Friday, October 12, 2012
Tuesday, August 7, 2012
NASA LANDS CAR-SIZE ROVER BESIDE MARTIAN MOUNTAIN
PASADENA, Calif. -- NASA's most advanced Mars rover Curiosity has landed on the Red Planet. The one-ton rover, hanging by ropes from a rocket backpack, touched down onto Mars Sunday to end a 36-week flight and begin a two-year investigation.
The Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) spacecraft that carried Curiosity succeeded in every step of the most complex landing ever attempted on Mars, including the final severing of the bridle cords and flyaway maneuver of the rocket backpack.
"Today, the wheels of Curiosity have begun to blaze the trail for human footprints on Mars. Curiosity, the most sophisticated rover ever built, is now on the surface of the Red Planet, where it will seek to answer age-old questions about whether life ever existed on Mars -- or if the planet can sustain life in the future," said NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. "This is an amazing achievement, made possible by a team of scientists and engineers from around the world and led by the extraordinary men and women of NASA and our Jet Propulsion Laboratory. President Obama has laid out a bold vision for sending humans to Mars in the mid-2030's, and today's landing marks a significant step toward achieving this goal."
Curiosity landed at 10:32 p.m. Aug. 5, PDT, (1:32 a.m. EDT Aug. 6) near the foot of a mountain three miles tall and 96 miles in diameter inside Gale Crater. During a nearly two-year prime mission, the rover will investigate whether the region ever offered conditions favorable for microbial life.
"The Seven Minutes of Terror has turned into the Seven Minutes of Triumph," said NASA Associate Administrator for Science John Grunsfeld. "My immense joy in the success of this mission is matched only by overwhelming pride I feel for the women and men of the mission’s team.”
Curiosity returned its first view of Mars, a wide-angle scene of rocky ground near the front of the rover. More images are anticipated in the next several days as the mission blends observations of the landing site with activities to configure the rover for work and check the performance of its instruments and mechanisms.
"Our Curiosity is talking to us from the surface of Mars," said MSL Project Manager Peter Theisinger of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "The landing takes us past the most hazardous moments for this project, and begins a new and exciting mission to pursue its scientific objectives."
Confirmation of Curiosity's successful landing came in communications relayed by NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter and received by the Canberra, Australia, antenna station of NASA's Deep Space Network.
Curiosity carries 10 science instruments with a total mass 15 times as large as the science payloads on the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity. Some of the tools are the first of their kind on Mars, such as a laser-firing instrument for checking elemental composition of rocks from a distance. The rover will use a drill and scoop at the end of its robotic arm to gather soil and powdered samples of rock interiors, then sieve and parcel out these samples into analytical laboratory instruments inside the rover.
To handle this science toolkit, Curiosity is twice as long and five times as heavy as Spirit or Opportunity. The Gale Crater landing site places the rover within driving distance of layers of the crater's interior mountain. Observations from orbit have identified clay and sulfate minerals in the lower layers, indicating a wet history.
The mission is managed by JPL for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The rover was designed, developed and assembled at JPL. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
For more information on the mission, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/mars and http://marsprogram.jpl.nasa.gov/msl .
Follow the mission on Facebook and Twitter at: http://www.facebook.com/marscuriosity
Teambox Delivers Industry’s Only Collaboration Platform
Teambox Delivers Industry’s
Only Collaboration Platform that Brings Notes, Group Chat and Tasks to Millions
of Dropbox, Box and Google Docs Customers
·
Teambox 4 is the broadest collaboration platform
available today
·
New integrations combine leading file sharing
solutions, group chat and notes in a single location with integration into any Web-based
application
·
Teambox changes the way companies and teams work
together to get more done and faster
PALO ALTO, Calif. – Aug. 7, 2012 – Teambox, the cloud-based
company redefining
collaboration and business communications, today announced the release of Teambox 4. This
new platform aggregates best-of-breed tools, such as Box, Dropbox, Google Docs and Gmail, to help
companies better manage tasks, communicate across teams and share files, all from
a single location. Teambox combines single point collaboration, communication
and business applications into one easy-to-use platform, enabling organizations
of any size to get more done, faster and with better accuracy.
Changing
business needs and social factors are driving organizations to work
differently. As a result, this new reality has left small- to medium-sized
businesses, though large enterprise organizations, struggling to pay for and
maintain heavyweight enterprise solutions and disparate collaboration point
solutions. Teambox 4 is a unique collaboration platform addressing this new
landscape. It is enabling organizations to integrate file-sharing services and Web-based
applications, including Salesforce.com and Evernote, and customize business applications with tools,
such as chat, tasks and project management. With the addition of these
full-featured capabilities, Teambox 4 is the industry’s only collaboration “dashboard”
transforming business communication.
File Sharing Integration
Teams worldwide
already use file management applications to share, discuss and iterate all
types of stored files. Teambox is the first vendor to bring collaboration to
millions of Box, Dropbox and Google Docs customers by providing chat,
discussions and notes in a single, easy-to-use platform.
Additionally,
Teambox has created a Gmail plug-in for Google
Chrome. This new
plug-in enables end users to run Teambox inside of Gmail to view activity and
add tasks, all within the comfort of a user’s inbox.
Teambox 4 New Features
• Teambox Notes – Similar to Evernote, but designed for large teams, Teambox
Notes delivers a drag-and-drop interface that can be used to take notes,
instantly collaborate, get aligned and share information, without the clutter
or overhead of email.
• Customized Application Integration – Teambox 4 is built with an
internal API, enabling
users to import any Web-based application into Teambox. With this new feature,
Teambox now offers a single, cohesive platform for any company to run their
entire business. Many customers have integrated Salesforce.com, GotoMeeting and other key software-as-a-service (SaaS)
applications into Teambox for a single “business dashboard”.
• Integrated
Group Chat – This key
feature allows end users to quickly
create conversations between teams to assign tasks and due dates to projects
enabling real-time collaboration.
• Enhanced
User Experience – Teambox
4 includes several enhancements, including a new UI, redesigned infrastructure
and an updated tasks section to increase the overall user experience.
Comments on the News
“There has been
a huge paradigm shift in our industry; our customers were fed up with the
massive, lengthy implementations required by Sharepoint and other antiquated
solutions. With the “consumerization of IT”, business users are selecting and
rapidly adopting their own collaboration software,” said Dan Schoenbaum, CEO of
Teambox. “We are proud to bring our customers the industry’s first team
collaboration platform that integrates tools, such as Dropbox, Box, Google Docs
and Gmail, all centralized into one solution. Teambox helps businesses get started
in seconds and get work done faster and easier, while saving our customers time
and money.”
“We evaluated over 20 business
collaboration tools, including SharePoint, Huddle, Asana and Basecamp, and
found Teambox to be the most intuitive and comprehensive platform available,”
stated Jason Gombos, Sharepoint Administrator for Kelly Services. “Teambox goes beyond a ‘tool,’ bringing together all of the
business applications we need in one centralized location. With Teambox, we get
more done and with better accuracy and efficiency.”
“Teambox is a phenomenal collaboration
platform,” stated Doug Monohan, CEO of Mobilezapp.
“It combines the power of email, chat and telephone into one easy-to-use online
solution. Quite frankly, I do not know how we’d run our business without
Teambox.”
“We tried Asana and other
collaboration tools, but those products could not bring together the
information we needed to work better and smarter,” stated Rachel Valosik,
director of eCommerce for Griffin
Technology. “Teambox provides a much
broader set of collaboration applications making collaboration, file management
and team discussions very easy for our team. And unlike other offerings, it is
so easy to use.”
Pricing and Availability
Teambox
4 is available now. There is no
cost for up to five users, five projects and/or five gigabytes. Beyond this,
pricing starts at $5 per user, per month with unlimited storage. Discounts are
offered for annual and two year subscriptions and for large teams.
Sign up for a
free trial at: https://teambox.com/signup. For more information, contact sales@teambox.com.
Tweet This: @teambox_app launches major new team collaboration platform integrated
w/ Dropbox, Box, Google Docs http://bit.ly/NeZc1B
Supporting Resources
About Teambox
Teambox is redefining
communications and collaboration for companies of all sizes – from small-to-medium
businesses to global enterprises. Based in the cloud, Teambox 4 is a platform
of lightweight applications for collaboration, task management and file
sharing. Teambox brings many capabilities together,
into one, cohesive environment enabling businesses to communicate, collaborate
and streamline work processes.
Teambox is the only
vendor enabling organizations to integrate their own file sharing services and
web-based applications and become a single
“dashboard” to run all business communications.
Founded in 2008,
Teambox is privately held and headquartered in Barcelona, Spain with U.S.
headquarters in Palo Alto, California.
###
Media Contact:
Cathy Wright
Kulesa Faul for
Teambox
(650) 340-1985
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Schiff Still SOPA Proponent as Opposition Mounts
By Dean Lee
With the treat looming that a number of popular internet sites —opposed to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)— are poised Wednesday to “blackout” their services, including Wikipedia and the user-generated news link startup Reddit, Congressman Adam Schiff said Thursday, that he not only still supports the bill but thinks it necessary to stop overseas intellectual property theft of American goods.
Schiff is one of 12 original co-sponsors of the bill, known as H.R. 3261, introduced in October by Representative Lamar Smith of Texas
“These are my constituents that are losing jobs because of this [pirated movies/TV] and a lot of the theft of this comes out of L.A.
Opponents of the bill included CEOs of some of the largest technology companies on Earth, including Google, Twitter, Yahoo, PayPal, eBay and craigslist.
In an open letter authored by, Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, Jack Dorsey co-founder of Twitter and Arianna Huffington co-founder of the Huffington Post among others, says SOPA threatens the existence of the internet.
Their concerns rage from the bills requirement that file sharing sites and search engines must monitor what users link to, or upload; to implications that it would deny website owners the right to due process of law giving the government, in what opponents say, amounts to censorship.
Schiff, optimistic, said he thinks the bill is being improved.
“There have been some amendments that have been adopted in committee to address some of the concerns the have been raised,” he said. “The goal is really focused on these foreign websites that are the venue for massive amounts of theft of American work product.”
In December The House Judiciary Committee held three markup sessions, one lasting over 10 hours. Schiff said the bill was currently still in markup and would again be heard Tuesday when the House convenes.
Reports from Computerworld.com, at the time, said about 20 amendments designed to address SOPA concerns were voted down.
The bills leading supporters include the Motion Picture Association of America, and the Recording Industry Association of America. Schiff said companies are losing billions of dollars and thousands of jobs to overseas pirating.
ANTONOVICH TO HONOR TOMMY LASORDA
Contact: Tony Bell, Communications Deputy Office: (213) 974-5555 Cell: (213) 215-5176 |
January 17, 2012 For Immediate Release
ANTONOVICH TO HONOR TOMMY LASORDA
ON HIS 63RD SEASON WITH THE LOS ANGELES DODGERS
WHO: Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich
Hall of Fame winning Dodger manager Tommy Lasorda
WHAT: Supervisor Antonovich will honor Tommy Lasorda on 63 seasons with the Los Angeles Dodgers with an official presentation at the regular meeting of the Board of Supervisors.
WHEN: Tuesday, January 17, 2012 at 1:30 pm
WHERE: Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration
WHERE: Kenneth Hahn Hall of Administration
Board Hearing Room – 381B
500 West Temple Street
Los Angeles, CA 90012
Pasadena Chamber of Commerce Board of Directors Votes to Support Exploration of NFL Interim Opportunity at Rose Bowl
Chance for lucrative defined-term NFL tenant should not be dismissed without knowing terms and financial benefits to Rose Bowl, City of Pasadena and local businesses
Pasadena, CA – At its December meeting, the Board of Directors of the Pasadena Chamber of Commerce voted to formally take a position in support of the Rose Bowl exploring the opportunity to host an interim professional National Football League (NFL) team for as many as four years.
“Without a deal on the table and without knowing what the financial, environmental and neighborhood impacts may be, the Chamber Board overwhelmingly supported the idea of looking at the Rose Bowl hosting an NFL team on a short-term basis, should that opportunity arise,” said Chamber CEO Paul Little. “The Board felt very strongly that it would be a huge lost opportunity to dismiss the interim NFL team before even hearing what any deal terms may be and without understanding what impacts may result.”
To date, there has not been an NFL team announced for the Los Angeles area. Two proposals are currently competing for the rights to bring a team to Los Angeles, one that would be located in the City of Industry and the other intended to be housed at a stadium to be built in downtown Los Angeles. Neither entity has been able to secure an agreement to re-located an NFL team to Los Angeles. If and when that happens, it is very likely that the Los Angeles NFL team would need a temporary stadium in which to play its home games for as many as four years as their permanent home is being built.
“Right now there is no indication that an NFL team will relocate to Los Angeles anytime in the near future, though we all recognize that an announcement could come in the next few weeks or five years from now,” said Mr. Little. “The Chamber Board simply wants our Rose Bowl stadium to be able to entertain the idea of hosting an interim NFL team. The Board encourages the Rose Bowl to, at the very least, look into the opportunity and determine if it is in the best interest of the stadium, the community and our local economy to play host to professional football for a defined period of time. If, at some point, there is a deal to be considered, the Chamber Board will likely look at the deal points and decide if the economic benefits outweigh any impacts to our community or the Arroyo Seco.”
The Pasadena Chamber of Commerce and Civic Association is a professional business organization. Since the earliest days of Pasadena, the Chamber has played a major role in the development of this internationally renowned city. Since 1888, when the organization was founded as the Board of Trade, the Chamber's primary purpose has been the enhancement of both the business climate and the quality of life in Pasadena. The Pasadena Chamber of Commerce serves 1500 members.
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