Twitter co-founders move Obvious Corp into spacious new digs

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Evan Williams and Biz Stone, the co-founders of Twitter, have leased three sprawling floors in a historic downtown San Francisco tower for their low-profile start-up incubator, The Obvious Corporation.

Obvious said Friday it leased 75,000 square feet at the busy 760 Market Street location – known as the Phelan Building – in one of the city’s larger commercial real estate deals in recent months.

The downtown space will be able to hold roughly 500 employees and signals ambitions at Obvious, which was re-constituted when Williams and Stone both left Twitter in 2011.

The incubator, with no more than two dozen employees, has mostly stayed out of the press except when it unveiled two new blogging platforms called Medium and Branch last September.

Although still thinly staffed, Obvious’s new space is larger than start-up Pinterest’s recently inked lease in the city.

“We need the right space from which to grow the Medium team and position Obvious to focus on bringing our new ideas to life,” Obvious CEO Williams said in a statement Friday about the new lease.

The company will occupy the seventh, eighth and ninth floors of the triangular building, which wraps around a central courtyard, said Jenny Haeg, a real estate agent who has brokered leases for Square Inc, Dropbox, Airbnb and other large tech startups.

(Reporting by Gerry Shih; Editing by Bob Burgdorfer)

Internet News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Drew Barrymore on Oprah's Next Chapter

Drew Barrymore opens up about her complicated childhood and the lessons she's learned when it comes to being a new mother on Oprah's Next Chapter, and we have a sneak peek!

Pics: Celebs and Their Cute Kids

Marking the first time cameras have ever been allowed inside her home, Drew also talks to Oprah about her new marriage to Will Kopelman, shares details about their newborn baby Olive, and reveals the story behind why her mother did not attend her wedding.

Related: Drew Barrymore's Daughter Olive Lands First Cover

Oprah's Next Chapter with Drew Barrymore airs Sunday at 9 pm ET/PT on OWN.

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An infantile spectacle

Rich Lowry

President Obama set a new standard for stupidly exploitative White House events by appearing onstage with children to unveil his gun-control proposals.

He quoted from the kids’ letters. He invoked their Solomonic authority: “Their voices should compel us to change.” He signed executive orders as they gazed on adoringly. He hugged and high-fived them.

No doubt every parent thinks his or her little Johnny or Sally is the next James Q. Wilson. That doesn’t make it so. Some of the wisdom that the president shared from his adorable pen pals was, “[I] want everybody to be happy and safe,” and “I feel really bad.”

News flash: Kids don’t want bad things to happen. This would be a genuinely useful insight . . . if we could write public policy in crayon. The White House event smacked of the old unilateral disarmament campaigns of the 1980s when we were supposed to abolish nuclear weapons because they scared youngsters.

We can assume that the kids onstage with Obama don’t have a fine-grained sense of the limits of gun control or a proper regard for the Second Amendment. That’s OK, though — neither does he.

It can’t be said that using kids as props was beneath the gravity of occasion, since the occasion was all about feel-good PR and make-believe. For all the emphasis on stopping another Sandy Hook, Obama didn’t offer any gun-control proposals that would do it.

The president plugged for a universal background check. Adam Lanza’s mother, who owned the guns he used on his rampage, passed a background check. James Holmes, the Aurora, Colo., shooter, passed two background checks. So did the Virginia Tech shooter (although he shouldn’t have).

The president wants a new assault-weapons ban. He told of how another school shooting happened in California while networks were broadcasting a Joe Biden news conference about his task force. He didn’t mention that the shooter used a shotgun, not an assault weapon. He could have said that there was yet another recent shooting at a Kentucky community college. The shooter used a semiautomatic pistol.

During his remarks introducing the president, Biden invoked Colin Goddard, a survivor of the Virginia Tech shooting in the audience. Seung-Hui Cho shot him four times. Not with an assault weapon. Cho perpetrated the worst school shooting in U.S. history with a semiautomatic pistol.

The president called for a ban of magazines of more than 10 rounds (fewer than some guns have as a standard feature). This would have made a difference in Newtown only if you presume that Lanza, who knew his way around firearms, couldn’t have reloaded in the permissive environment of an elementary school without a guard.

Unfortunately, no one can write a law against mothers owning guns that one day might be turned against them by deranged sons who then commit horrific acts of murder-suicide. Shooting rampages are very hard to prevent because they are so often committed by disturbed young men without criminal records who don’t care if they are caught and usually want to die.

These are adult facts that don’t intrude on the childish world of White House policymaking. They must have eluded Biden in the course of his consultations with 229 different groups that just happened to result in recommendations from his task force that anyone could have predicted beforehand.

To justify any gun-control measure, no matter how ineffectual or symbolic, Biden talks of adopting an “if it saves one life” standard. If that really were the White House’s guiding principle — politics and the expense be damned — it would push massive stop-and-frisk crackdowns in the nation’s cities. It would take up the National Rifle Association’s proposal for armed guards at every school in America. But what it really wants is as much gun control as it can plausibly get in the aftermath of Newtown. As Rahm Emanuel might put it, never let a massacre go to waste.

There’s no reason for kids to see through it. Discerning adults should.

comments.lowry@nationalreview.com

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Norwegian Cruise Line launches strong IPO

Miami-based Norwegian Cruise Line joined its larger local competitors on Wall Street Friday in a strong debut.

Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings Ltd. raised nearly $447 million in an initial public offering of about 23.5 million shares and saw stocks sail 30 percent in trading.

Shares closed Friday afternoon at $24.79, up $5.79 from the $19 offering price set late Thursday night. That was above the range of $16-$18 that the company had expected.

“I think this was a classically beautiful IPO, albeit relatively small in terms of total dollars,” said Roderick McLeod, partner in the management consulting practice McLeod.Applebaum & Partners and a former cruise executive.

In regulatory filings, the company has said it plans to use proceeds from the IPO to reduce debt and pay expenses related to the offering. Norwegian is giving the underwriters a 30-day option to buy up to an additional 3.5 million shares.

Previously, the company was privately held in a partnership of Genting Hong Kong, with 50 percent of the cruise line, and private equity firms Apollo Management and TPG. Genting Hong Kong is a subsidiary of gambling and resort conglomerate Genting Group, which purchased the land currently occupied by The Miami Herald in 2011 for $236 million.

After the IPO, the three groups own a total of about 88 percent of the company’s ordinary shares.

Norwegian, with a fleet of 11 ships and three more on the way by the fall of 2015, has made its name by emphasizing a “freestyle” type of cruising that allows guests to choose from a variety of dining, entertainment and rooming options.

In an interview Friday morning, Norwegian Cruise Line President and CEO Kevin Sheehan said that the timing was right for the offering.

“It just seemed like a very logical time: We’re into 2013, we’ve got these beautiful new ships coming out soon and the marketplace is very excited about them,” he said. “The locomotive is moving and we’re at the tipping point with the brand.”

As the industry grows by just about 2.5 percent over the next five years, Sheehan said, Norwegian will grow capacity by more than 10 percent.

“It’s the double whammy,” he said. “Lower growth in the future with a phenomenal set of assets.”

He said the benefits of going public include raising capital, allowing the company to strengthen its balance sheet and putting it in the same playing field as its competitors. Carnival Corp., the world’s largest cruise ship company, and rival Royal Caribbean Cruises are both publicly traded. Carnival closed up about a percent at $38.58 Friday, while Royal Caribbean dropped just over a percent to $36.90.

“Now we’re out there and people can look at our results and the analysts can talk about us freely,” he said.

The launch capped years of attempts by Norwegian to go public, all abandoned for economic reasons.

Miami cruise expert Stewart Chiron, CEO of CruiseGuy.com, said the timing was good, with an industry performing well and a vastly improved company.

“I’m glad they finally got it done,” he said. “This was by far one of the important milestones that they wanted to cross.”

McLeod remembers an effort when he was president and chief operating officer at Norwegian that coincided with the stock market crash in October of 1987. He has also worked in senior positions at Royal Caribbean Cruises and Carnival Corp.

“I think we’ve all kind of known this was coming eventually and some of us have known it’s coming for 25 years,” McLeod said. “It’s never too late to do the right thing; this is the right thing for them to do.”

The move is smart, McLeod said, for several reasons.

“In addition to improving their leverage, reducing their debt, this expands their strategic options,” he said. “This is a currency, and that can work for them in lots of different ways.”

This report was supplemented with information from the Associated Press.

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Senator Marco Rubio swears in Miami-Dade commissioner Rebeca Sosa on Friday

Miami-Dade Commissioners Rebeca Sosa becomes Miami-Dade commission’s first Hispanic chairwoman when she is sworn in on Friday by U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio.

Also being sworn in is fellow commissioner Lynda Bell, who is now the vice chair. Miami-Dade County Judge Gladys Perez will swear in Bell

The installation ceremony will be at 11:30 a.m. ceremony at the commission chambers at the Stephen Clark Center, 111 NW First St.

Elected in 2001, Sosa represents District 6, which includes areas of Miami, Coral Gables, West Miami, Hialeah and Miami Springs, as well as unincorporated zones.

Sosa’s office explained the Florida Senator is doing the honors at the historic swearing in because the two are long-time friends.

Bell who was elected in 2010 represents District 8, which encompasses a significant area of southeastern Miami-Dade, including the municipalities of Palmetto Bay, Cutler Bay and Homestead with portions of Kendall an the Redlands.

Sosa and Bell were elected to two-year terms in November.

The installation ceremony is open to the public.

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Ex-Red Sox pitcher Schilling puts bloody sock up for auction after video game company collapse

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – Former Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling — whose video game company underwent a spectacular collapse into bankruptcy last year — is selling the blood-stained sock he wore during the 2004 World Series.

Chris Ivy, director of sports for Texas-based Heritage Auctions, says online bidding begins around Feb. 4. Live bidding will take place Feb. 23.

The sock previously had been on loan to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. It has been at Heritage’s Dallas headquarters for several weeks and will be displayed at the auction house’s Manhattan office before it is sold, according to Ivy.

He said the sock is expected to fetch at least $ 100,000, though he described that as a conservative estimate.

“I do expect the bidding to be very spirited,” Ivy said.

Schilling’s company, 38 Studios, was lured to Providence, R.I., from Massachusetts with a $ 75 million loan guarantee in 2010. In May, it laid off all its employees and it filed for bankruptcy in June. The state is now likely responsible for some $ 100 million related to the deal, including interest.

Schilling also had personally guaranteed loans to the company and listed the sock as bank collateral in a September filing with the Massachusetts secretary of state’s office.

Messages left for his publicist were not immediately returned.

The bloody sock is one of two that sent Schilling into the annals of baseball lore in 2004.

The other was from Game 6 of the American League Championship Series, when Schilling pitched against the New York Yankees with an injured ankle. That sock is said to have been discarded in the trash at Yankees Stadium.

The one being sold is from the second game of the World Series, which the Red Sox won that year for the first time in 86 years.

Schilling has said he invested as much as $ 50 million in 38 Studios and has lost all his baseball earnings. He told WEEI-AM in Boston last year that possibly having to sell the sock was part of “having to pay for your mistakes.”

“I’m obligated to try and make amends and, unfortunately, this is one of the byproducts of that,” he told the station.

Brad Horn, a spokesman for the hall of fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., said the loaned sock was returned in December under the terms of the hall’s agreement with Schilling. The hall had had it since 2004.

The Feb. 23 live bidding will be held at the Fletcher-Sinclair mansion in New York City, now home to the Ukrainian Institute of America. The auction will feature other “five- and six-figure items,” including a jersey and cap worn by New York Yankees great Lou Gehrig, Ivy said.

Heritage last May auctioned off the so-called “Bill Buckner ball,” which rolled through the legs of the Red Sox first baseman in the 1986 World Series. Ivy said that item, like Schilling’s sock, was listed at the time as being expected to bring in “$ 100,000-plus,” but it was sold to an anonymous bidder for $ 418,000.

Gaming News Headlines – Yahoo! News

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Undercover Boss Gets Chastised by Pushy Manager

A verbally abusive manager is bound to get his comeuppance on the next Undercover Boss.

PICS: Celebrity Dream Jobs

President of Moe's Southwest Grill, Paul Damico, gets a rude awakening while going through employee training at one of the restaurant's branches. Under the alias Marc, Paul is chastised by a store manager on a power trip.

"Tito's a little flippant with me," Paul says, who felt the atmosphere was less than professional. "As the leader of the brand, I don't like to see managers run a shift like this."

Paul grows more irritated as he realizes that Tito has been treating all of the associates with the same lack of respect.

"I'm not okay with what is happening in front of the guests," says Paul.

Click the video for more. Watch an all-new Undercover Boss Friday at 8/7c on CBS.

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Re-evaluating Andrew

Striking bus drivers are making it hard for kids to get to school, even resorting to thuggery to stop them — but why even go, when they’re bound to find lousy teachers waiting for them when they get there?

Too often, that’s the case in this city; ineffective teachers can’t easily be fired. Yesterday, the United Federation of Teachers froze that sorry status quo by nixing any reasonable system for rating teachers and firing those who can’t cut it.

Not even the lure of $450 million in state and federal funds, which Gov. Cuomo assured folks would seal the deal, could buy the union’s cooperation.

AP

Gov. Cuomo

We refer the governor to our words from one year ago: “As long as Cuomo leaves the union with a veto over reforms,” we said, “there’ll never be any — even if districts lose state aid.”

Alas, he ignored our warning and left the unions veto power. Sure enough, yesterday our prediction bore out, sad as it is to note. New York’s kids will pay the price.

At the time, recall, Cuomo was trying to fix a 2010 teacher-evaluation law that he rightly called “unworkable by design.”

The law, he said, “protected the teachers union at the expense of the students.”

Yet then he pushed a new law that is just as unworkable.The failure of the city and the UFT to come to terms by yesterday — Cuomo’s deadline — shows just how flawed it is.

Of course, the UFT was ready to accept a sham evaluation system. For example, it wanted any plan to be scrapped after two years. The catch: It takes at least that long to get rid of poor teachers, so no teacher could’ve been removed in time. Great.

Kudos to Mayor Bloomberg for rejecting the charade, even if it cost nearly half a billion in state and local funds.

It’s futile to blame the UFT. After all, the union isn’t in business to serve students; its job is to protect teachers, even the bad ones. The real culprit here is the law.

We have two questions. First: Will Cuomo heed our warning now, and push legislation that holds teachers accountable, even over union objections?

Second: Will Bloomberg’s successor stand as firmly he has? (UFT boss Michael Mulgrew says, ominously, that he’s only too happy to wait for the next administration to take office “in 11 months.”)

Meanwhile, 1.1 million city schoolkids will be counting on Cuomo & Co. — that is, if the kids can manage to make it to school.

Have an opinion on this Post editorial? Send it in to LETTERS@NYPOST.COM!

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Prices for Miami Beach luxury condos soar to records

Ultra-luxury condominiums on South Beach are fetching nosebleed prices.

On Tuesday, a penthouse at the Setai Resort at 2001 Collins Avenue closed for $27 million — the highest price ever for a South Florida condominium, according to real estate agents.

“We’re definitely seeing the market turning upward,” said Jeff Miller, of Zilbert International Realty in Miami, who represented the buyer in the sale of the palatial 7,100-square-foot condominium. “We’re seeing buyers come in from all over the globe.”

Just a few weeks ago, Ohio coal mining businessman Wayne Boich Jr. completed the sale of his Icon South Beach penthouse at 450 Alton Road in the uber-trendy South of Fifth neighborhood for just under $21 million.

The 6-bedroom, 7 1/2-bath Icon condo sparked a bidding war that drove the sale $2 million above the listing price — a level that is three times the $7 million Boich paid in July 2007 in the depths of the bust. It was a record price for a Miami Beach bayside condo.

“The luxury market is on fire in South Beach — especially the South of Fifth neighborhood,” said Dora Puig, principal of PuigWerner Real Estate Services, who was the listing broker for the Icon unit. “It’s moving Miami to totally different pricing points.”

The Setai’s record may not reign for long.

Penthouse 2 in the decade-old Continuum South tower at 100 South Pointe Drive in the South of Fifth neighborhood is on the market for $39 million.

That is a record listing price for a Miami-Dade condominium, according to Puig, who also snagged that listing.

Amid the market sizzle, Puig bumped up the asking price late last summer from $35 million.

The penthouse, which has 11,000 square feet of interior space, belongs to Manhattan real estate developer Ian Bruce Eichner, who built the Continuum project at the tip of South Beach and kept the trophy for himself.

The Continuum penthouse, which has 6,000 square feet of deck and a rooftop heated pool, boasts sweeping 13 1/2-foot ceilings that give the feel of a single-family home. The floor-to-ceiling glass walls offer a 360-degree view of the Atlantic Ocean, Biscayne Bay, downtown Miami and Miami Beach from 40 stories up.

“It looks down on Fisher Island, way down,” Puig said with a smile.

The unit has a private interior elevator, of course, and stretches over two indoor levels and two largely exterior levels.

One big plus: It has a gated entrance and sits on an expansive enclave of rolling lawns and gardens adjacent to a city park at the tip of the island.

The unit comes with an additional 874-square-foot guest quarters that would delight most mortals. “The guest unit is intended for professional quarters: the maid, the nanny, the chef, the pilot,” Puig explained.

Also included is a snazzy cabana on the beach.

Eichner has used it as a vacation home and once rented it to Tom Cruise for a couple of months while he was in Miami to film Rock of Ages.

On Thursday, Puig hosted Miami’s power brokers for a look at the Continuum penthouse over champagne and hors d’oeuvres. Next week, she plans to spend three days in New York touting the property to high-end brokers.

Such palatial properties typically are paid for in cash. But what would a monthly payment be?

With a 20 percent down payment of $7.8 million, the buyer would have to finance $31.2 million.

“I don’t know that I’d be able to find anybody willing to go that high on one unit,” warned Steve Schneider, a mortgage broker who is owner and president of Abacus Lending Group in South Miami.

If a buyer could line up a 15-year fixed rate mortgage at 3.5 percent, the monthly payment for principal and interest would be $223,043.35.

“I’d hate to see the tax bill,” said Schneider.

According to Miami-Dade County Property Appraiser records, the 2012 property tax bill on the Continuum penthouse was $264,896.17. That was based on an assessed value of just $9.5 million, less than half what the Property Appraiser listed as the market value of $19.3 million. The tax break came as a result of the state law that caps increases in assessed values on non-homesteaded property at 10 percent a year.

The condo maintenance fee for Eichner’s unit runs $7,624 a month. “I think that’s low for what you get,” said Puig.

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Scott supports review of state gun laws: ‘I want people to feel safe’

LARGO --
Gov. Rick Scott voiced his support for a broad review of Florida’s controversial gun laws by state lawmakers Wednesday, saying the state’s vital tourist economy depends on visitors being able to “feel safe” amid an increasingly well-armed population.

“We have a legislative session coming up,” Scott said during a visit to the Honeywell Aerospace plant in Largo, where he was touting his new plan to boost state manufacturing. “I think the right thing to do is go back and look at our laws.”

The father of a teacher, Scott said he would particularly support looking at ways to make schools safer. But he did not specify which other areas of existing state law might deserve scrutiny, refusing to respond to questions about universal background checks for firearm sales and a ban on assault weapons.

“I want people to feel safe in our state,” he said.

His remarks came in response to reporters’ questions on gun control, as the nation awaited an announcement from the White House on proposals to reform federal firearm regulations. President Barack Obama called on Congress Tuesday to enact bans on assault weapons and high-capacity gun magazines, and expand background checks for gun purchasers.

Scott’s statements about a review of state gun laws were a rare — if still vague — foray into the debate over gun control in the wake of the Dec. 14 massacre of 20 children and six adults by a gunman at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn.

In previous public remarks, he has emphasized his sympathy for the victims’ families, rather than a legislative response. Scott skipped a conference call held by Vice President Joe Biden last week in which Biden solicited views on gun violence.

Scott’s press secretary, Jackie Schutz, later said she wanted to clarify that the governor’s support for a review of existing gun legislation doesn’t detract from his backing for citizens’ constitutional right to keep and bear arms. She said his remarks were not a “call to action” for specific legislation or reforms.

“Gov. Scott, as he has continued to say, is a strong supporter of the Second Amendment,” Schutz said. “He’s open to having a conversation, and he wants people to feel safe.”

Florida’s patchwork gun laws have subjected the state to criticism from gun-control advocates across the country. The state received a grade of “D-” in a recent review of state firearm laws by the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, a San Francisco-based nonprofit.

In addition to its hotly debated “Stand Your Ground” self-defense law, Florida does not require background checks for private sales of weapons and places no limit on the number of guns a person can buy at one time. The state has issued more than a million permits to carry a concealed handgun.

Top Republicans in Tallahassee have so far balked at the prospect of adjusting those laws, though they have signaled some openness to increasing funding for school-security measures after the Newtown shooting.

Senate President Don Gaetz, a Niceville Republican, told the Orlando Sentinel this month that regulating gun access is “not something I think the Legislature will get involved in, other than peripherally.”

Asked to clarify the governor’s position on which state laws should be examined, Schutz said she could not offer specifics.

“Generally, he wants to take the [legislative] session to look at them, like he said,” Schutz said. “He wants to look at any ideas.”

Schutz declined to offer details about the governor’s ideas on school safety, or the possibility — advocated by the National Rifle Association — of placing armed guards in every elementary school.

“The safety of our schools — the teachers, the students, the people who work in the schools — is incredibly important,” she said.

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