Affordable Hotels In San Diego - South Korea E-Commerce Sales Pass $1T

Source - http://www.zdnet.com
By - Jamie Yap
Category - Affordable Hotels In San Diego
Posted By - San Diego Hampton Inn

Affordable Hotels In San Diego

South Korea's e-ecommerce sales last year surged to an all-time high of 1,144 trillion won (US$1.05 trillion), thanks to increased transactions between businesses online.

This was a 14.5 percent jump from 999.6 trillion won (US$920 billion) in 2011, Yonhap News Agency reported Tuesday, citing Statistics Korea (KOSTAT). It added that the sales figure was also the largest since the government agency began collecting e-commerce data in 2001.

According to KOSTAT, online transactions increased across all categories in 2012.

Business-to-business (B2B) sales accounted for more than 90 percent of all online transactions, hitting 1,051 trillion won (US$967 billion) and up 15.1 percent from the year before. Business-to-government (B2G) sales reached 62.26 trillion won (US$57.3 billion), up by 6.6 percent from the previous year.

Business-to-consumer (B2C) sales increased 6 percent to register 19.64 trillion won (US$18.1 billion), while consumer-to-consumer (C2C) sales leaped 20.6 percent to hit 11.8 trillion won (US$10.9 billion).

KOSTAT also pointed out that consumer online shopping, comprising B2C and C2C sales, grew 11.3 percent to 32.35 trillion won (US$29.8 billion) in 2012.

Trip To San Diego - Samsung Armors Android to Take On BlackBerry

Source - http://www.nytimes.com/

By - BRIAN X. CHEN
Category - Trip To San Diego
Posted By - San Diego Hampton Inn

Trip To San Diego

Samsung’s smartphones have been best sellers all over the world, but the company has been, until recently, marketing them to consumers, not businesses.

But over the last year, Samsung, the South Korean manufacturer, has been quietly beefing up the Google Android software that runs on its smartphones to give businesses a phone with more security.

It introduced that software, named Knox, as in the fort, at an international cellphone industry trade show here this week. Samsung said its new version of Android protected users from malware.

The company hopes that the new software makes Samsung smartphones attractive to corporate information technology departments that worry about the theft of sensitive corporate data by hackers. I.T. managers have been among BlackBerry’s most loyal customers because of the security BlackBerry built into its phones and the private communications network it maintains.

Samsung said it teamed up with General Dynamics, a military contractor, to ensure its phones met the strict security standards of government agencies. Samsung executives have said Knox will first appear on a new Galaxy smartphone in the second quarter. That phone is likely to be the Galaxy S IV, which is expected to be introduced at an event in New York on March 14.

The company has also been focusing more on businesses in its advertisements. It ran a series of amusing commercials during the Academy Awards show on Sunday featuring the phones’ handiness in a business.Samsung said it had evidence that it was ready for enterprise. Thousands of its Galaxy smartphones and tablets are already in the hands of American Airlines flight attendants, Dish Network cable technicians and Boston Scientific health care professionals.

“We will become No. 1 in enterprise,” said Tim Wagner, a vice president for enterprise sales at Samsung who worked at BlackBerry. “If Samsung chooses to be No. 1 in a certain area, we will become No. 1.”

Samsung has become the top seller of televisions and cellphones, but persuading I.T. managers to risk their jobs on a new security system will be tricky. BlackBerry executives insist the BlackBerry is still the top phone for professionals. But the company is vulnerable. Android phones and Apple iPhones last year replaced BlackBerrys as the most-used phones among workers all over the world, according to a study by the research firm IDC.

It found that more businesses were buying iPhones for their employees, and Android phones were the most popular among workers buying their own phones. That puts Samsung, as the leading Android phone maker, in position to become a top vendor for businesses.

To appeal to the business user, Samsung added special features to Android. One tool allows the phone owner to create separate “personas” for personal and business use, a feature also on the new BlackBerry 10.

In a phone’s business persona, an office worker can use apps approved and monitored by the I.T. department. The worker can switch to a personal persona, where personal photos, games and calendar are stored, which cannot be seen by I.T. If the employee were to leave the company and keep the phone, the I.T manager can erase the data from the business persona, leaving the personal data untouched.

The business persona also has a layer of security. If malware were to infect the phone, it would not be able to invade the apps and data in the business persona, said Rhee Injong, a senior vice president for the Samsung group that developed Knox.

Samsung also has teamed up with AirWatch, a company that makes tools for I.T. professionals to manage phones. AirWatch will make detailed tweaks inside the business persona of a Samsung device, like creating restrictions for Wi-Fi networks or blacklisting certain apps.

John Marshall, chief executive of AirWatch, said that the benefit of Samsung’s openness was that businesses could tailor their phone’s software and also better manage the corporate fleet of phones. He said that because BlackBerry made its own I.T. management software, its flexibility was limited. BlackBerry, however, said that its approach offered higher and more consistent levels of security.

Samsung is also collaborating with developers. The note-sharing app Catch, for example, will use the persona system to allow people to divide notes so that the memos they share with friends do not show up in the notes they share with co-workers.

Place To Visit In San Diego - Wary Of Crises, Americans Tune Out Budget Cut Talk

Source - http://news.yahoo.com/
By - JOSH LEDERMAN
Category - Place To Visit In San Diego
Posted By - San Diego Hampton Inn

Place To Visit In San Diego

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama is pulling out all the stops to warn just what could happen if automatic budget cuts kick in. Americans are reacting with a collective yawn.

They know the shtick: Obama raises the alarm, Democrats and Republicans accuse each other of holding a deal hostage, there's a lot of yelling on cable news, and then finally, when everyone has made their points, a deal is struck and the day is saved.

Maybe not this time. Two days before $85 billion in cuts are set to hit federal programs with all the precision of a wrecking ball, there are no signs that the White House and Republicans in Congress are even negotiating. Both sides appear quietly resigned to the prospect that this is one bullet we just may not dodge.

Still, for all the grim predictions, Americans seem to be flipping the channel to something a little less, well, boring. They wonder, haven't we been here before?

It's like deja vu, says Patrick Naylon, who runs an audiovisual firm in San Francisco: "The same stuff, over and over again."

Texas native Corby Biddle, 53, isn't losing sleep over the cuts. No way the government will let vital services collapse, he said as he visited tourist attractions this week in downtown Atlanta.

"It will get resolved. They will kick the can down the road," Biddle said.

Usually, that's exactly what happens. Even the cuts behind the current panic were originally supposed to kick in on Jan. 1 — part of the fiscal-cliff combo of spending cuts and tax hikes that economists warned could nudge the nation back into recession. For all the high drama, lawmakers finally acted on New Year's Day, compromising on taxes and punting the spending cuts to March 1.

And the blunt instrument known as the "sequester" that's set to deliver the cuts? That too was the progeny of another moment of government-by-brinksmanship, a concession that in 2011 made possible the grand bargain that saved the U.S. from a first-ever default on its debt.

Even if the current cuts go through, the impact won't be immediate. Federal workers would be notified next week that they will have to take up to a day every week off without pay, but the furloughs won't start for a month due to notification requirements. That will give negotiators some breathing room to keep working on a deal.

But you can only cry wolf so many times before people just stop paying attention.

"I know you guys must get tired of it," Obama told a crowd in Virginia on Tuesday. "Didn't we just solve this thing? Now we've got another thing coming up?"

Three out of 4 Americans say they aren't following the spending cuts issue very closely, according to a Pew Research Center poll released this week. It's a significant drop from the nearly 4 in 10 who in December said they were closely following the fiscal-cliff debate.

Public data from Google's search engine shows that at its peak in December, the search term "fiscal cliff" was about 10 times as popular as "sequestration" has been in recent days. Even "debt ceiling," not a huge thriller for the web-surfing crowd, maxed out in July 2011 at about three times the searches the sequester is now getting.

"We're now approaching the next alleged deadline of doom. And voters, having been told previously that the world might end, found it did not in the past and are becoming more skeptical that it will in the future," said Peter Brown of the nonpartisan Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.

And let's face it: When it comes to policy issues that can really put an audience to sleep, "sequestration" is right up there with filibuster reform, chained CPI and carried interest.

For all the angst about layoffs, furloughs and slashes to government contracts, the markets don't seem to be rattled, either. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, after falling below 13,000 at the height of the fiscal cliff debacle, has been buoyant ever since, spending the last month hovering just below 14,000.

"I shrug my shoulders because I don't believe any of those severe cuts will go through," said Karen Jensen, a retired hospital administrator who stopped to talk in New York's Times Square. "Life goes on as it has before."

But if the Obama administration hasn't managed to convince Americans these spending cuts could be the real deal, it's not for lack of trying.

Each day the cuts grow nearer sees a new dire warning from the White House about another government function that will take a hit if they go into effect — what White House chief of staff Denis McDonough has called a "devastating list of horribles." Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano warned Monday that her agency will be forced to furlough 5,000 border patrol agents. Education Secretary Arne Duncan has said 70,000 preschool kids could be removed from Head Start. Fewer air traffic controllers could mean 90-minute delays or longer in major cities, and visiting hours at all 398 national parks are likely to be cut, the administration has said.

The White House has circulated 51 reports — one for each state, plus the District of Columbia — localizing the effects of the cuts. On Tuesday, Obama took his cautionary tale to a shipbuilding site in Newport News, Va., calling attention to how the cuts could impede the military. The White House says in Virginia alone, about 90,000 civilians working for the Defense Department would be furloughed, for a nearly $650 million reduction in gross pay.

SeaWorld San Diego - Bank Of England Considers Negative Interest Scheme For High-Street Banks

Source - http://www.guardian.co.uk/
By - Press Release
Category - SeaWorld San Diego
Posted By - San Diego Hampton Inn

SeaWorld San Diego

A top Bank of England policymaker hinted on Tuesday that the central bank was considering charging high-street banks a negative interest rate in a desperate move to encourage more lending to small businesses.

This would mean banks being charged to hold deposits with the Bank of England, encouraging them to lend more of their funds to the private sector.

Speaking to MPs on the Treasury select committee, deputy governor Paul Tucker said he was prepared to consider "extraordinary" policies after it became clear that current schemes were failing to spur lending to small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs).

The plan would involve Threadneedle Street setting up a separate interest rate just for banks, leaving base rates, which provide the basis for mortgages and savings rates, untouched.

The European Central Bank has maintained a separate bank rate since its inception to manipulate bank lending behaviour.

Tucker admitted that cheap loans directly funded by the central bank were failing to reach small businesses, undermining a key policy to drive growth.

He said successive schemes designed to boost lending to small businesses had failed to reach their target after the majority of loans offered as part of the central bank's £80bn funding for lending scheme went to homebuyers.

Tucker, who lost out to the Canadian Mark Carney in the race to succeed Sir Mervyn King as governor of the Bank, said he favoured a plan to encourage major corporations, which are flush with cash, to offer loans in partnership with the central bank to bypass the ailing banking sector.

"I am worried, and this is a personal opinion, that the current battery of credit policies are not reaching small and medium-sized businesses at the moment," he said.

Adding that he was sceptical that it would be a quick fix, he said: "I hope that we will think about the constraints of setting negative interest rates. This would be an extraordinary thing to do and it needs to be thought through carefully."

Andrew Tyrie, chair of the Treasury select committee, said: "The lack of lending to SMEs is inhibiting economic growth in the UK. The MPC is right to be looking at additional tools, or changes to existing tools, that could help."

Ray Boulger of mortgage adviser John Charcol said negative interest rates would result in losses for banks that kept money on deposit with the Bank of England, increasing the pressure to lend to private borrowers. He said the mortgage market would be a major beneficiary: "This increases the likelihood of genuine cuts in two-year fixed rates, with the scope for more cuts in longer-term rates as well."

Analysts likened the discussion about negative interest rates inside the Bank of England to blue-sky thinking and said any action was likely to come long after members of the monetary policy committee (MPC) had considered injecting further funds into the economy through the central bank's policy of quantitative easing (QE).

Tucker said: "I remain open to doing more QE, depending on the outlook for demand and inflation.
"Nobody on the committee thinks that QE has reached the end of the road and that it is not a useful instrument any more. We stand prepared to do more, if we judge that necessary."

Challenging critics of QE, Tucker said the MPC believed it continued to benefit the economy and without it lending would be more restricted. "We are absolutely committed to supporting growth within the constraints of keeping inflation to its medium-term target," he said.

David Miles, a former City economist and external member of the MPC, told MPs he was prepared to allow inflation to rise further above its 2% target to support growth, though it was his view that prices would be unaffected by a boost to QE.

In the US, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke strongly defended the Fed's own QE programme, which he said had been essential for the stock market's recovery. "To this point, we do not see the potential costs of the increased risk-taking in some financial markets as outweighing the benefits of promoting a stronger economic recovery and more rapid job creation," Bernanke told the Senate banking committee.

The Fed is buying $85bn (£56bn) in bonds each month and has said it plans to continue until it sees a substantial improvement in the outlook for the labour market.

The Bank of England has pumped £375bn into the financial system over the last four years through QE and there is a growing expectation that the MPC will increase the amount to £400bn sometime in the spring. At the last meeting, three MPC members, including King, voted to increase QE by £25bn.

Most UK economic indicators have turned south in recent weeks, wiping out hopes that the UK would recover strongly after four years of intermittent low growth and recession. Many City economists believe the UK will avoid a triple-dip recession despite a 0.3% contraction in the last three months of 2012, though growth will remain weak.

La Jolla Cove Attractions - Facebook Agrees To Remove Some Newtown Pages

Source - http://news.yahoo.com/
By - Pat Eaton-Robb
Category - La Jolla Cove Attractions
Posted By - San Diego Hampton Inn

La Jolla Cove Attraction

HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) -- Facebook has agreed to remove some so-called tribute pages related to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting over concerns they're being used to exploit the tragedy, U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal said Monday.

Echoing complaints already brought by some Sandy Hook families, Blumenthal and fellow Connecticut Democrats U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy and U.S. Rep. Elizabeth Esty requested the removal of offending pages in a letter to Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg Monday morning.

The lawmakers said some pages purportedly set up to honor the victims of the Dec. 14 shooting in Newtown have been used to exploit or harass the victims' families and could be used as vehicles for financial fraud.

The lawmakers also said the pages also appear to violate Facebook's own terms of use, which prohibit users from creating accounts for anyone other than themselves.

In the letter, the lawmakers said they know of more than 100 pages dedicated just one of the victims, slain teacher Victoria Soto.

Some of those contain postings from conspiracy theorists who claim the shootings were staged, and that Soto and others were actors.

"Certainly there have been many, too many, of these pages that are intimidating or harassing or exploitive," Blumenthal said. "I'm pleased that Facebook has responded positively."

The lawmakers said Facebook also had received complaints from Soto's family and the family of Kaitlin Roig, a first-grade teacher who survived the shooting and has been credited with saving the lives of her students by locking the class in a small bathroom and barricading the door.

A Facebook page titled "Kaitlin Roig is a Hero" contains numerous well-wishes but also prompted abusive posts, such as one that reads, "Congratulations Kaitlin or whatever your name is.. Now you're famous and got to meet the 'President.' You ought to be ashamed of yourself."

Blumenthal said his office received a phone call Monday from Facebook officials saying they had already begun removing abusive pages.

Facebook did not immediately reply to an email request for comment.

There has been one fraud arrest already connected to a Sandy Hook Facebook posting.

Nouel Alba, a 37-year-old New York City woman, is accused of using her Facebook account, telephone calls and text messages to seek donations for what she called a "funeral fund." She allegedly told one donor that she had to enter the scene of the mass shooting in Newtown to identify her nephew, according to the criminal complaint. Jury selection in her trial has been scheduled for March.

Blumenthal said they are not asking that all Sandy Hook-related tribute or donation pages be removed, just the ones that are not authorized by the families.

"Facebook needs to follow its own rules, and enforce those rules," Blumenthal said.

Balboa Park San Diego - Why You Can’t Log in to Twitter from Your New Phone

Source - http://news.yahoo.com/
By - Jared Spurbeck
Category - Balboa Park San Diego
Posted By - San Diego Hampton Inn

Balboa Park San Diego

Imagine this: You bring your new smartphone home, get it unpacked, and start installing your games and apps on it. But when you go to log into Twitter from your favorite third-party app, it just doesn't work.

Maybe you don't even get a new phone. Maybe you just buy a new Twitter app, a high-end version that actually costs money, and then find out you can't log in on it. Sound familiar? It does to a lot of people now; people who bought Falcon Pro, a $0.99 third-party Twitter app. And according toJeremiah Rice of the Android Police blog, this problem is even affecting people who already bought the app, when they install it on a new device.

It isn't Falcon Pro developer Joaquim Vergès' fault, though. It's all thanks to Twitter's new policies --policies which may soon affect other popular Twitter apps.

From the ground up
The people who use Twitter actually came up with many of its most successful features. Hashtags?Invented by Chris Messina (who now works for Google, according to GigaOM's Liz Gannes). How about the official Twitter app? That was written by Loren Brichter, and was originally called Tweetie. Brichter's app was eventually bought out by Twitter, and the company soon started restricting what the developers of other Twitter apps could do.

Biting the hand
Starting in March 2011, Twitter's rules for app developers began to change. In a now-deleted topic on one of Twitter's mailing lists, Twitter platform lead Ryan Sarver wrote "developers ask us if they should build client apps that mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience. The answer is no." Twitter also began cracking down on app developers by setting stricter guidelines for how tweets should be formatted, and other minutiae.

Pushed to the limit
Finally, in August of last year, Twitter VP Michael Sippey posted on the Twitter Developer blog about"Changes coming in Version 1.1 of the Twitter API," which was the new version of the system app developers used to connect their apps to Twitter. Some of these changes were relatively minor, such as changing the aforementioned guidelines into rules that could get developers' access revoked if they broke them. The biggest one, however, was giving Twitter app developers a hard and fast limit of 100,000 "user tokens," or individual installs of that app -- a limit that Falcon pro reached just a few days ago.

Why the limit?
Officially, Twitter wants to maintain a consistent experience for the people who use it. Conveniently enough, this also gives Twitter a captive audience, one that it's free to experiment on with new ways to serve people ads. Such as the infamous (and short-lived) QuickBar, which soon picked up a more colorful name from disgruntled user John Gruber.

What to do now?
Developers who need more tokens have to "work with [Twitter] directly," meaning ask permission from the company. Twitter has not done so for any third-party app yet. But that hasn't stopped Vergès from starting a petition on iPetitions, which has more than 3,500 signatures at the time of this writing. In the meantime, he's updated the Google Play app page for Falcon Pro, to let people know that the app will not work for new buyers … and to encourage people who aren't using it anymore to go to Twitter's website and deauthorize the app from their accounts (to free up a token).

If Falcon Pro currently works for you, it should continue to do so until you need to upgrade your phone.
Jared Spurbeck is an open-source software enthusiast, who uses an Android phone and an Ubuntu laptop PC. He has been writing about technology and electronics since 2008.

Attractions In San Diego - Demand growing for top Hotels In Brisbane

Source - http://www.heraldsun.com.au
By - Sophie Foster
Category - Attractions In San Diego
Posted By - San Diego Hampton Inn

Attractions In San Diego

Not only has the city pulled one of the country's highest occupancy  rates in the September quarter - at 85.2 per cent - but local independent luxury offering Emporium Hotel wiped the floor with the competition at the recent national tourism awards in Hobart.

Tony John, of property development firm Anthony John Group, owner of the Emporium Hotel, said taking out the Best Luxury Accommodation category in the 2012 Qantas Australian Tourism Awards was the pinnacle of his career.

"It's extraordinary,'' he said. "It's an absolute credit to our staff that the hotel's performed extremely well, particularly having just won the HM award for the best boutique hotel in Australia."
The five-year-old independent hotel, built as part of the $350 million Emporium mixed use development in Fortitude Valley, was considered a first for Brisbane. But Mr John has already released designs for a second Emporium in his $590 million Southpoint project at South Bank.

"We're launching that under construction early 2014 and that will be slightly bigger,'' Mr John said. "The Emporium Hotel in the Valley, there's about 102 rooms. The one at Southbank will be about 146 rooms.
"I've no doubt there'll be a need for more hotel rooms. It's about delivering quality, it's about the detail.''
Tourism & Transport Forum acting chief executive Trent Zimmerman said Brisbane could comfortably take two to three new 150-room hotels a year for the next nine years.

"The demand forecast suggests that the Brisbane hotel market can sustainably absorb between 300 to 450 new rooms each year until 2022 and maintain occupancy of around 80 per cent, which is important for the ongoing viability of existing properties,'' he told The Courier-Mail.

Brisbane currently had more than 9000 rooms, he said, with the TTF-HOSTPLUS National Accommodation Barometer tracking supply growth at an average of 3.5 per cent per annum for the last five years.

As well, he said, given the current development pipeline, there was sufficient overall supply in the city to cater for a massive influx of 6500 people expected for the 2014 G20 meeting.

"By the time the G20 arrives, there will be an additional 440 hotel rooms and 250 serviced apartments on the market,'' Mr Zimmerman said. "When you factor in 13,000 rooms on the Gold Coast and thousands more on the Sunshine Coast, there is plenty of accommodation available to cater for this event.''

The appetite for boutique hotels seemed to be rising in Brisbane, with the Emporium Hotel's offering, another developer planning a five-and-a-half star hotel across the road, and Treasury Casino considering one as well.

Hotels San Diego Downtown - Host Hotels CEO Has a Suite Outlook, Despite Sequester

Source - http://www.cnbc.com/

By - Matt Twomey

Category - Hotels San Diego Downtown

Posted By - San Diego Hampton Inn

Hotels San Diego Downtown

While hotel operators are fretting the impact of sequestration, the CEO of Host Hotels and Resorts— which owns many of the inns the big chains operate — says the recovery from a few brutal years is looking strong.

"The reality is that while we all would have liked to see stronger GDP growth over the last few years, the benefit ... is that new construction is still very low in the sector. It's still at levels that are less than 50 percent the long-term average," Ed Walter told CNBC's Squawk on the Street.

The result has been an opportunity to invest more in current assets, and Walter says Host, the country's largest real estate investment trust, has sunk more than $1 billion into existing hotels in the past two years alone. Under current conditions, he said, "it makes sense to buy new assets or invest in our existing assets."

"Until we see new supply accelerate above the long-term averages, which are slightly above 2 percent a year, I think the cycle's going to be extended," he said.

On Thursday Host reported a 9 percent fourth-quarter revenue increase to $1.75 billion and a 27 percent jump in funds from operations to $308 million, exceeding analyst expectations. Higher room rates and improving occupancy were credited.

Marriott CEO Arne Sorenson, after an earnings report that also beat predictions, on Wednesday told CNBC that the looming threat of sequestration — the automatic government spending cuts that will take effect March 1 if no deal is cut — was the sole reason for a darkened outlook. "We know it will not be good for our business," he said.

Walter said he too is concerned about the fiscal drama playing out in Washington, but noted that "the first six weeks of this year have been very strong. Revenue per available room growth ... was up over 9 percent. And we look at our group bookings for the last three quarters of the year, our group revenues are projected to be up 8 percent."

Host, which has 103 properties in the U.S. and 15 more abroad, saw fourth quarter per-room revenue jump more than 17 percent in Los Angeles and Seattle as well as double-digit growth in Hawaii and San Francisco, and Walter credits a West Coast comeback.

"I think you've got a combination of the economy in California recovering ... and international travel," he said. "There are a lot of travelers coming in from Japan, China and India, and a lot of those are coming to the West Coast."