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Click & Close Ads Netflix stock touched an all-time high of $706.24 Wednesday, topping its previous high of $692.79 set on June 10. Netflix, which has a market value of $41 billion, is the best performer this year in the Nasdaq 100, an index that tracks the largest nonfinancial Nasdaq companies. The stock has soared nearly 100 percent since January.Icahn's firm Icahn Enterprises held 1.41 million Netflix shares as of March 31, according to regulatory filings, making the latest sale worth about $960 million at current prices, according to Bloomberg data. The firm paid $58 a share for the stock in 2012, booking profits between $700 million and $800 million in the fall of 2013, Reuters reported. Click & Close Ads
Click & Close Ads "Netflix was a no-brainer when we first went into it," Icahn said in an interview on CNBC’s "Fast Money Halftime Report.” "You couldn't compete with Netflix because they were starting the year with like $2 billion flowing into them, and Reed Hastings [CEO of Netflix] did a great job in building it up." Icahn also says technology giant Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) is undervalued. The iPhone maker also had a 7-for-1 stock split in June 2014 and since then, shares of the world's largest-valued company have rallied 40 percent. The investor holds about 53 million Apple shares, according to regulatory filings, worth about $6.8 billion, according to Bloomberg data. Icahn announced in an open letter to Apple chief executive Tim Cook on May 18 that Apple shares should be trading at $240, trading at more than $100 higher than the iPhone maker’s current stock price, valuing the company at nearly $1.5 trillion. The investor also said he believed the company would enter the television market by 2016 and the automobile market by 2020. "I just don't see how you compete with Apple because of the great ecosystem they've built," Icahn told CNBC on Wednesday. Click & Close Ads
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Click & Close Ads Click & Close Ads After a sharp increase in the number of rail crossing accidents last year, the Federal Railroad Administration plans to announce a new partnership with Google on Monday to provide the locations of all grade crossings in the company’s popular map application. Google has agreed to include information from the United States Department of Transportation’s vast database to pinpoint every rail crossing in the country in Google Maps. Google will also add audio and visual alerts to the app for when drivers use the turn-by-turn navigation feature. There are about 130,000 public and 85,000 private grade, or level, crossings across the country. The number of accidents at crossings had declined more than 80 percent, to about 2,000 a year in recent years from about 12,000 a year in the 1970s. But last year, the number rose by 9 percent. This upswing has prompted the railroad agency to seek new ways to stem this longstanding hazard through technology. Last year, 270 people died in highway-rail collisions, up from 232 the previous year, and 843 people were injured, according to federal safety statistics. Grade-crossing accidents are the second-highest cause of rail fatalities after trespassing accidents, which killed 533 people last year. Drivers are increasingly reliant on their smartphones for directions, and major tech firms — including Google, Apple and Facebook — have developed location-based services that make the most of their capabilities. Google has been a pioneer in mapping, and its mobile app is one of the most popular maps for Android phones and iPhones.Click & Close Ads Click & Close Ads The partnership with Google is likely to precede other announcements. The agency said it had also reached out to four other map makers — Apple, MapQuest, TomTom and Garmin — to include similar features on their apps or mapping devices. Grade-crossing accidents are generally caused by driver inattention and error, according to the rail regulator. In many instances, there are no gates or blinking lights to warn drivers of an oncoming train — just a crossing sign or a crossbuck (a white “X” marked with the words “railroad crossing”). Officials and safety advocates do not have a precise explanation as to why grade accidents rose last year. A growing economy might have contributed to increasing freight train traffic and put more people on the roads. Distracted driving might be another factor. “The vast majority of these accidents and deaths are preventable,” said Sarah Feinberg, the Federal Railroad Administration’s acting administrator. “In some cases, maybe a driver intends to beat the train, thinks they are familiar with the route or still have time to cross. But there are many cases where drivers lack situational awareness, because it may be dark or the route is unfamiliar.” She points out that many drivers now routinely plug their destination into their smartphones, often to find the fastest itinerary or avoid traffic. No date has been given for when the crossing information will be available on Google Maps, but Department of Transportation officials say the company has made the project a priority. “We’re happy to help the Federal Railroad Administration as we’re always looking for new ways to make maps useful to our users,” Mara Harris, a Google spokeswoman, said. Click & Close Ads Click & Close Ads The Department of Transportation has developed its own app, called the Rail Crossing Location Mobile Application, that provides drivers with a catalog of all crossing locations. But the app does not alert drivers when they are about to cross over tracks. It is also not used much. The same data found on this app would also be used by Google and others. “We have some really good data on these crossings but we have to put the data where people are using it,” Ms. Feinberg said. “What makes sense is to take that data where people are gathering. It makes much more sense for me to share my data with Google, rather than try to get Google users to come to my app. For us, it makes a ton of sense to get that information out there.” In February, a Metro-North commuter train struck a sport utility vehicle that was stuck on the tracks, killing six people. That accident took place just weeks after Ms. Feinberg, formerly the chief of staff to the secretary of transportation, was named as the railroad agency’s acting administrator. The accident, along with last year’s uptick in the number of fatalities, prompted Ms. Feinberg to turn to technology partners for help. Before joining the Department of Transportation, Ms. Feinberg, a former White House employee, had worked at Facebook, giving her knowledge of how big tech companies develop their products. Joyce Rose, president of Operation Lifesaver, a rail safety educational group, welcomed the new initiative. She says that a vehicle or a person is hit by a train every three hours in the United States. About half of those accidents happened at cross roads with a gate or lights, she said. “It’s another tool in the toolbox to make the public safer,” Ms. Rose said. “This is going to help raise awareness about where crossings are and, hopefully, remind drivers to act safely as they approach.”Click & Close Ads Click & Close Ads

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Click & Close Ads Apple Music has reversed its payment policy, a day after the singer Taylor Swift said she was refusing to allow the company to stream her album 1989. In an open letter to Apple, Swift said she was withholding the record as she was unhappy with the three-month free trial offered to subscribers. Now Apple says it will pay artists for music streamed during trial periodsSwift had said the plan was "unfair", arguing Apple had the money to cover the cost. "I find it to be shocking, disappointing, and completely unlike this historically progressive and generous company," the 25-year-old said, describing Apple as one of her "best partners in selling music". Click & Close Ads
Click & Close Ads "Three months is a long time to go unpaid, and it is unfair to ask anyone to work for nothing. "We don't ask you for free iPhones. Please don't ask us to provide you with our music for no compensation." Apple Music launches on 30 June. It will cost $9.99 (£6.30) per month in the US for one person or $14.99 for families.After hearing news of the company's decision on Sunday night Swift tweeted: "I am elated and relieved. Thank you for your words of support today. They listened to us.'' Mr Cue said he did not know if the Shake It Off singer would now make her album available on Apple Music - but he praised her for taking a stand. "When I woke up this morning and I saw Taylor's note that she had written, it really solidified that we needed to make a change," he told Associated Press. The music industry has generally supported the company bringing its vast music library to paid streaming, and the firm said it would pay 73% of the music subscription revenue to music owners.Speaking to Billboard magazine Cue said they had already been been hearing "a lot of concern from indie artists about not getting paid during the three-month trial period" before Swift spoke out. But he said "we never looked at it as not paying them". "We had originally negotiated these deals based on paying them a higher royalty rate on an ongoing basis to compensate for this brief time", he said. They will now pay artists during the trial period and "also keep the royalty rate at the higher rate." He said he spoke to Swift himself to let her know they were making the changes and "she was thrilled and very thankful".Click & Close Ads
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Annette Bening bids on $4K suit for hubby 
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Click & Close Ads Annette Bening was honored with the Humanitarian Award at the National Urban Technology Center Gala, and went shopping for hubby Warren Beatty while there. Spies said before Bening took the stage at Gotham Hall, designer Keith Lloyd put on a charity fashion show. Click & Close Ads
Click & Close Ads Bening got into an “animated bidding war” for a bespoke suit, which she won for $4,000. She told the audience the suit was for Beatty. Russell Simmons received the night’s Visionary Award. Click & Close Ads
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Everything You Need to Know About the Music Service that Apple May or May Not Announce at WWDC
This upcoming Monday is the start of Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference, an event where MacBooks glow like fireflies and the men’s bathroom line stretches as far as Oakland. Apple isn’t expected to unveil a new gadget; instead, it will highlight the mobile and desktop software goodies coming our way, including a mysterious new music service that supposedly will take on Spotify and Pandora. Some say Apple execs will show it off on Monday. Others disagree. Sony Music’s CEO said in an interview on Sunday that it’s definitely coming. So, you’re probably wondering what’s so new and exciting about another music subscription service. My fearless colleague Dan Tynan and I will be there in the flesh, on Monday at 1pm ET, 10m PT, live-blogging the event until our fingers get sore. But in the meantime, we answer your most pressing questions. 
  So, what is this thing called? 
 According to the frequently accurate Apple blog 9to5Mac, Apple’s internal name for the project is Apple Music. It makes sense, since Tim Cook opted to drop the gimmicky iNaming scheme with the premiere of the Apple Watch earlier this year. The company is also shedding the Beats Music branding that this app is based on (more on that soon).
How much will it cost?
Just a few months ago, outlets were reporting that Apple would offer this service for a cheaper price than its competitors, at just $8 a month. But after extended negotiations with music labels, it’s looking more like $10 a month—exactly the cost of unlimited streaming for competitors Spotify, Rdio, Google Play Music, and Deezer. Why should I care about this when Apple has failed at music for a long time? Wow! How rude. If you’re reading this, Craig Federighi, cover your beautiful eyes. I’ll have you know that back in my day, the 99-cents-a-song iTunes model was actually innovative. Apple was the first company to work closely with artists and music labels to sell their music by the MP3. The launch of its online music store was significant in 2003, the time of iPods — especially for those of us who had 40GB to fill. But as they were perfecting that model, entirely different approaches to digital music were popping up. Pandora, which was created in 2000, was a viable alternative to music discovery. And, you know, so was stealing it, on sites like Kazaa and LimeWire. When Spotify and several other unlimited streaming services premiered in 2006, it began to eat away at the iTunes audience, despite Apple’s occasional efforts to modernize (RIP Ping) and, you know, surprise Beyoncé albums. Apple has fully realized that it needs to get with the times, though it will probably continue selling MP3s. So, how is Apple going to catch up to the standard after all these years of mediocrity? You may have heard about a little $3 billion transaction last May in which Apple purchased the headphone and speaker company Beats Electronics. On the surface, it may have seemed as if Apple was trying to up its accessories game, but buying Beats gave it two key things: the talent and influence of the company’s founders, Dr. Dre and recording industry bigwig Jimmy Iovine, and Beats Music, a subscription-based service that the pair had launched earlier that year. I tested it out when it premiered in January. It’s pretty solid. To help with the update, Apple reportedly hired Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor to help redesign the app.
  So, what does the Apple Music service have that my current music-streaming service doesn’t?  Because this service is based on the original Beats product, it focuses heavily on personalization. The original app asked your age and gender to get an idea of what genres resonate with your generation. While it’s unclear if Apple Music will keep those features, it will reportedly greet first-time users with a bunch of bubbles displaying genres. You can select the ones you like, and it stores that information to make smart suggestions. The service will be integrated with your existing music library — including all those deep cuts you ripped during your Phish phase in college — so when you search for a song, the search will include both your personal collection and the entire 26 million-song iTunes catalog. Any song you hear and like can be added to your library. If space allows, you can add it to your offline library. Otherwise it will be stored in the cloud. This just happens to be very similar to what Google Play does with music. Apple hopes to set itself apart with a revamped iTunes Radio. In case you’re unfamiliar, the two-year-old service works kind of like Pandora. You can create your own stations based on genres or artists you’re into. Eventually the program will learn about your interests to make its own suggestions. But you can’t freely search for specific music and play it, and you can only skip six songs in an hour, per station. Overall, it worked as a medium to sample songs and then, if you wanted, buy them in iTunes. And just like the paid Pandora service, the updated version will reportedly allow you to skip tracks an unlimited number of times and provide stations that are exclusively DJed by high-profile celebrities.
Wait, like Bono? Please don’t say Bono While I can never guarantee whether or not Bono will surreptitiously appear in an Apple product, I can tell you that certifiably legit musicians are rumored to be involved with the project. So far the rumored shortlist of station curators include Dr. Dre (easy), Drake, Pharrell Williams, David Guetta, and Q-Tip. This list seems to align with the celebs we’ve seen wearing pricey Apple Watches in the wild, so it’s not entirely out of the question to wish and hope for a station from Beyoncé, too. Cool, so that’s it? Apple is also supposedly resurrecting a hollow shell of its failed social music recommendation feature, Ping. Except this time, the only people who are allowed to have music profiles are the artists themselves (sorry, Aunt Gertrude, you’ll have to find another way to display your love for Huey Lewis and the News). On these artist profiles, musicians can promote themselves, share clips of their own music and tracks from other artists, and premiere music videos. It sounds curiously like a little something called Tidal. And in that case, perhaps we won’t see participation from Queen Bey, after all. But, Drake! Yeah, Drake’s cool, I guess. Anything’s better than Bono.

You Can Customize the Keys to Type Out Anything on This New Keyboard

This is quite possibly the softest hardware keyboard ever made. With its novel e-ink key labels, the Sonder Bluetooth computer keyboard offers visual customization for 50 of its 78 plastic buttons. You can program in what symbols, pictographs, or (lol) letters you want to display on each key, and the keys will change what they display before your eyes. Who, besides emoji maniacs, might want this? Well, those that use multiple shortcut-heavy programs like Adobe Photoshop would be able to bring up the corresponding suite of shortcut icons, for example. It’s pretty clever and could eliminate the exhausting process of memorizing what each key does in each program. Sonder Design touts its keyboard’s ability to create emoji shortcuts keys, with a picture of the emoji displayed right on top. All of its keys can apparently be customized to show an entirely different language with just the flip of some settings.
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The un-customizable keys on Sonder look to be Mac-compatible; you can see the Mac-only “command” button where the Windows key might typically be. Though the company claims the device will work with PCs, it seems more-so catered to Mac typers. That being said, the Sonder keyboard is yet to even launch its Kickstarter campaign, due to go up before the end of the year. Changes could still happen between now and the time the final product hits consumers. You can pre-order a Sonder over at the company’s website for $199, which is more than $1,000 cheaper than this keyboard that does some of the same things. Though with no info to be found about when the keyboard will ship, you may be better off waiting for the Kickstarter to kick-off.

Hands On with Apple Music: Slick, But Nothing Special

This week Apple launched a new subscription-based streaming service named “Apple Music.” For $10 a month you’ll be able to stream any of the 26 million songs on iTunes and store them locally in your music library, so you can listen to them without an Internet connection. You’ll also be able to access playlists curated by real artists and other human beings, listen to the Beats 1 radio station. For $15 a month you can share your subscription with up to five other family members. And to give you plenty of time to test out Apple Music, the company is letting iOS users try it free for their first three months, starting on June 30. (An Android version will be available this fall.) Is it any good? This afternoon, I got an opportunity to play with the much-anticipated app in a shadowy room in Moscone Center. Though 30 minutes was by no means enough time to make or break my opinion of the service, I can say this: Apple Music isn’t unique enough to draw people away from its already well-established competitors. At the most, it’ll be a welcome enhancement for those who are holding onto their existing iTunes libraries for dear life. Siri, play me a tune The advantage to a phone-manufacturer making its own custom music streaming service is that it can integrate some nifty existing features into the mix, like Siri. During today’s keynote presentation, we saw Apple VP Eddy Cue asked Siri to play the top song from 1982. A few seconds later, Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock and Roll” blared from the stage.
In practice, that feature mostly holds up. Though Siri stumbled when I asked for the top song from 1988, she was able to handle a few other questions, even when I didn’t give her specifics. I asked her to “Play that song from that one Whitney Houston movie,” (The Bodyguard), and she automatically brought up “I Will Always Love You.” When I asked for the top pop songs today, it gave me a playlist based on the iTunes Charts. Either way, the Siri integration is a convenient feature. Searching for songs in music libraries can sometimes be arduous, especially if you don’t remember anything but the lyrics or that it was really popular the summer of 85. Honestly, this is one of the only real competitive advantages Apple Music has over other streaming services like Spotify and Rdio. It’s all for you As expected, Apple relied heavily on Beats’ existing app for determining your musical preferences. When you launch Apple Music, you arrive at a section named For You. Here a bunch of deep pink bubbles pop up, each branded with a different genre of music like “Jazz” or “Electronic.” You can tap a few or a lot, and then move on. Based on what you choose, another set of bubbles will populate before you, this time with artists from each of the categories you selected. Choose a couple of those, and that’s all Apple Music will need to start making recommendations.

Birth month may correlate to some diseases (bad news, October)

A new study may have just given you another reason to hate time and your mortality. I feel sorry for people born in or near December. The holidays and their birthdays are almost right on top of each other, so those folks have to wait almost a whole year for their next gift avalanche. Now I've found another reason to pity those birthed around the end of the year, especially those born in October. They might be more susceptible to certain diseases later in life, according to a new study. Columbia University scientists compiled the birthdays and medical records of patients from New York City databases and found that people with May birthdays may have the healthiest outcomes, while people born in October might be at the highest risk for certain diseases. (See chart below for more.) The scientists confirmed 39 previous findings, put forth by similar studies, relating ailments such as ADHD and asthma and certain birth months. They also found 19 new correlations including 9 types of heart disease such as high rates of atrial fibrillation, congestive heart failure and mitral valve disorder for people born in the month of March, according to the study, the results of which were published last Wednesday in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association. The Columbia team scoured the case histories and records of more than 1.7 million patients from the New York Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center who were born in the last millennium. Then they looked for associations between the months of those patients' birthdays and 1,688 diseases using a new computational algorithm developed for their study. While the correlation appears, at least in part, due to the fact that "seasonally dependent early developmental mechanisms may play a role in increasing lifetime risk of disease," Columbia researchers say they plan to expand the study beyond New York City's clogged traffic boundaries (assuming they can actually get through the traffic and out of New York City) in hopes of finding more of the why behind the statistics. Specifically, they plan to apply their algorithms to patient records from other parts of the country and world to see if geographic factors and seasonal patterns impact their results.
As the Columbia study mentioned, researchers have found correlations between certain illnesses and birth months before. One study conducted in 2008 by the Center for Asthma Research and Environmental Health at Vanderbilt University found that children born in the fall, a season when homes tend to get more dust mites, could have a 30 percent higher risk of becoming asthmatic. Another study published in 2012 found that children born at the end of the calendar year may have a higher risk of suffering from ADHD. However, if you fall in one of the less healthy months mentioned in the study, there's no need to wish for the ability to time travel so you can somehow go back and get your parents to hook up earlier in the year. Nicholas Tatonetti, an assistant professor of biomedical informatics at Columbia University's Medical Center and the Data Science Institute who co-authored the study, said these statistics aimed to "uncover new disease risk factors" instead of scare people with October birthdays or convince parents to aim for certain birthdays for their future children.

'Empire,' 'Walking Dead' top TV season on Twitter

AMC's The Walking Dead and Fox's Empire are monster hits, so it's not surprising that they're also huge on Twitter, where Dead ranked as the top premiere and Empire as the most-tweeted-about series episode in the just-ended TV season. Nielsen data out Monday reveals the Oct. 12, 2014, season opener of the zombie hit drew 1.3 million tweets, reaching an audience of 7.4 million users, while Empire's March 18 season finale claimed 2.4 million tweets, the most for any series episode, and reached 5.9 million users. Saturday Night Live's 40th anniversary special had the biggest audience on Twitter for any episode, with 9.1 million. And ABC's The Bachelor, HBO's Game of Thrones and FX's American Horror Story were also among the most popular shows on Twitter, if not on all of TV. '
Empire,' 'Walking Dead' top TV season on Twitter
Nielsen data for the period from Sept. 1, 2014 to May 24 show the Super Bowl, unsurprisingly, was the biggest sports event of the year on the social-media platform as well as TV, where it set another record audience. More than 25 million tweets about the game reached an audience of 16.1 million fans. The Grammy Awards bested the Oscars, at least on Twitter, where 13.4 million tweets reached 13.3 million users.
  The season's top 10 entertainment shows on Twitter (lists average number of tweets per episode, and ranked by unique audience)
 1. The Walking Dead (AMC) 480,000 tweets 4,305,000 audience
 2. The Bachelor (ABC) 156,000 tweets 3,593,000 audience
 3. Game of Thrones (HBO) 107,000 tweets 2,886,000 audience
 4. American Horror Story: Freak Show (FX) 239,000 tweets 2,796,000 audience
 5. Empire (Fox) 627,000 tweets 2,636,000 audience
6. Scandal (ABC) 282,000 tweets 2,428,000 audience
 7. Pretty Little Liars (ABC Family) 268,000 tweets 2,387,000 audience
 8. Parks and Recreation (NBC) 89,000 tweets 2,105,000 audience
 9. WWE Monday Night Raw (USA) 183,000 tweets 1,865,000 audience
 10. Dancing With the Stars (ABC) 93,000 tweets 1,843,000 audience

Samsung Lifts Lid On New Galaxy
The firm - which once dominated but has seen profits fall recently - seeks to woo users with curved screens and wireless charging.
Samsung has unveiled two new flagship smartphones with a host of features aimed at taking on arch-rival Apple. The Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge, revealed at the tech giant's Unpacked event in Barcelona, have ditched the plastic case of previous versions in favour of a premium-look metal body. The latter device has a screen that curves around both edges that will be used to display notifications and other information, including a contacts shortcut. The company claims the smartphones are the most advanced and secure on the market. Samsung has unveiled two new flagship smartphones with a host of features aimed at taking on arch-rival Apple. The Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge, revealed at the tech giant's Unpacked event in Barcelona, have ditched the plastic case of previous versions in favour of a premium-look metal body. The latter device has a screen that curves around both edges that will be used to display notifications and other information, including a contacts shortcut. The company claims the smartphones are the most advanced and secure on the market.

Microsoft doubles down on affordable smartphones