Web Development Live

Blockbuster, Inc. is unveiling a new digital player that will give the popular Netflix a run for its money as it will bring recent movie titles from the Internet to customers’ homes.

For those eager to try the new service, which will be called Blockbuster OnDemand, anxious customers can purchase it from Blockbuster’s Web site beginning on Tuesday.

Despite the fact that many Netflix subscribers are drawn to that service because it offers a wide variety of movie titles, many of which are older movies, Blockbuster has always made sure the newest releases are made available to the public as soon as possible. Blockbuster Chairman and Chief Executive Jim Keyes is optimistic about this latest development, “Even though this is a very small market, the movies and the devices are the differentiators.”

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Ramattan, one of the largest Palestinian news agencies, accused the Palestinian Authority on Sunday of waging a campaign of harassment and intimidation against its staff in the West Bank.

The independent agency, which has several offices in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, was established 10 years ago and has since been providing satellite, production and editing services to many foreign TV stations and media outlets. The agency employs nearly 200 people.

The agency’s managers decided to close down all its West Bank offices and suspend its Web site after PA security officers loyal to PA President Mahmoud Abbas raided Ramattan’s headquarters in Ramallah and summoned eight employees for interrogation.

The entire home page of Ramattan was colored black, and an announcement published in Arabic said the agency had decided to suspend work in protest against the harassment experienced by its offices in the West Bank - a reference to the raid by Abbas’s security forces.

However the agency’s English-language Web site said the decision to suspend work had been taken in protest against the “relentless harassment and unyielding complications placed upon Ramattan by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, on top of the already more than difficult conditions faced from working in Occupied Palestine.”

The English announcement continued, “In our tenth year, we are proud to hold our heads up high for having maintained a clean name as an unbiased source for news-gathering from the occupied territories.

The offices of Ramattan in the West Bank have been raided several times by PA policemen over the past few months. In the most recent incident, the PA policemen demanded the agency’s managers provide them with a “good conduct certificate,” issued only by the PA’s General Intelligence Force and a prerequisite for renewing its license.

Scores of Palestinian journalists staged a demonstration in Gaza City Sunday to protest against the campaign against Ramattan and other journalists in the West Bank.

Shahdi al-Kashef, one of the directors of Ramattan, said that Abbas’s security forces had also confiscated one of the agency’s vehicles in the West Bank for no reason. He said the arrest of journalists was a flagrant violation of the freedom of the media.

In a related development, PA security forces arrested Sunday Muhammad Shtaiwi, bureau chief of the Hamas-affiliated Al-Aqsa TV station. Shtaiwi is the seventh journalist to be arrested by Abbas’s security forces in the past few months.

Many Palestinian journalists working in the West Bank are under pressure from the PA security forces to avoid publishing material that reflected negatively on Abbas or the Palestinian leadership in Ramallah. Some journalists said they had been summoned to the offices of the PA General Intelligence in Ramallah where they warned not to express views that were “sympathetic” to Hamas.

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Developers looking to build two large commercial structures along Conahan Drive in Hazleton Heights came a step closer to securing tax breaks under the Local Economic Revitalization Assistance program.

A resolution unanimously approved by the board awards the LERTA tax breaks over a decade, effective when the buildings become operational. Over the first five years, First Industrial will receive a 100 percent abatement while taxes on improvements will be phased in at 20 percent increments each year over the final five years.

The school board’s affirmative vote is the second of three approvals sought by First Industrial. Hazleton City Council adopted a LERTA ordinance in late October. The Luzerne County commissioners must also approve.

Developers told the school board they’ve been working to secure permits from the state transportation and environmental protection departments. That process should be completed by February, Thomas recently said.

The board approved First Industrial’s request in the absence of Director Tony Bonomo.

According to First Industrial’s Web site, the firm “buys, sells, leases, develops and manages industrial real estate, providing real estate solutions for every stage of the industrial supply chain.”

It was founded in 1994 and has more than 100 million square feet of industrial space in more than 30 markets throughout North America and Europe, the Web site says.

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For years, the Kahnawake had relied on cigarette sales and payments from the federal government to get by. Under Norton, they began to look at gambling as a way to lift up the tribe’s economic fortunes. In the mid-1990s, Norton promoted an effort to open a land-based casino on the reservation, but the tribe voted it down. A second referendum was also rejected.

Norton and the Kahnawake shifted their focus to Internet gambling. Several factors played to their advantage.

First, the Kahnawake consider themselves a sovereign nation, outside the laws of the federal and provincial governments. So, even though Internet gambling is considered illegal in Canada, they could set themselves up as a licensing authority and not have to worry about being prosecuted.

Second, they were close to the potentially lucrative U.S. market with millions of online gamblers. That was attractive to Internet gaming sites. Finally, running near the 35,000-acre reservation was a major broadband pipeline capable of handling millions of bets and other transactions.

In 1996, the Kahnawake established a gaming commission and later drafted regulations and started licensing Internet gambling sites, including Absolute Poker and UltimateBet. Today, the Kahnawake Gaming Commission licenses more Web sites than any other agency, generating thousands of dollars in fees from each license.

But that’s only the start. Gambling sites that apply for a Kahnawake license are required to place their computer servers in a refurbished mattress factory on the reservation for a minimum of three years. Mohawk Internet Technologies collects millions in fees annually from these rentals, though Kahnawake officials said most of the profits have been plowed back into the company.

Delisle said the Kahnawake have received “millions” from their Internet gambling ventures, and have used the money to support a native language program and other community efforts. He added that Internet gambling supports about 150 jobs on the reservation.

Less clear is what it means financially to Joe Norton. He declined to be interviewed and has provided few financial details about his Internet poker sites.

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The Binghamton area is already “home to innovation,” according to a logo unveiled by the Greater Binghamton Coalition five years ago.

“This is one of our largest industry clusters,” county Economic Development Director Darcy Fauci said.

The officials have created a Greater Binghamton Modeling and Simulation Coalition to spread the message that the region is home to this high-tech economy and to regain its reputation as the birthplace of simulation, she said.

Link Flight Simulation in Kirkwood was his main business, which experienced several name and ownership changes over the years.

In 1929, Link filed a patent for the first pilot training device, the Pilot Maker. During that year, he also established Link Aeronautical Corp. in Binghamton to market the product, which he sold to amusement parks.

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Several months ago, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology created the Mobile Web Project in an attempt to provide up-to-date university information for its faculty, students and visitors over mobile devices.

The MIT mobile site offers a staff and student directory, a campus map, the shuttle schedule, an event calendar, class announcements for students, emergency information, and status updates for many of MIT’s tech services.

The next step, according to Yu is to explore personalization and customization in a secure manner: “For instance, it would be great if students using mobile devices can securely check their grades or the balance of their MIT TechCash account and make simple transactions instead of having to pull out their laptop. Our team is brainstorming the next set of modules and arranging meetings with various departments at MIT. We expect to include content from MIT News, Campus Dining, TechTV, MIT World, and other areas in coming months.”

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A marketing manager e-mails a sales rep telling him to go to a conference in Berlin. The rep, while reading the e-mail, types in “book this”.

His computer looks up the flights, books the most convenient return ticket with an aisle seat, finds the nearest four star hotel, books a room, and puts the details in his calendar. And sends his wife some flowers to apologise for missing a meal out they had arranged.

Ubiquity is an attempt to connect up the web so that it becomes easier and more intuitive to use. It has been launched by the Mozilla Foundation, the open-source organisation behind the successful Firefox web browser.

Ubiquity, still an experimental prototype with many limitations and faults, has months of testing and development before it even reaches a beta release stage. The purpose of the early release of the experiment is to allow people to try it and, crucially, for developers to solicit feedback and suggestions for improvements.

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Giselle Walker pointed toward a desolate parking lot with rows of empty spaces that once were filled with Wal-Mart shoppers. Ever since the store closed, that part of the Mesa strip mall near Main Street and Longmore looks like it could do with some “life,” said Walker, a longtime Mesa resident, as she piled up her black Chevy Tahoe with groceries from a Fry’s east of the lot.

Urban as in shops on the first floor, homes on the second, third and more. Less parking sprawl, more walkable spaces close to Main Street. A community where people can walk to a coffee shop or the dry cleaners from their home, buy groceries, or pick up some flowers and hop on the light rail to get to Tempe or Phoenix and back.

Planners envision buildings at least three stories along the light-rail stations and two stories along the transit corridor, parking lots kept away from the front of buildings, and walking distance between buildings and mass-transit stops.

For now, these plans are tempered with the reality that financing is not going to be easy and city resources are limited.

But examples such as the Rosslyn-Ballston Corridor in Arlington, Va., as cited on the Center for Transit-Oriented Development’s Web site, are proof that transit-oriented uses can benefit new and existing residents.

That area was a “declining low-density commercial corridor” that has been transformed, and property values have jumped 81 percent in 10 years, while preserving the character of single-family neighborhoods, according to the center.

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The agonizing details of Mesa’s latest budget crisis will begin to unfold next week in City Council chambers.

That’s how much Mesa must cut from budgets this year and next to match spending with plummeting revenues. Budget officials said last week the number could grow.

Gray said Monday’s session will consider changes in the development services, code-compliance and transportation departments.

Mesa has provided no information about the impact of the crisis on transportation, but that sector has been almost constant assault from Mesa’s budget woes. Early this year the council chopped Saturday bus service from half-hour to hourly service to save money.

It is already known, however, that development services will take a tremendous wallop.

City Manager Chris Brady’s budget proposal, which the council must approve, includes combining the planning, building safety, code compliance and some environmental departments into one Development and Sustainability Department with far fewer employees than the separate departments now have.

Part of the idea, Smith said, is to create a department that can expand and contract with the economy.

But rather than add full-time employees when things are booming, Smith said, the city may rely more on contractors and consultants for planning and building-code work. That would lessen the need to lay off full-time staffers during downturns.

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Imagination is looking for a technical lead to join our team as the Director of Technology. You will be responsible for project technical oversight in the context of the organization as a whole, and also develop solutions that have a positive impact beyond the scope of current projects. You will be responsible for providing team leadership and innovation.

The ideal candidate is fluent in understanding effective and creative technology solution and systems design as well as the ability to create, test and deploy efficient, elegant code that drives the interface and backend. You have demonstrated ability to guide and direct developers to keep them on budget and schedule while continually inspiring them to innovate. You have solid understanding of digital production processes; thrive within a fast paced, creative, deadline-driven environment; have direct experience and skills in brand marketing and understanding of online marketing tactics.

You will lead a team using agile development methodologies to build content-rich, media rich interactive web sites. These sites are involved in all aspects of web publishing including content management, social networking, search engine optimization, blogs, ad serving, and more.

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