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Last year,polo lacoste pas cher, three friends who were making arrangements to drive to the famous festival in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert concluded that there was great interest in ride-sharing but no easy way to match up those who had space in their cars with those who needed rides and would help pay for gas and other expenses. So they set up .

It went so smoothly that the site became a small hit,polo ralph lauren pas cher,3.) ?Fridays and weekends are still prime time. ?, setting up 1,600 rides within a few weeks. And that led the three friends to think about offering the same sort of ride-matching service to any location on any date. At first glance,borse louis vuitton, that may sound like a simple extension of the service, but in fact,ralph lauren pas cher, it was a huge leap in complexity to a sort of free-form, nationwide mass-transit system. And the founders of the new service, called ,polo So Warren Buffett likes newspapers again Ja, which they introduced late last year, have put a lot of work into creating a Web site that invites potential users to give the service a try. “With Burningmanrides, it was very obvious what we offering,” said Jason Shen,polo lacoste pas cher, one of the site’s founders. “We needed a new model for Ridejoy.”

One of the challenges that the site faces is that most people who come for the first time have either the college “ride board” model or the Craigslist model in mind. A ride board, of course, is a physical bulletin board where students can pin a note specifying where they’re driving or where they’re hoping to get a ride and allowing people to see at a glance whether there’s a match. On Craigslist, on the other hand, you can jump to a city, select “rideshare,” and see a bunch of rides being offered out of that city. Both models work, in part, because the number of listings is usually small enough to allow easy scanning.

But it’s not so easy on a Web site that currently lists more than 2,ralph lauren,polo femme polo ralph lauren pas cher Waffling on climate cha,000 rides among more than 500 cities and can succeed only if customers find what they’re looking for. Clearly, the site has to let users narrow the possibilities, which means the users have to provide some information. “Having to sift through all those listings would drive people away,” said Randy Pang,borse gucci,polo femme, another co-founder. “It’s too much work. We just needed people to tell us where they wanted to go, and we could help make it happen.”

It’s easy enough to ask for starting and ending locations and for the desired date of travel. But would customers be comfortable going to an unfamiliar Web site and typing in information about their planned trip? Thus the first challenge was designing a home page that would prompt customers to provide enough information to get the process going without making them nervous. To balance the potentially conflicting needs of soliciting information,ralph lauren, raising comfort levels and hiding complexity, the Ridejoy home page features three simple elements.

The first is a place to provide the four key pieces of information: driver versus rider, starting point, ending point and date of travel. The second element,polo ralph lauren, just below it,polo ralph lauren pas cher,polo homme, is a list of popular ride-sharing destinations or departure points — so that users familiar with ride boards or Craigslist can begin by narrowing the choices to a single “hub” that represents their destination. (The site is focusing on West Coast locations for now but plans to branch out in the coming months.) The third element, near the bottom of the page, is a single strip that displays one of the listings on the site, along with the lister’s first name — a bit like an index card on a ride board. “We were trying to capture the experience of feeling you’re going on a real trip with a real person,” Mr. Shen said. The strip switches listings every few seconds,ralph lauren pas cher PARKS - Green Blog - NYTimes, communicating that there are a variety of listings.

A simple logo prominently splashed across the top of the home page reads, “Share rides with friendly people.” That phrase gets at what is probably the biggest barrier that Ridejoy has to confront: the issue of trust. Taking a ride with a stranger or taking a stranger into your car is inevitably a leap of faith. Arranging the ride on the Internet can add another layer of concern. Ridejoy’s intended solution is pasted right underneath those sample ride listings. Every one of them comes with an invitation to “Sign up to see if you have any mutual friends on Facebook” — that is, if you share any friends with the person who posted the listing.

If you click on that invitation, you’ll be prompted to log on to Ridejoy with your Facebook log on,louis vuitton borse, which means Ridejoy now has your basic profile information, including your profile picture. Clearly,polo homme, the chance to gain that familiar footing appeals to most Ridejoy users — nearly 90 percent of them do in fact link through Facebook. Thus, most listings include a profile picture and offer a look at the user’s public Facebook information. “We want everything to feel as friendly as possible,” Mr. Pang said.

Ridejoy is hiding a lot of high-powered complexity behind the intended simplicity of the home page. Consider, for example,polo femme,polo ralph lauren,gucci sito ufficiale Golf Balls Not All Created Eq,polo ralph lauren pas cher There’s material (video/text/pho, that an offered or desired ride can start anywhere,sacs longchamp pliage, end up anywhere,ralph lauren, and happen on any date or time. That means the chances that everyone or even most people who come to the site will find an exact match are not high. So the site’s computers churn through all the possibilities to find the closest matches — perhaps a ride that leaves from a nearby city,ralph lauren, or that leaves a day later. If nothing clicks, a notification service lets you know if a new listing comes along that might meet your needs.

There is also an optional credit-card-based advance-payment system that takes the uncertainty of cash transactions out of the picture and helps users determine fair prices for sharing expenses. “One by one, we’re trying to remove all the obstacles to sharing rides,” Mr. Shen said. “We want to refine the experience so it stays really simple, but it’s also highly functional.”

Please take a look at Ridejoy and tell us if you think the owners have hit the right notes. Do you have other questions or concerns?

You can follow David H. Freedman on ,polo lacoste pas cher, and on .

As I mentioned in, I recently gave a speech to a group of family-business owners. The session concluded with a question from the audience that stumped me: “Are the kids entitled to the business?”

It came from a man my age (56),polo homme, and I wasn’t sure if he was asking as the father,polo lacoste, the son,polo lacoste pas cher polo Thomson Reuters Cost of Compliance Survey 20,polo ralph lauren pas cher, or both. But it didn’t matter,borse gucci prezzi Why the Bailout in Spain Won�,polo ralph lauren pas cher, because he was asking what I thought about my business, and I know what I am. I am the father who started a business in his parent’s basement at 22 years of age and built it to 113 employees. I am also the father who has told his three sons — now 30,ralph lauren, 27, and 22 — to do what they want with their lives and their careers.

At the moment, only the middle son is working in the business, but he wants to leave at some point. Which is fine. I think. I have never wanted to hang the business around any of their necks. In fact, I have long imagined an old man exclaiming, “I built this for you!” to his unappreciative children. “Not me,” I have vowed. (The Times has just published a to keeping family businesses together.)

Over the years, I have been in many business groups, and I have seen up close and personal how ugly it can get. Resentment, jealousy, dysfunction, incompetence, and bitterness are all thrown together like some kind of family stew, causing grief for all concerned, including the non-family employees. Not on my watch,ralph lauren femme, I have always told myself.

But that is the point — it won’t be my watch forever,ralph lauren femme, which gets me back to the question: Are my sons entitled to the family business? The relatively fast and easy answer,louis vuitton outlet Soaking the rich might not be a panacea. Vanessa Houlder , after 30 seconds of soul searching, is no. It’s an easy answer because these days, no and entitled go together like soup and sandwich. The fact is,sac longchamp, the word entitled has been dragged through the mud to the point that it is almost always used negatively, like spoiled and unearned. But that is not always the case. People are entitled to a safe workplace,polo lacoste pas cher, people are entitled to change jobs, and people are entitled to vote for whomever they wish. Actually, entitled has a noble and free side, one that is very American. It is also very American that the word has become the rallying cry for all things spoiled, lazy,ralph lauren pas cher, and undeserving.

I would say that business owners are entitled to do whatever they wish when it comes to selling,louis vuitton borse, passing along, or closing a business. But the question is more complicated than it might seem. There are many issues to consider: Is most of the owner’s estate tied up in the business? Is there a spouse to support after the owner’s death? If so, there could be too much risk in not selling the business,polo ralph lauren outlet,polo femme, since businesses can go from valuable to worthless very quickly.

Are there any family members working in the business? If not,Week One, it really becomes a question of money,ralph lauren, and maybe emotional ties. If there are family members who want to work,polo ralph lauren,ralph lauren pas cher, do they have the desire or ability to run the business? Are there any nonfamily members who are capable of taking over? As the owner? of a business that’s been around 30 years, I do think I have some obligation to look out for long-term employees, if possible (you can’t give away money you don’t have). Actually, I wouldn’t call this an obligation; it’s something I want to do, something I’d be thrilled to do for people who have made tremendous contributions. It’s a goal, a desire, a plan.

But that plan has to work with what I am leaving my kids. This is a very personal decision, and it can get complicated. If you give a piece of the company to a child who is in the business,polo homme,polo homme polo ralph lauren Edward Hadas - Part 5,polo homme, how do you compensate family members who are not in the business? Do you give them a say in company affairs? Are the family dynamics such that you are just setting everyone up for years of grief?

It gets even more complicated as the kids get married, the in-laws get involved, and the parents get older. I have seen it many times: siblings not talking to each other, children estranged from parents, litigation. This is in stark contrast to the warm and fuzzy feeling that marketers want to emit when they proudly proclaim, “family-owned since 1956.” Maybe there should be a truth-in-advertising law requiring the addition of an asterisk when appropriate: “and dysfunctional since 2002.” It is easy to see why only make it to the second generation, and only 12 percent get to the third.

So what does this owner think? My sons are not necessarily entitled to take over the business, but they are entitled to being considered. Now that my third son is graduating from college,ralph lauren About Yaxue Cao Seeing Red in China, I am going to have a board meeting. I am going to lay out the options,ralph lauren pas cher, my concerns, and some possible plans. I am going to join a family business council, with or without my family. And I am going to give my sons some things to think about, as they try to navigate their futures.

I think about that old man exclaiming,polo ralph lauren pas cher, “I built this for you!” He is starting to look more and more familiar the older I get. The concept was much more abstract when I was 36. Maybe I’ll dye my hair.

Jay Goltz owns in Chicago.

The day has not yet arrived where people can have microchips installed in their bodies that connect them to the Internet, then go haywire and nearly annihilate the human race. But is happy to hasten that future along, even if it poses risks to the media in which he customarily operates.

Mr. Singer, the director of films including “The Usual Suspects,” “X-Men” and “Valkyrie,ralph lauren,” is the producer of the new Web series which will make its debut Aug. 8 on YouTube. Created by John Cabrera and Cosimo De Tommaso,polo lacoste pas cher, “H+” tells a not-so-far-fetched story in which millions of people have communications chips installed in their bodies,chanel Seeing Things Reaching for the Sky, and are then wiped out by a virus attacking the chips. Shuttling back and forth in time, “H+” follows the survivors of that devastation while exploring the origins of the technology that caused it.

While viewers contemplate the amalgamation of man and machine anticipated in “H+,polo femme By Britt K. Latham and Joseph B. Crace,polo ralph lauren,” Mr. Singer said he had been thinking about the blending of serialized drama and the Web.

“At some point these mediums are going to merge and there’s going to be some kind of sea change in the way we observe content,” he said in a telephone interview. With a laugh, he added: “I just hope it doesn’t make people not want to go to movie theaters. Because that’s my day job.”

Mr. Singer,polo lacoste pas cher,borse gucci prezzi, who was also a producer of the Fox medical drama “House,sac longchamp pas cher,” said “H+” originally had been submitted to his Bad Hat Harry production company as a traditional television series. But its emphasis on technology, he said,ralph lauren pas cher,chanel, and a pivotal event “where all these implants malfunction and create massive, almost apocalyptic death,air jordan pas cher How much will a capital surcha,” made it a natural fit for an online format.

“By moving backwards and forwards in these smaller webisodes, the audience can piece together the mystery surrounding the event,” Mr. Singer said. “As opposed to a series where you might get lost,sac longchamp pas cher, here they’re in short,polo ralph lauren outlet, three- to six-minute bursts,ralph lauren pas cher, so each episode becomes kind of a cliffhanger or a piece in the greater puzzle that takes shape.”

Mr. Singer said his goal with “H+,” directed by Stewart Hendler (“Sorority Row”) and with a cast including Alexis Denisof (“Buffy the Vampire Slayer”) and Hannah Simone (“New Girl”), was to present an “extremely cinematic” series “that would look and sound like real high-quality television,” but was presented online.

Not that Mr. Singer is moving away from film or television: He is in postproduction on a fantasy adventure being released next year. And he is directing an NBC pilot for which promises an updated take on the 1960s horror-comedy “The Munsters.”

“It’s not a remake of ‘The Munsters,’” Mr. Singer said of the pilot,gucci sito ufficiale, which stars Jerry O’Connell as Herman, Portia De Rossi as Lily and as Grandpa. “It’s based on that universe. It’s got all the fun that those characters bring to it, and yet a very contemporary feel. None of the campy makeup and all that stuff.”

“If the series goes forward,polo ralph lauren,” he added,polo lacoste pas cher,ralph lauren Lumière Made in France - NYT, “we have access to all the Universal monsters. We’ve already commissioned scripts so there are other characters being introduced. It has a great potential to be a mixture of ‘Modern Family’ with monsters.”

While online video naturally competes with the movies and TV shows he creates,borse gucci, Mr. Singer described it as “another option” for presenting material.

“If anything,ralph lauren, it’s cannibalizing less time than a reality show,polo lacoste,polo femme Startup Genome Report,” he said.

Still,polo ralph lauren,chanel occhiali, he expects that Web content will become increasingly dominant, even if Internet-to-brain interfaces will not.

“Whether you like it or not, people are going to live more and more on their pads,” Mr. Singer said. “Eventually your entire content library literature, movies, television all of it’s going to be sitting there on your phone. If you want a bigger screen you might carry a pad. Otherwise you’ll just plug it into something. Thank God people still need a place to take their date and hopefully the movie theaters will still be there.”
“But just in case,12:21 a.m. Updated ,chanel,ralph lauren femme,” he added, “I want to make sure I’ve got my bases covered.”