New York City, can relate. She, too, tried a few electronic exercise gadgets but found they weren't for her.

"My life is so overscheduled and I'm so 'under the gun' all the time that I just need to unplug and take in the sounds and sights around me when I'm out running," Pulver says. "It's not like I'm training for a marathon or anything, and I found that monitoring my every move was just sort of a waste of time."

The price of the gadgets can add up. Health and wellness experts like Aimee Nicotera, former fitness director at health resort and spa operator Canyon Ranch, say that exercise enthusiasts can easily spend a few hundred dollars on the devices, which can run from $90 to $400 each.

That includes wristbands like the Nike FuelBand, Jawbone, and Fitbit, to GPS-equipped bike computers and everything in between. These devices can track your every move, be it in time, distance, laps, strokes, steps, hours of sleep, or calories.

The market for wearable exercise devices is now a $1 billion business and is expected to grow 24 percent with 94 million devices sold by 2018, according to Adarsh Krishnan, senior analyst at New York-based market intelligence firm ABI Research.

Still, nearly 50 percent of those who try fitness gadgets don't stick with them, says Sarah Robb O'Hagan, president of Equinox Fitness, which operates a chain of luxury gyms across the country.

Fitness buffs untether themselves from their gadgets for many reasons. Often the device doesn't meet user expectations or is limited in what it can do. Users may feel the devices aren't accurate or haven't had a lasting impact. And sometimes, the novelty simply wears off.

"Two of my Nike devices ($200) died in less than three months," says Yeida Perez, a New York City-based dermatological assistant. "And I gave up on the Fitbit Flex ($100) because it kept going into sleep mode when I was boxing."

Technology can help.

Take, for example, that classic Halloween accessory, the realistic festering wound. Former NASA employee Mark Rober has created an app that shows animations of moving, oozing innards.

Put your iOS or Android smartphone in a special fleshy case, add a carefully bloodied, ripped T-shirt and you have the iWound. There is also a moving eyeball outfit, and a new effect that makes it look like a hand is ripping out your guts from behind.

Rober first got the idea for mixing Halloween and smartphones in 2011. Using two iPads and the FaceTime video chatting app, he strapped one tablet to his front and the other to the back. The live video feed made it look like there was a hole blasted through the center of his body.

One hit YouTube video later, and Rober had found his new calling. This year, he quit his job as a mechanical engineer at NASA and started Digital Dudz, a company that makes costumes that integrate tablets and smartphones.

You don't need to be an engineer to put together your own high-tech costume though. Portable battery packs, LED lights and cheap motors can all be used to make ingenious costumes. Check out some of the brilliant ideas on Instructables, in Make Magazine or on YouTube, where people like to show off their creations.

Lionfish are not native to the Atlantic Ocean. The venomous, fast reproducing fish are aggressive eaters and will consume anything and everything, gorging so much they are actually getting liver disease. With no known predators -- except human beings -- they can wipe out 90% of a reef.

"The lionfish invasion is probably the worst environmental disaster the Atlantic will ever face," said Graham Maddocks, president and founder of Ocean Support Foundation, which works with the government and research agencies to help reduce the lionfish population in Bermuda.

While the problem is only beginning to escalate, many in the marine preservation field are already concerned for the marine life that surrounds the lionfish. Ecologist James Morris with the National Centers for Coastal Ocean Science said that while this may not be the worst epidemic the Atlantic Ocean has faced, it does have the makings of a disaster. He said the lionfish has brought a "big change in biodiversity," and it is what he called "the most abundant top-level predator on some coral reefs (in the Atlantic)."

Lionfish were first recorded decades ago and their population has grown quickly. They produce 30,000 to 40,000 eggs every few days and are sexually mature by 1 year old. Today, you can find them throughout the Amazon, the Bahamas, the Caribbean and in the waters along North Carolina.

As a non-indigenous species, lionfish are especially dangerous to the ecosystem because fish in the Atlantic lack a native instinct to stay away from them. How did they get there? Ask Florida.

Florida pet owners are blamed for their release into unfamiliar waters. Believe it or not, DNA evidence traces all lionfish in the Atlantic back to only six to eight female lionfish.

Scientists will tell you it's up to humans, the fish's only known predator, to save the ecosystem. I recently joined Maddocks and his team to get a front-row view into a lionfish hunt.

"The Mexicans have shown themselves to be good partners. One thing I think they won't do is to act in a hostile way. I think you can rule that out," he told the Gewinn Messe retail investor fair.

He added he did not know if America Movil intended to increase its near 23 percent stake.

Speculation about a potential move on Telekom Austria emerged after America Movil dropped its takeover offer this week for Dutch group KPN, the other company Slim had targeted as a bridgehead for expanding into Europe.

Telekom Austria shares were down 1.4 percent at 6.271 euros by 1235 GMT, while the Stoxx European telecoms sector index rose 0.5 percent.

Asked about prospects for a capital increase, Ametsreiter said: "The issue does not arise at the moment," adding such things were communicated only when decided.

He was speaking after sources close to the situation told Reuters the company was unlikely to use a quick capital increase to finance its purchase of next-generation mobile frequency spectrum in its home market.

"Telekom has no short-term financing problems. There is enough liquidity available," said one source who spoke on condition of anonymity.

"A capital increase is not a topic for the short term," another source added.

Bids for Austria's new telecoms frequencies had approached 2 billion euros ($2.73 billion) by the time the auction - now nearing its conclusion - entered its fourth week.

The final cost of purchasing the frequencies remains a secret. Results of the auction are expected next week, people familiar with the process said.

BlackBerry Ltd said in August it was exploring options that could include an outright sale. And the Canadian company, which helped pioneer smartphones, has since been linked with a string of potential buyers from private equity firms to rival technology companies.

Its shares, which rose 4 percent after the Wall Street Journal first reported the interest from Lenovo Group Ltd, ended up less than a percent at $8.20 on the Nasdaq.

Multiple sources close to the matter have told Reuters BlackBerry is in talks with Cisco Systems Inc, Google Inc and Germany's SAP AG among others, about selling all, or parts of itself. The potential buyers have all declined to comment.

None of these technology companies have made a formal bid for BlackBerry yet. However, industry experts believe that, while these players might not be interested in all of BlackBerry, they are keen on at least some pieces that would mesh well with or expand their own businesses.

Two sources said they expect some of these strategic players to be paired in bids for BlackBerry, depending on their level of interest its hardware and network assets.

Such a deal would be an alternative to a preliminary, $9-a- share offer by a group led by BlackBerry's biggest shareholder, Canada's Fairfax Financial Holdings Ltd. Earlier this month, co-founders Mike Lazaridis and Douglas Fregin said they were also considering a bid.

TOUGH REGULATORY REVIEW

The sale of BlackBerry, or any of its assets will likely undergo tough regulatory reviews in both Ottawa and Washington.

Most security experts believe BlackBerry's most vital asset, a secure network that handles millions of confidential corporate and government emails every day, is likely to be sold to a North American entity because of the security concerns. Its less contentious handset business, however, could be shopped to an Asian device maker.

Under the Investment Canada Act, the federal government has wide ranging powers to veto any foreign takeover of a Canadian asset or company if it deems such a deal would not bring a "net benefit" to the country, or if it believes a deal might pose a threat to national security.

Last week, Canada blocked an Egyptian telecommunication entrepreneur's bid to acquire the Allstream fiber optic network owned by Manitoba Telecom Services Inc, citing unspecified national security concerns.

This network of urban trails connects each of the neighbourhoods so it’s possible to get nearly anywhere in the city on dedicated foot or bike infrastructure - although the comprehensive rail system is usually faster.

The transformation transcends the physical environment. A cultural shift has occurred and residents in general choose to live near where they work.

Education has improved as well, with children walking or biking to quality schools close to where they live. Health has improved dramatically and people are living longer. Most people don’t own cars, and those who do usually only drive them as a hobby, since they’re relics of a bygone era.

This is the Los Angeles of the future.

It's certainly not the Los Angeles of today, the land of 20-lane interchanges and parking lots the size of football stadiums and mind-bending, soul-crushing, life-altering traffic.

LA's seemingly brilliant plan half-a-century ago to re-engineer its urban environment for cars has become a global affliction. There are now 60 million new cars being added to the planet every year, and with those vehicles come more smog, toxic emissions and dependency on rapidly depleting resources.

As we embrace the car, our cultures become more sedentary and rates of obesity and heart disease increase. Cars not only make our cities unhealthy, they also make our cities dangerous: 270,000 pedestrians are killed by cars every year.

To undo these decades of suburban propaganda is to essentially unravel the American Dream; one which has since travelled around the world. But there is a new dream. Walkable City author Jeff Speck said it best in his recent TEDCity2.0 talk: "Sustainability—which includes both health and wealth—may not be a function of our ecological footprint, but the two are deeply interrelated.

If we pollute so much because we are throwing away our time, money, and lives on the highway, then both problems would seem to share a single solution, and that solution is to make our cities more walkable."

Virtual beginnings

The market reaction put Google's stock within striking distance of $1,000, following what analysts said was a strong, but not spectacular quarter.

Shares of the world's No.1 Internet search engine jumped 8 percent to $959.65 in after-hours trading on Thursday, after it reported a 23 percent rise in revenue from its Internet business, excluding fees paid to partners, of $10.8 billion in the third quarter.

"Expectations going into earnings were a little muted," said Needham & Co analyst Kerry Rice. "They did what they needed to do to impress investors."

Google's business, like rivals Facebook Inc and Yahoo Inc, has come under pressure as more consumers access its online services on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, where advertising rates are lower than on PCs.

The average cost-per-click - the price that marketers pay Google when consumers click on their ads - decreased 8 percent during the third quarter, deepening the 6 percent price erosion that Google experienced in the second quarter.

But the total amount of paid clicks increased 26 percent year-on-year during the three months ended September 30, the highest rate of growth in one year.

"That's the key story, their ad volume growth is outpacing the decline in cost-per-clicks," said JMP Securities analyst Ronald Josey.

Roughly 40 percent of the traffic to YouTube, the Google-owned video website, now occurs on mobile devices, Google Chief Executive Larry Page said on Thursday. Two years ago, only 6 percent of YouTube's traffic occurred on mobile devices.

"Google's done a good job of being in the right place in mobile as it grows, and being able to monetize that," said Rice.

He also pointed to Google's 28 percent revenue growth outside of the U.S. and Britain as further signs of Google's strength.

Google's results offered a sharp contrast to online rival Yahoo Inc, which reported a slight dip in quarterly revenue on Tuesday and lowered its financial outlook.

NO MORE ANALYST CALLS FOR PAGE

On Thursday, co-founder and CEO Page told analysts he will no longer be joining the company's quarterly earnings conference calls on a regular basis.