Boston Marathon bombing suspect arrested

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A street is closed near the scene of twin bombings at the Boston Marathon on April 17, 2013 in Boston.(AFP Photo / Spencer Platt)

Law enforcement officials in Boston tell reporters that they have arrested a suspect thought responsible for Monday’s deadly bombing.

CNN confirmed the news at 1:45 p.m. local time when journalist John King said both a federal source and a Boston law enforcement source confirmed the news. Reporter Fran Townsend then added over the phone that “there is an arrest that has been made in the Boston bombing case based off of two independent videos.”

The suspect is now expected to arrive at a federal courthouse in Boston.

Earlier in the day, CNN reported shortly after 1 p.m. that a suspect has apparently been identified. The suspect’s name has not been made public as of this time, but he is reportedly a dark-skinned male, according to police.

According to CNN’s sources, surveillance video from a Lord and Taylor department store and a local television station are believed to have helped authorities identify the person sought responsible for Monday’s incident, which US President Barack Obama said on Tuesday is being investigated as an act of terror.

 

New Lord and Tayloк shop in Boston.(Image from Google.com)

 

CNN’s King reports from Boston that the video footage helped police narrow in on a person being considered a suspect in the attack “to such detail, I’m told, that they believe they have a clear identification, including a facial image of a suspect.”

The footage, sources say, show the suspect carrying and perhaps placing down a black bag that is thought to have contained a bomb that was detonated at the second of two crime scenes near the finish line of the annual Boston Marathon just before 3 p.m. on Monday.

The mayor of Boston, Massachusetts has confirmed that a suspect was ID’d, and officials are expected to speak to the press at 5 p.m. Wednesday afternoon. According to sources speaking to the Boston Globe, authorities may publicize their findings at that briefing.

 

 

“Rights”Rights” a short rant for my friend Barry Monahan.

Yeah, talk to me about rights. What rights do we really have?
You have the right to remain silent, unless doing so pisses me off and I slap you upside of the head with my pistol.
You have the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? I’ll go with the last one, but as far as the first two I think that is kind of up to God.
Did the victims of baby Doc, or Hitler have the same rights? I’m not necessarily saying it’s not correct for protecting our own shores, but what rights do they have at Gitmo?
You have the right to work your ass off, be the best you can be, and hope to heck somebody doesn’t shoot you in the face. That is all.
Rights are like entitlements. They do not exist in the real world.
Have we gotten so fat and freeking Arrogant that we think the world owes us a living, and somehow is obligated to take care of us?
Let’s face it, baby boomers. We have no right to anything but to work our asses off.
There are so many of us, there is nobody left to bail us out. The days of peace love and dope in the Haight-Ashbury are over.
Face it, you are not going to be guaranteed healthcare, a sweet old peoples home with chirping birds and basket weavers, or a nurse name Consuela to come and wipe your ass when you poop your pants. Some of us are going to starve, some of us are going to croak on the streets from heart attacks, and some of us are going to stroke out.
What you have the right to do, is your best. Work your freaking ass off as hard as you can for as long as you can, treat the people you love with love, and be thankful for every breath you have the “right” to take.
And you do have the right to thank your God, however you envision that, for every good minute you’ve had.

 

The Finishing Touch

After working for so long, I had finally taken the next step; I had moved my small company into our very own offices.  My wife was sick of our home being used as our base of operations, couldn’t blame her really, I had originally forecast the use of the room would be for no more than a year, but it had actually taken closer to three. The day of the move had been awful. Even though the offices were fully set up, the actual transfer of the information vital to us had been a nightmare. We had been forced to stop operations for two full days, as the software engineer we had employed had been unable to transfer our data in one single move. On the third day we had been able to open our doors, in our newly acquired offices and face the world.

The Public

When I had made the decision to move into premises, it had been made with the knowledge that the company was bringing in enough money to pay for it. The work coming in via the telephones had been steadily increasing, but the members of the public seemed to be somewhat hesitant. They would come in, have a look around but then leave without using our services. If anything the income generated from the public had actually dropped.

Aesthetics

The offices were already painted, prior to our acquisition by our landlord, and the beige carpet wasn’t that old, but one of our customers had explained how the waiting room felt dull and flat. I needed inspiration.  Many companies had made our town their home, some hugely successful, others more modest and I needed to discover their secrets. I visited several of these and the difference in aesthetics and therefore atmosphere was obvious. The companies who had an interesting first point of contact had appeared to be more successful. The public access area also had to be engaging. You really could feel the difference between dull earth colours and a bright vibrant theme. If you are forced to make customers wait, then at least occupy them. I had seen enough, I knew what I needed to do.

Solution

My company is primarily focused on days out. We would arrange for large numbers of people to visit castles, the seaside or safari parks. Our offices now though were generating almost 20% of our business. The dull brown carpet had gone; a new bright blue one now covered our public area floor. The usual green leafy plant had been replaced with a large circular fish tank, although a little expensive to have maintained it did keep those kiddies happy. A smart and articulate older lady had been position in the area itself, our fourth employee, as first point of contact. The secret weapon though still draws the attention of our patrons. Everywhere we travel to, we take photos. Images of the mountain peaks, castle walls and cheeky monkeys now hang in our public area. More than photos, being just flat images behind glass frames, our displays actually engage our viewers. They are mounted on canvas. It brings the image itself to life, gives it something more than just a photo, and they are priced reasonably enough to replace with new images regularly.

Take advantage of my own experience. If you have customers and need to liven up their waiting area, why not consider having your own photos on canvas, it made all of the difference for us.

 

The Most Effective Time Management Tips You’ll Ever Find

When you’re a college student, being able to manage your time can mean the difference between success and failure. These tips, many of which seem to fly in the face of logic, can help you reduce your stress and manage your time effectively so the important things get done every day.

Take Charge of Your Schedule

One of my favorite professors once said “If you don’t take charge of your schedule, then your schedule is in charge of you.”

We’ve all had times when our days seemed to be governed by one crisis after another, but that should be the exception rather than the norm.

Before you go to bed each night, take a look at the next day’s schedule. Set aside time for the important things, the things that matter most to you. Sure, unexpected events may crop up, and when they do, you’ll deal with them — but once you’ve put out the fire, you can get right back on track to the schedule you’ve set.

Be Realistic

Figure out how much time it takes you to accomplish a certain task, like reading 10 pages out of a textbook or writing a five-page paper. Keep these findings in mind when you are deciding what to do with your day.

Most people, for instance, can’t dash off a 10-page term paper in half an hour or read a complex, technical document in 15 minutes. If you don’t allot enough time for each of your daily activities, you’re setting yourself up for failure.

Don’t Multitask

Multitasking used to be considered the great time management skill. That was before researchers discovered people who were high on marijuana actually performed better on an assignment than people who were trying to switch back and forth between three different tasks.

It’s probably okay to walk and chew gum, but other than that, focus your attention on just one thing, do it and move on to something else.

Take Regular Breaks

Brick-and-mortar universities have breaks built into their schedules when the bell rings, and students have 15 or 20 minutes to get to the next class. Programs that offer online college degrees don’t have such clear break periods. If you’re taking several online classes, it’s possible to work for hours without stopping. It’s also a bad idea.

The brain, like a muscle, gets tired if you demand too much of it. Tired brains are responsible for foolish mistakes as well as errors in judgment. For every hour of studying, set aside 10 to 15 minutes to do something completely different. Put in a load of laundry, wash the breakfast dishes, take the dog for a walk or treat yourself to a few minutes of your favorite magazine.

With a little practice, you can develop time management skills that will help you get through any type of class setting.

CJ contributed this guest post. Passionate about self-improvement, he frequently blogs about time management and how it can factor into online college degrees.

 

VIDEO: Best marriage proposal ever

Isaac Lamb proposed to his girlfriend, Amy, in a very innovative way, and the video has gone viral.

Check out Isaac’s incredible proposal – set to Bruno Mars‘ “Marry You.”

CLICK ON THE PHOTO

 

When Isaac Lamb decided to propose to his girlfriend, Amy, he knew he wanted to do something over-the-top. but not even Amy was prepared for the elaborate proposal he staged with 60 of their closet friends and family members. The video went viral – and has already amassed almost 6 million views on YouTube at last count.

The video even got Bruno Mars’ stamp of approval!

Bruno Mars

• ✔

@BrunoMars

Congrats to Isaac Lamb and the future Mrs.. I don’t think I could’ve made a better music video for this song. Thank youvimeo.com/42828824

 

Going viral: from 350 to 135,000 readers a day

Recently one of my blog articles (A Dog’s Purpose? from a 6-year-old) went “viral” and in one week, had 335,000 hits.

One can never predict the reaction of the Internet, but your next article could be the one.  Who knows?  The point is that if you don’t set up a Social Network, maintain it regularly, and generate good content, it is sure not to happen.  I have to admit, it took me two years to grow the circulation from zero to around 350 readers a day.  When this article was first published it started with a few readers.  The next day it was around a hundred, the next 500, then 2,500, and then on a Friday it soared to 135,000 readers in a single day.

The amount of positive feedback we have had is amazing, and my business has never been better, time to re-staff.  The moral of the story is that attraction marketing is not an overnight sensation, but a process.  It takes time to build trust, and a brand, but if you stick with it, it works!

In my consulting business I work with business owners to integrate social media and internet publishing to generate interest and drive prospects to their websites, and make sure the sites are optimized to convert prospects into customers.  I would love to discuss some improvements to your business, at no charge, if you are interested.  Feel free to drop me a line by email @ steve@bayintegratedmarketing.com  http://www.bayintegratedmarketing.com  and please if you haven’t yet, please join my LinkedIn network at: http://linkd.in/IPwsK7v 

 

This Creepy App Isn’t Just Stalking Women Without Their Knowledge, It’s A Wake-Up Call About Facebook Privacy [Update]

by John Brownlee

This app is meant to all be in good fun, but it’s potentially a weapon in the hands of stalkers.

“Boy, you sure have a lot of apps on your phone.”

“Well, it’s my job.”

“What’s your favorite?”

“Oh, I couldn’t choose. But hey, want to see one to set your skin crawling?”

It was the flush end of a pleasurably hot day — 85 degrees in March — and we were all sipping bitter cocktails out in my friend’s backyard, which was both his smoking room, beer garden, viticetum, opossum parlor and barbecue pit. I was enjoying the warm dusk with a group of six of my best friends, all of whom seemed interested, except for my girlfriend… who immediately grimaced.

“Girls Around Me? Again?” she scolded. “Don’t show them that.”

She turned to our friends, apologetically.

“He’s become obsessed with this app. It’s creepy.”

I sputtered, I nevered, and I denied it, but it was true. I had become obsessed with Girls Around Me, an app that perfectly distills many of the most worrying issues related to social networking, privacy and the rise of the smartphone into a perfect case study that anyone can understand.

It’s an app that can be interpreted many ways. It is as innocent as it is insidious; it is just as likely to be reacted to with laughter as it is with tears; it is as much of a novelty as it has the potential to be used a tool for rapists and stalkers.

And more than anything, it’s a wake-up call about privacy.

The only way to really explain Girls Around Me to people is to load it up and show them how it works, so I did. I placed my iPhone on the table in front of everyone, and opened the app.

The splash screen elicited laughter all around. It’s such a bitmap paean to the tackiest and most self-parodying of baller “culture”; it might as well be an app Tom Haverford slapped together in Parks And Recreation. But it does, at a glance, sum up what Girls Around Me is all about: a radar overlaid on top of a Google Map, out of which throbs numerous holographic women posing like pole dancers in a perpetual state of undress.

“Okay, so here’s the way the app works,” I explained to my friends.

Girls Around Me is a standard geolocation based maps app, similar to any other app that attempts to alert you to things of interest in your immediate vicinity: whether it be parties, clubs, deals, or what have you. When you load it up, the first thing Girls Around Me does is figure out where you are and load up a Google Map centered around your location. The rest of the interface is very simple: in the top left corner, there’s a button that looks like a radar display, at the right corner, there’s a fuel meter (used to fund the app’s freemium model), and on the bottom left is a button that allows you to specify between whether you’re interested in women, men or both.

It’s when you push the radar button that Girls Around Me does what it says on the tin. I pressed the button for my friends. Immediately, Girls Around Me went into radar mode, and after just a few seconds, the map around us was filled with pictures of girls who were in the neighborhood. Since I was showing off the app on a Saturday night, there were dozens of girls out on the town in our local area.

Girls Around Me’s splash screen (left) and geo-maps interface (right). Lots of girls around the MFA.

“Wait… what? Are these girls prostitutes?” one of my friends asked, which given the Matrix-like silhouettes posing on the splash screen was a pretty good question.

“Oh, no,” I replied. “These are just regular girls. See this girl? Her name’s Zoe. She lives on the same street as me and Brittany. She works at a coffee shop, and I’m pretty sure she doesn’t moonlight picking up tricks.”

“How does it know where these girls are? Do you know all these girls? Is it plucking data from your address book or something?” another friend asked.

“Not at all. These are all girls with publicly visible Facebook profiles who have checked into these locations recently using Foursquare. Girls Around Me then shows you a map where all the girls in your area trackable by Foursquare area. If there’s more than one girl at a location, you see the number of girls there in a red bubble. Click on that, and you can see pictures of all the girls who are at that location at any given time. The pictures you are seeing are their social network profile pictures.”

“Okay, so they know that their data can be used like this for anyone to see? They’re okay with it? ”

“Probably not, actually. The settings determining how visible your Facebook and Foursquare data is are complicated, and tend to be meaningless to people who don’t really understand issues about privacy,” I explained. “Most privacy settings on social networks default to share everything with everyone, and since most people never change those… well, they end up getting sucked up into apps like this.”

“But they know they’ve checked in, right?”

“Again, not necessarily. Foursquare lets you check other people into a location. If you get checked into Foursquare by a friend without your knowledge and have a publicly visible Facebook profile, you could end up in here.” (Update: Apparently, I wasn’t correct about this. Foursquare does NOT allow you to check other people in with you without their knowledge; I was confusing Foursquare for Facebook, which does offer this functionality. Thanks for the correction, unknown8bit! – JRB)

One of my less computer-affable friends actually went pale, and kept on shooting her boyfriend looks for assurance. A Linux aficionado who was the only person in our group without a Facebook account (and one of the few people I’d ever met who actually endorsed Diaspora), the look he returned was one of comical smugness.

“But wait! It gets worse!” I said, ramping things up.

“So let’s say I’m a bro, looking to go out for a night on the town and pick someone up. Let’s say I’m going to the Independent around the corner, and checking it out ahead of time, I really like the look of this girl Zoe — she looks like a girl I might want to try to get with tonight — so I tap her picture for more information, see what I can find out about here.”

I tapped on Zoe. Girls Around Me quickly loaded up a fullscreen render of her Facebook profile picture. The app then told me where Zoe had last been seen (The Independent) and when (15 minutes ago). A big green button at the bottom reading “Photos & Messaging” just begged to be tapped, and when I did, I was whisked away to Zoe’s Facebook profile.

“Okay, so here’s Zoe. Most of her information is visible, so I now know her full name. I can see at a glance that she’s single, that she is 24, that she went to Stoneham High School and Bunker Hill Community College, that she likes to travel, that her favorite book is Gone With The Wind and her favorite musician is Tori Amos, and that she’s a liberal. I can see the names of her family and friends. I can see her birthday.”

“All of that is visible on Facebook?” one of the other girls in our group asked.

“More, depending on how your privacy settings are configured! For example, I can also look at Zoe’s pictures.”

I tapped on the photo album, and a collection of hundreds of publicly visible photos loaded up. I quickly browsed them.

“Okay, so it looks like Zoe is my kind of girl. From her photo albums, I can see that she likes to party, and given the number of guys she takes photos with at bars and clubs at night, I can deduce that she’s frisky when she’s drunk, and her favorite drink is a frosty margarita. She appears to have recently been in Rome. Also, since her photo album contains pictures she took at the beach, I now know what Zoe looks like in a bikini… which, as it happens, is pretty damn good.”

My girlfriend scowled at me. I assured her Zoe in a bikini was no comparison, and moved on.

“So now I know everything to know about Zoe. I know where she is. I know what she looks like, both clothed and mostly disrobed. I know her full name, her parents’ full names, her brother’s full name. I know what she likes to drink. I know where she went to school. I know what she likes and dislikes. All I need to do now is go down to the Independent, ask her if she remembers me from Stoneham High, ask her how her brother Mike is doing, buy her a frosty margarita, and start waxing eloquently about that beautiful summer I spent in Roma.”

The Girls of Girls Around Me. It’s doubtful any of these girls even know they are being tracked. Their names and locations have been obscured for privacy reasons.

Throughout this demonstration, my group of friends had been split pretty evenly along gender lines in their reactions. Across the board, the men either looked amused or (in the case of my beardo Diaspora friend) philosophically pleased with themselves about their existing opinions about social networking. The women, on the other hand, looked sick and horrified.

It was at this point, though, that the tendrils of the girls’ unease — their deeply empathic sense of someone being unsafe — seemed to creep through the entire group.

“And if that doesn’t work on Zoe,” I concluded, consulting the app one last time. “There are — let’s see — nine other girls at the Independent tonight.”

Often times, a writer uses tricks and exaggerations to convey to a reader the spirit — if not the precise truth — of what occurred. I just want to make clear that when I say that one of my friends was actually on the verge of tears, you understand that this is not such a trick. She was horrified to the point of crying.

“How can Apple let people download an app like this?” she asked. “And have you written about this?”

In answer to the first question, I replied that as sleazy as this app seemed, Girls Around Me wasn’t actually doing anything wrong. Sure, on the surface, it looks like a hook-up app like Grindr for potential stalkers and date rapists, but all that Girls Around Me is really doing is using public APIs from Google Maps, Facebook and Foursquare and mashing them all up together, so you could see who had checked-in at locations in your area, and learn more about them. Moreover, the girls (and men!) shown in Girls Around Me all had the power to opt out of this information being visible to strangers, but whether out of ignorance, apathy or laziness, they had all neglected to do so. This was all public information. Nothing Girls Around Me does violates any of Apple’s policies.

In fact, Girls Around Me wasn’t even the real problem.

“It’s not, really, that we’re all horrified by what this app does, is it?” I asked, finishing my drink. “It’s that we’re all horrified by how exposed these girls are, and how exposed services like Facebook and Foursquare let them be without their knowledge.”

But I didn’t have an easy answer ready for my friend’s last question. I’d been playing with the app for almost two months. Why hadn’t I written about it? None of the answers made me look good.

Part of it was because, like many tech professionals, I had taken for granted that people understood that their Facebook profiles and Foursquare data were publicly visible unless they explicitly said otherwise… and like my beardo Diaspora friend, I secretly believed that people who were exposed this way on the Internet without their knowledge were foolish.

That made Girls Around Me a funny curio, a titillating novelty app, the kind of thing you pulled out with your buddies at the bar to laugh about… and maybe secretly wish had been around when you were younger and single and trying to pull some action. And if I’d written a post about it a month ago, it would have probably been from that angle. The headline might well have been: “No More Sausage Fests With Girls Around Me [Humor]”

It was in just this spirit that I’d shown off the app to my friends in the first place. It was getting late, we were all drunk or on the verge of getting there, and it had been a perfect day. It would have been so nice to finish things with a laugh. But now, as six intelligent, sophisticated friends from a variety of backgrounds surrounded me — some looking sick, some looking angry, and some with genuine fear in their faces — I didn’t think Girls Around Me was so funny. It had cast a pall across a beautiful day, and it had made people I loved feel scared… not just for the people they loved, but for complete strangers.

So I’m writing about it now. Not because Girls Around Me is an evil app that should be pulled from the iOS App Store, or because the company that makes it — Moscow-based i-Free — is filled with villains. I still don’t believe that there’s anything wrong with what this app is doing, and the guys at i-Free are super nice, and certainly don’t mean for this app to be anything beyond a diversion. So, the reason I’m writing about Girls Around Me is because I finally know what to say about it, and what it means in the greater picture.

Girls Around Me isn’t an app you should use to pick up girls, or guys for that matter. This is an app you should download to teach the people you care about that privacy issues are real, that social networks like Facebook and Foursquare expose you and the ones you love, and that if you do not know exactly how much you are sharing, you are as easily preyed upon as if you were naked. I can think of no better way to get a person to realize that they should understand their Facebook privacy settings then pulling out this app.

That’s why I hope you’ll go download Girls Around Me on your iPhone or iPad. It’s free to download. Show it to someone. Give them the same demo I gave to my friends. Then, when they ask how it’s done and how they can prevent an app like Girls Around Me from tracking them, educate them about privacy.

Here’s a good place to start.

Update: In response to this story, Foursquare has killed Girls Around Me’s API access to their data, effectively knocking the app out of commission. For more details and a statement from Foursquare, read here.

Update 2: As of Saturday evening, Girls Around Me has been yanked from the iOS App Store.

Update 3: Girls Around Me developer i-Free has released a full statement on the app, in which they say they’ve done nothing wrong and been made a scapegoat for privacy issues. You can read their response — and ours — here.

Update 4: Think this issue’s dead now that Girls Around Me has been killed? It’s not at all. In fact, it’s very possible Girls Around Me could come back with its core functionality intact.

Update 5: We’ve written a guide on cutting apps like Foursquare and Facebook off from tracking your data. Read it here.

Update 6: Girls Around Me’s developer gave Cult of Mac an interview, in which they said that the app wasn’t for stalking girls without their knowledge, but for avoiding women who are ugly.

 

Traditional Crafts and Skills

The importance of crafts and skills in the past can be seen by the huge number surnames in the UK which are occupation driven such as Cook, Cooper, Taylor, Wright, Turner, Miller or Carter. As increasing industrialization means machines are doing more and more for us, is there still a place for these traditional occupations?

Craftsmanship

Although the majority of furniture bought in the UK is still bought as flatpack sets from large warehouses, there is still a thriving industry in bespoke furniture which is handmade from native woods such as oak. Carpenters and joiners are more in demand than ever as an increasing number of people want to invest in a quality piece of furniture which will last for generations, rather than a cheap MDF flatpack which will fall to bits in a few years. Carpenters and cabinet makers are also called upon to fit kitchens or create shelving solutions unlike anything that can be bought in the shops.

Blacksmiths and Farriers

In the past, the words blacksmith and farrier were used interchangeably, and both dealt with equine leg & hoof care. Nowadays, a blacksmith is as likely to be making wrought iron gates or fences as they are to be making horseshoes. A farrier however, is solely concerned with the care of horses. Even though most of us now travel by car, bus or train rather than by horse and cart, there is still a demand for the farrier’s services from people who ride recreationally. Stabled horses still require new shoes regularly, and the expertise of the farrier in equine leg & hoof care will also mean that owners can be advised of potential problems with their horse at the earliest opportunity.

Textiles and Weaving

The UK was once central to the world’s weaving and cotton industry but with the advent of cheap imports from the Far East, this industry is not as important as it once was. The UK still produces great quality textiles however, and names like Harris Tweed are known on a world platform. Quality is the watchword for British textiles, and brands such as Cath Kidston, Ness or Laura Ashley have been at the forefront of bringing back an interest in British design and textiles. Clothing manufacturers are still mainly producing clothes overseas due to the lower labour and raw material costs, but it is possible to buy British on the high street if the consumer is prepared to spend the time and effort hunting out locally designed and produced items.

Disappeared occupations

Some occupations and crafts which were essential in the past, such as making barrels, have all but disappeared. Barrels are now made in a factory rather than handmade by a cooper, and it is unlikely that there will be a return to traditional methods. Wheelwrights are no longer needed to make large wheels for carts, and the occupation of pump-maker disappeared with the advent of piped water into all of our homes. Cordwainers were previously an important occupation as they made shoes and other leather goods. Although there are still a few cordwainers working at the top end of the market, this occupation too has all but disappeared.

Citations:

• Photograph by Belinda Hankins Miller

The Equine Warehouse has some great products available for equine leg & hoof care, perfect for you to use on your horse.

 

Facebook bought out Instagram for $1 billion on Monday

Facebook bought out Instagram for $1 billion on Monday, April 9th. Since then, there has been different opinions circulating the internet and chat rooms about whether or not this is going to ruin or make Instagram better than it was before.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, announced that he wanted to buy out Instagram because Facebook had been searching for years to find better ways of sharing beautiful photographs. This was a good deal for the nine workers of Instagram because it made them instantly rich! Most people still feel that Facebook is trying to dominate the app and make bad decisions with it, such as adding advertisements that were previously never seen on Instagram. Yet, some people still feel that Facebook is just trying to make photo sharing easier and more exciting for Facebook users. There has been much chat and discussion on the issue and there is much controversy surrounding it still.

It seems that Zuckerberg does not want to make changes to the app however. He insists that he wanted Instagram’s “talented” workers to join his team and produce more features to help both the app and Facebook succeed. He also insists that he wants to help Instagram grow through Facebook to popularize it even further. Zuckerberg states that he does not want to make any changes and all the features of Instagram will remain and not be limited despite people’s fears of this.

The staff of Instagram is extremely pleased with the offer to join Facebook and surely they will want to keep their same users of Instagram despite this change. People are frantically trying to delete their Instagram account and are expressing their fears of changes that Facebook will make to it. It seems, however, that these fears are just that and actually, no changes will be made. If anything, Instagram will only become better, not ruined.

Unfortunately, many people seem to be abandoning Instagram as seen on Twitter and other chat rooms even though it has been insisted that Instagram will still continue to remain separate from Facebook. All that the two companies want is to expand their networks and create better social network experiences for people around the world.

There is no end to Instagram as some people seem to think. Instagram is going to continue to grow and become even better as it would have even if Facebook had never become involved.

Ludwing Hernandez Mezee.me Chat Site.

 

Shopfitting Advice For 2012

Shop fittings and shop displays are vitally important to the layout of a commercial premises, as it can be the difference between a customer buying or not.
Visually appealing shop layouts are there not just to be eye candy, but to make sure the goods are shown off in the best possible way.
Having a good selection of difference shop fittings will give you the flexibility to design your shop so that different types of goods can be rearranged quickly and presented in the best possible way.
Below are some examples of different types of shop fittings you may want to consider and their possible uses.
Clothes and dress rails.
Clothes and dressed rails are just there to hang clothes off, right?
If you want to present your clothing like a discount store, then regular old clothes rails will do.
For a much more attractive way to present garments, there are many more clothes rails available to fulfil this need. Circular rails, garment rails, feature rails, dressed rails and many more. Your choice will depend on what garments you want to present and the look of the rest of your shop.
Garment rail should come in a variety of sizes and colours. Pick a colour that will not clash with the garment colours.
If you are thinking of buying large garment rails, then check that the wheels or castors are robust enough to take being pushed around a busy shop.
If you are looking for something more stylish to present your garments in the shop, then there are many options on the market. There are many different sizes and shapes of merchandising display stands, such as spiral, circular and multi-armed versions. These usually fit well in a boutique type setting.
You should have lots of choice when it comes to clothes and dress rails for your shop. The ones you buy, will be dependent on the products you are selling.
Clothes mannequins.
Close mannequins aren’t just blobs of plastic to hang garments from. They arguably have to be as appealing as the garments themselves to attract customers.
There are many different types to choose from these days. You mainly have the choice from male mannequins, female mannequins, child mannequins, flexible mannequins, sports mannequins, plus-size mannequins, dressmaker mannequins and display busts.
All the above mannequins are usually used in shop windows, but can be used anywhere else throughout a store.
A lot of people will look for realism in a mannequin. This will be dependent on your needs. Most suppliers will advise you on which mannequins are best suited for which garment types.
Portable displays.
Portable displays are important for presenting new products, special offers and anything else you wish to be attention grabbing.
If you’ve not used portable displays before, then visit your favourite store or boutique shop. See how they arrange their products and present their special offers. There will be most likely using portable display stands of one variation or another.
Portable displays are available as roller banners, tension fabric displays, pop-up systems, display plinth, modular displays and many other niche display types.
If you are not sure which ones will work for you, ask a supplier and they are sure to help you out.
A well presented shop that displays all its products in an appealing way and leads customers through the shop in a stimulating environment, will sell more products than the shop with no display appeal.
Look at all the display options then plan your shop accordingly.

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