Verizon did not disclose how much exactly it would have to pay but said 15 million customers would receive credits or refund checks that in most cases would range from $2 to $6 but would go beyond this in some cases, on their October or November bills.

Former customers will get refund checks while existing customers will get credits.

A person familiar with the matter said the refunds would come to more than $50 million. If all 15 million customers receive $6 in refunds each this would come to $90 million.

The case marks a misstep in an area wireless service providers are dependent on for future growth.

Operators like Verizon Wireless have been heavily promoting ever more advanced phones in the hope of convincing consumers to go beyond making voice calls and to also spend money on data services such as web-browsing and downloading applications such as games and movies download.

The New York Times, which first reported the settlement, cited unnamed people familiar with the settlement plan saying that the US telecommunications regulator, the Federal Communications Commission is pressing Verizon to agree to a penalty for the unauthorized charges.

The charges affected customers who did not have data usage plans, but were billed because of exchanges initiated by software built into their phones.

The use of data recovery and mining software have been used to track erroneous usage.

For example, trying out a demonstration of a game that Verizon Wireless had pre-loaded onto a phone would sometimes trigger data transmissions from the phone unbeknownst to the customers who were then charged by Verizon Wireless for the data.

In the past three years, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission received complaints from Verizon Wireless customers who said they were charged for data usage or Web access, the New York Times reported Sunday.

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MY TAKE: If you want my take, the way my cell phone bill looks every month I wouldn’t be surprised if I was download new movies and not know it.  The costs I’ve racked up would pay for new garage floor tile.  I might have extra beyond garage flooring if I didn’t have to also factor in the costs of paying for a Denver car accident lawyer last year.  But it wouldn’t surprise me if I’d been charged all along for Web access and didn’t know it.

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Other Resources

Long Term Unemployment Falls

There has been a lot of information about the health of the economy in recent years and it has come to the attention of people who measure those types of statistics that one of the most important economic indicators for staffing solutions is that the number of people who were unemployed on a long term basis, which means they had been out of a job for at least nine months, dropped in December, which is very encouraging news. The higher the number of people who are unemployed for a long time, the less recovered the economy seems to be.

Legal Matters

Brockville drinking and driving lawyer fees are expensive. If you’ve been accused of Toronto provincial offences you need to hire an attorney right away.  Don’t settle for a public defender.  Find a way to pay for a retainer fee for a good lawyer who will treat your case individually and with the ultimate goal of representing you in court and achieving the best possible result.

SOURCE:  Reuters

Haitian officials have requested that their earthquake-devastated hirstoric center of Port-au-Prince be rebuilt with help from an architectural planning charity founded by Britain’s Prince Charles.

The Center Ville area of the capital, the commercial and administrative heart of the Caribbean nation, was one of the worst hit by the catastrophic January 12 quake, which turned many of its shops and landmark buildings to rubble.

Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive said Haiti had sought help from the charity foundation of the 61-year-old heir to the British throne, who has stirred controversy with his criticism of modern architecture, to draw up a master plan for the harmonious reconstruction of downtown Port-au-Prince.

“The contact has already been made, there is an informal agreement, we have to formalize all that,” Bellerive told Reuters this week.

He said Haiti was seeking a “coherent” rebuilding plan from The Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment, which would work on the project with urban planners Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company, based in Miami, Washington and Charlotte, N.C.

“They have the experience,” he said. The Port-au-Prince city center makeover is part of a national recovery strategy that seeks to “decompress” Haiti’s hilly capital, which even before the quake was a chaotic, overcrowded warren of streets clogged with vendors, vehicles and pedestrians.

“I hope that we’re going to see Port-au-Prince as a huge construction field,” Haitian central bank governor Charles Castel said, adding that funds freed up by an International Monetary Fund (IMF) cancellation of $268 million of debt would help in the reconstruction of the city’s administrative heart.

An army of resilient street hawkers quickly returned to the traditionally bustling Port-au-Prince downtown area after the quake, which killed up to 300,000 people and devastated the economy of what was already the poorest state in the Americas.

They have laid out their wares again — everything from fruit, food and vehicle and electrical spare parts to voodoo paraphernalia — alongside or on top of mounds of crumbled debris which narrow the streets for vehicles and pedestrians.

But much still lies in ruins, and key buildings like the Haitian parliament, the Justice Palace and the 19th Century Iron Market were either destroyed or damaged.

RESTORATION OF PALACE, MARKET

A note on the Prince’s Foundation website said the UK charity had been asked to “create a guiding vision” to rebuild a central area of 25 city blocks of central Port-au-Prince. This would cover homes, streets, public spaces and amenities.

“We hope to play a small part in bringing hope and benefit to the city by maintaining its authentic character, reducing its environmental impact and helping train local people in construction skills that equip them for future employment,” foundation chief executive Hank Dittmar said in a statement.

Prince Charles advocates traditional planning and building techniques and said recently he had “a passion for reusing things and repairing things.” He has often blasted modern architecture projects, calling them eyesores that do not take into account the living needs of ordinary people.

Port-au-Prince’s downtown area lies behind the damaged remains of the domed, white-painted Haitian presidential palace built at the beginning of the last century, which partially collapsed in the January 12 earthquake.

Former colonial ruler France has agreed to draw up a study for rebuilding the palace. Haiti won its independence in 1804 following a violent slave revolt.

In another historic site reconstruction initiative, a well-known British architect, John McAslan, has been appointed to rebuild and restore Port-au-Prince’s Iron Market, which was badly damaged by a 2008 fire and the January earthquake. Originally built in 1891, the market is a cultural, historic and architectural landmark in the downtown area.

This restoration project is backed by Irish-owned mobile phone operator Digicel, the biggest foreign investor in Haiti.

The government also faces the huge task of rehousing some 1.3 million people left homeless by the quake, who live in cramped tent and tarpaulin cities crammed into spaces across the city.

Six camp occupants were killed in a violent storm last week and aid workers say the quake survivors remain vulnerable to winds and floods in the remaining hurricane season months.

Bellerive told Reuters $10 billion would be needed to build decent housing for all of the homeless and destitute, and the cost of removing quake rubble alone would be $1.2 billion.

He said the $11 billion pledged by foreign donors for Haiti’s rebuilding and development over the next decade would fall short of the overall needs, unless the crippled Caribbean state received a massive injection of foreign investment.

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MY TAKE: I sure hope the Haitian officials don’t build themselves a glass fortress and forget to include complete rebuilding of the slums that overlook Port-au-Prince, which is where many of the deaths occurred during the quake.  I’m no infrastructure expert, but I know that, just as we would compare health insurance quotes or quotes on simple things like decorative glass doors, working with a “re-building” company should also involve some comparisons.  This project is going to require some unprecedented cooperation between Haiti and Great Britain and goes beyond the need to compare insurance quote data.  These residents of Haiti need solid wood entry doors, not cardboard doors or metal roots.  What about hiring a team of commercial landscape design experts to provide donated services to the city? How about students studying New Jersey landscaping and volunteers from U.S. data center services to support the cause?

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MORE RESOURCES

Copy That

A DVD duplication service provides your business with offsite DVD and collocation facilities to help you protect and back up your important data. In business these days making a CD copy of your critical files isn’t enough.  You need off-site support and storage options in case of an earthquake, fire, flood, or other disaster.

SOURCE:  New York Times

Mike Wise, a sports columnist at The Washington Post has been suspended for publishing an erroneous tweat on his Twitter account that the Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger would be suspended for five games.

The information Mr. Wise published about Mr. Roethlisberger was made up — a test, he said, of how fast a piece of misinformation could spread online. (Mr. Roethlisberger was suspended for six games, not five, after he was accused of sexual assault in March, and the N.F.L. is considering whether to reduce the suspension.) Mr. Wise followed his initial post about the quarterback with three others about his sourcing for the news. And by the end of the day, the paper had suspended him for a month.

On his radio program on Washington’s WJFK on Tuesday morning, Mr. Wise said, “I could give you 10 reasons why I did this and explain what went wrong in the execution. But none of it matters today. I made a horrendous mistake.”

Kris Coratti, a spokeswoman for The Post, said that she could not comment on personnel issues. Before joining the paper in 2004, Mr. Wise worked as a reporter at The New York Times for 10 years.

Sree Sreenivasan, a digital media professor at the journalism school of Columbia University, said that because Twitter was often a source of news — athletes posting updates about their contracts, for example — the posts of newsmakers and journalists were taken seriously by followers.

A journalist’s reputation “is on the line with every tweet, for better or worse,” Mr. Sreenivasan said. “People have a reasonable expectation that it’s accurate or the best of what you know at the moment.”

Journalists have a responsibility to the public to not incite or offend in a way that other professionals may do but often get away with anyway, like the brutish Panama City Florida face lift doctor, the bossy and highly paid juvenile defense attorney, or even a Murfreesboro family law attorney.  In journalism there are ethics that once crossed or abused have the propensity to do serious damage.

Within a few hours of Mr. Wise’s Twitter post on Monday, The Post’s sports editor, Matthew Vita, sent an e-mail to his staff reminding it of the paper’s guidelines for using social media.

“When you use social media, remember that you are representing The Washington Post, even if you are using your own account,” Mr. Vita wrote. “This is not to be treated lightly.”

Yet within The Post, there was disagreement about whether the punishment fit the crime. Andrew Alexander, the paper’s ombudsman, wrote on his blog that Mr. Wise was “lucky he wasn’t fired.” Howard Kurtz, the paper’s media writer, wrote in a message on Twitter that the suspension “seems overly harsh to me.”

But on his radio program in Washington on Tuesday, Mr. Wise said that he agreed with the suspension. “I’m paying the price I should for careless, dumb behavior in the multiplatform media world,” he said.

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MY TAKE:  I’d sure bet the Fort Walton Beach FL cosmetic surgery or the nasty Nashville Tennessee divorce lawyer could get away with sending out false tweets, but why would they want to?  Journalists have a motivation for falsifying their quotes, pumping up their stories and in these case, allegedly, sending out erroneous information to generate a buzz. That’s why it’s media not medicine, and it’s been that way since the beginning.  Nothing has changed here except the ink is drier and the dissemination of information is much, much faster and more efficient.

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OTHER RESOURCES

Basement Remodeling As a Build Out

Denver basement refinishing might be the best alternative for you if you are considering expanding your home.  Before you finalize blue print plans to build up. Check with an experienced Denver Colorado basement refinishing company and get at least three different quotes for remodeling the basement space you have.  You could save a significant amount of money.

Divorce Austin Style

Austin divorce attorney rules are different from other divorce attorneys in the country.  If you are considering hiring an Austin divorce lawyer be sure to meet with at least three or four different attorneys to get a sense of a range of fees and services being offered.  Be sure to get referrals from them too because past clients can tell you more about a lawyer than anything else.

Los Angeles has created a $15 million loan fund that is designed to help scores of LA companies expand as recession winds down providing a boost to those small businesses that have been hampered by tough economic times.  The first recipient in the program, Powerline Control Systems in Northridge, will get $220,000 to expand its commercial and industrial business that manufactures lighting controls.

“Once this thing gets off the ground (and) depending on what the sales volume is, it will create jobs,” said Powerline CEO Marshall Lester, who founded the company in his garage 15 years ago.  Lester is taking advantage of the Los Angeles Citywide Small Business Loan Program, which will be administered by the Van Nuys-based Valley Economic Development Center.

“Right now we’re in the midst of the most significant credit crunch we’ve seen since the 1970s,” said Roberto Barragan, the center’s president. “What this program does is recognize the fact that businesses are going through tough times.”

The fund is the brainchild of Barragan and Ninoos Benjamin, director of the Economic Development Division of the city’s Community Development Department, who began discussions last February.

“I said, `Look the city has not a citywide loan program since 2004,”‘ Barragan said Friday.

Benjamin concurred and assembled money for the loan pool, allocating some of the money the city receives from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Quantcast Development. The city has typically used these grants for construction projects.

“I credit a lot to Ninoos in making our request feasible because he knows the HUD rules and we don’t,” Barragan said.

Businesses that qualify can use the money to refinance debt; buy inventory, equipment or commercial real estate; as working capital; or for tenant improvements.  With loan amounts ranging from $50,000 to $400,000, Barragan estimates as many as 60 companies will benefit.

And while HUD provisions require that one job be created for every $35,000 loaned out, Barragan hopes to add one job to the city work force for every $10,000 loaned.

Loan applications and terms are available on the center’s Web site at www.vedc.org. Barragan said that interested companies should first check the terms to determine if the program meets their needs.

The center will then do a free credit check to see whether a company should continue with the application process.

“You don’t have to have fantastic credit but we don’t want people who had a bankruptcy in the last three years or major collection actions because that would make it very difficult to get through our (application) process,” Barragan said.

Startup companies must show strong job creation potential and the owner must have a significant investment of his own money, he said.

Barragan also said that Lester’s Powerline was an excellent loan candidate.

“The company is a good, strong company. It has a real upside potential for jobs,” Barragan said. (Lester) is in a green type business and that’s what we’d like to see more money in.”

Lester said there is a lot of competition in the residential lighting control sector but he thinks he’s got a clear field on the commercial side.

“There is no competition (in commercial) because nobody can do what we do,” Lester said.

The loan money will be used to produce and market Powerline’s new, patented GreenWorx energy-efficient commercial lighting control system. Lester said the company will first focus on parking structures and then expand into buildings.

Powerline’s control system uses existing power lines to automatically control lights without the need for rewiring the facilities.

The latter is an expensive undertaking, Lester said, and the only other option to his company’s technology. GreenWorx systems reduce energy use and power costs, both important considerations to industrial and commercial businesses.  Lester said his company should be ready for its big push at the end of next year’s first quarter.

In fact, a $220,000 deal is being installed at California State University, Northridge, which is the company founders’ alma mater.  It is a six story parking structure.  This is only one of a couple of systems that the company has already sold.

“That’s also kind of our giant testing laboratory,” Lester said.

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My Take: This does not make sense to me.  I keep hearing how bad California is financially and Los Angeles can do this?  Maybe the LA city mayor should take over the state?  Maybe it is because LA is such a big passion town, who knows.

I know there are several T shirt design companies that are based in LA as well as cosmetics manufacturing companies.  Maybe that is because of Hollywood.  But you can definitely get any number of pop culture T shirts easily in Los Angeles.  However, I do not think any the manufacturers of private label skin care products need to worry too much because most females think they need it.

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Groupon Clone Script and Small Business

For a new or emerging business, one of the most important steps is finding new customers and keeping those customers coming back. By using a Groupon clone site or a site that utilizes a Groupon clone script, a business owner can jump the hurdle of being new to the community by offering targeted, large-scale sales to local clients through a Groupon clone. The cash flow generated by the swift nature of group buying can give any new business the capital it needs to plant a secure foothold in the economy of the local community and can even influence repeat visitors after the sale.

Air Cargo Safety

The GaRDS™ Portal is cost effective, safe, and reliable system for the inspection of trucks and cargo containers for concealed contraband, smuggled goods, and for manifest verification. The GaRDS Portal is available in two models: Enhanced Penetration and Standard.  This provides a smaller operational area and exclusion safety zone. The GaRDS product family is designed to detect hidden contraband, including weapons, explosives, and weapons of mass destruction, drugs, and undeclared goods making the job of air cargo security easier.

Building Links

An SEO company can create links to your website.  It is usually part of on-page optimization. Link Building is part 2 of the SEO process only to on-page optimization. Link building is the art and science of strategically acquiring quality links from websites with page rank, relevancy, and unique content. This is a tedious, powerful and critical process. In order to achieve great search engine placement, you need to execute a well-rounded ongoing link building campaign.  One SEO service is able to analyze the data and give you recommendations from the visitors’ perspective on how to drive a visitor to convert via the path of least resistance.

A New York Times editor strongly suggested that Goldman Sachs make a multibillion-dollar gift to the government instead of paying executives big bonuses to help reduce the US national debt because of its role in the financial crisis.  That editorial was dated November 21 on the Times’ website and then published the 22nd in print.  It attacked Goldman for everything from its top executive’s failure to apologize properly for his part in creating the crisis as well as Goldman’s giving bonuses related to profits that were boosted by the government bailout.

The Times sniffed at Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein’s acknowledgment last week that his bank “participated in things that were clearly wrong,” saying that he was not specific about what the company had done wrong and his remarks did not “come close to an apology.”

It cited the company’s ability to set aside $16.7 billion for bonuses this year as it was able to post “blowout profits” after receiving a $10 billion government bailout and $12.9 billion in payments and collateral in relation to the government bailout of American International Group.

The paper described Goldman’s pledge earlier this week of $500 million over five years to help small businesses as “crumbs from its table,” saying it should do much more.

“The money will be welcomed by recipients, but if Goldman wants to make a meaningful contribution, it would have to be in the billions and aimed more directly at taxpayers,” the Times said.

For those who are looking for attorneys . . . When you need an attorney, you need a firm that is comprised of a solid team of litigation attorneys whose expertise and courtroom experience include representation for clients covering a broad range of issues.  One that handles litigation and appeal cases involving personal injury, wrongful death, auto accident injury and filing an injury claim.  That means you need Texas injury attorneys.  One firm has Austin personal injury lawyers can do everything you need to resolve your situation

A contribution could also help Goldman ward off “serious calls for a windfall tax on bonuses, which would be justified since the profits they are based on are in a large part the result of government efforts,” the editorial said.

In another story published in the Times on Saturday, Gretchen Morgenson quotes Janet Tavakoli, an expert in derivatives at consulting firm Tavakoli Structured Finance, who urged Goldman to repay money from the AIG bailout, saying Goldman should be forced to take back toxic collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs, which had been insured with AIG.

“The prices of the collateralized debt obligations against which Goldman bought protection from AIG were in sickening freefall, and the cost of replacing AIG’s protection would have been sky-high,” she said. “Goldman must have known this, because it underwrote some of those value-destroying CDOs.”

“Goldman should do this before it gives bonuses to “taxpayer-protected employees,” Tavakoli said in the Times report.

Again the article suggested that Goldman Sachs return the favor to help small businesses and taxpayers to help it out in its time of need.  It also suggested that the Federal Bureau of Public Debt begin accepting tax-deductible donations that can help reduce the national debt and urged Goldman Sachs to donate. The paper said that a multibillion-dollar donation from Goldman could be made in such a way that it does not harm shareholders, noting that the related tax savings could help finance the company’s small-business initiative.

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My Take: I agree!  If they can afford to pay outrageous bonuses for profits that were received after their bailout, they should help pay the national debt too.  As a taxpayer, I am not willing to pay bonuses to executives who earn too much as it is.

Get real that would be like hiring a NC social security disability attorney for a broken leg.  That is nothing but a waste of money.  That is like buying Scentsy candles and not buying the Scentsy candle warmer to go with it.  You cannot light these candles without a wick, you need Scentsy warmer to melt the candle and smell it.  Even North Carolina bankruptcy attorneys can see the stupidity in this action.

If the company will not make the donations, then the executives should donate their bonuses.  It may not be a multibillion-dollar donation, but it sure would help.  According to the news, the recession is really getting bad and there are more people becoming unemployed.  They could use a little help!

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One struggling businessman found a numbers problem that worried him, which was usually not a challenge for this math whiz Marc Goldberg.  After opening Mathnasium of Manhattan, a franchise tutoring business last October on the Upper East Side of New York City, this math whiz and his wife Tammy became worried when their sales continued to fall.  At 30, one thing you do not want to worry about is collapsing businesses especially if it is your own.

“We opened at the height of the recession, when everything started crashing down. There were people who told us they would have been able to afford our help a year earlier,” said Marc Goldberg.  The Goldbergs invested $100,000 in their business, all of it from their savings.

“We had a rough start but we’re expecting a good-sized growth this year,” said Goldberg, who hopes to have at least 100 kids enrolled in his Mathnasium center.

“Several parents told us their kids asked if they could go after their friends raved about it. It’s hard to say no when your kid wants to go to a math center,” Goldberg said.  Tuition is $450 a month for a tutoring program with a student-to-instructor ratio of 3-to-1.

Naomi Suzuki, a former public school teacher who’s taught in the Bronx and Maryland, has applied all her energy to keep her two-year-old tutoring franchise, Kumon Park Slope, afloat.

“There are some sleepless nights,” said Suzuki, 37, who regularly puts in 60 hours a week at her after-school center in Brooklyn, which helps kids with math and reading.  Many of Suzuki’s worries started when Bank of America reduced her credit lines unexpectedly.

Examining every cost, Suzuki decided to stop accepting credit cards so she wouldn’t have to pay processing fees. Tuition is $125 a month per subject; she pays about $36 per student in royalties. She also put off plans to move.

“We were hoping to expand to a larger location,” she said. “The center is only 600 square feet, but that will have to wait until we figure out our future.”  Business has been tough even for well-established tutoring organizations.

For those businesses who wish to offer their customers more . . . A computer room with a specific design Internet host can an application hosting is a data center in this service can help you find a qualified data center facility at no cost to you.  A colocation data center provides power, pain and Internet bandwidth.  These colocation services typically include to costs associated with server colocation space fees and bandwidth charges.  You should also make sure that you have the proper managed security services for your business.  Ensuring that you have a good intrusion detection system means you can ensure that your client’s information as well as yours is safe.

Learning Leaders, formerly the New York City School Volunteer Program has provided volunteers for more than 50 years. They group now works with more than 230,000 students in more than 800 schools citywide.  With the recession came an influx of volunteers, said Mindy Duitz, president of Learning Leaders.

“Between the start of the year and June, we’ve had about a 25% uptick of volunteers, many from the business sector,” she said.

Despite increased interest in the organization, its budget was cut 15% to about $3.6 million this year.

“We need to be smarter about how we can meet demand with fewer resources,” she said.

Educate Inc., the Baltimore-based operator of Sylvan tutoring centers, reported on October 27 an $8.5 million loss in the third quarter, its largest quarterly loss since the company became public two years ago. Educate is considering a buyout proposal to take the company private. Last month, Educate’s top management and others offered $8 a share, or about $344 million. Executives said the process is continuing and made no further comments during a conference call with analysts yesterday. Educate stock dropped 2.5% or 20 cents.

Educate, Inc. (Nasdaq: EEEE) is a leading pre-K-12 education services company delivering supplemental education services to students and their families.

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My Take: The one thing I could see that they can offer is their stick-to-itiveness.  Besides that, offering a product or service that consumers need like offering business people a way to purchase used copiers for their office instead of purchasing new ones.  Purchasing a new color copy machine can be expensive, however if you and want to save money you would purchase used copy copiers.

This is just simple economics as far as I can see.  The same thing could be said about the fashion world.  If you sell jeans, sell skinny jeans which are popular right now instead of playing with low-rise jeans.  Although, some may argue that sexy jeans are just as popular.

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