The Los Angeles housing market is swinging back into shape after imploding during the financial crash. Homes are selling for more than a million dollars in West L.A. and hitting above the million and a half mark in Beverly Hills.

Recovery is underway even in low-income areas such as South L.A., which was stung particularly hard by predatory loans and foreclosures. Prices have crept up to the pre-bust levels of 2005. And just like 10 years ago, residents today want to become homeowners. But realtors are finding there just aren’t enough homes go around.

“Any home that’s halfway decent is selling,” said realtor Leon Higgins, who’s worked in South L.A. for 15 years. “But you still have more buyers than what’s available to sell.” [Read more…]

The California Department of Transportation is planning to build a 63-mile highway that will link the Antelope Valley and the Victor Valley.

The High Desert Corridor Project, a collective project of Los Angeles County Metropolitan and Caltrans, is designed to connect the fastest growing residential areas such as Lancaster, Adelanto and Victorville to serve passengers who travel across Mojave desert.

The project that will include solar installations, charging stations for electric cars and bike lane, is designed to connect two proposed high-speed rail system, the road and several cities across the Mohave Desert.

But with the cost of $8 billion, is the ambitious transportation project feasible?

Last months, county officials released a report about the project.

According to the plan, the highway will run through the City of Palmdale and will connect Fresno, Burbank and San Bernardino County.

Palmdale will play a role of a transportation hub, with a station that will link the Palmdale Transpiration Center and Metrolink trains, the report stated.

The High Desert Corridor will connect the highway with the terminal at the Palmdale Regional Airport, which Metro officials are planning to open again after it was closed for six years. 

On their website, Metro officials said highway will cost from $4 billion to $8 billion. The construction of the four-lane freeway will start in four years and will be completed by 2024. 

As the population of the Antelope Valley will grow 50 percent by 2020, the highway might be seen as a chance to push for the commercial and economic growth. Antelope Valley officials, a city known for its gravitation towards innovations, were pushing for the project.

The highway will stretch through 3,200 acres of land, an area that doesn’t include the railway that will occupy additional area.

The highway will run through 252 acres of farmland and 2,9000 acres of grazing land, that might become a disturbance with natural inhabitants such as Golden Eagle and desert tortoise.

But the major problem for the agency in charge is still ahead: Metro is the leading agency of the proposal are required to submit a route and get the funding.

By spring Metro will announce its decision on the route of the freeway.

The biggest concern is the financing, which is very unclear at this point.

The Metro High Desert Corridor posted on their website that the estimated cost will be included in the Environmental Impact report is which is currently underway.

Officials are planning to allocate $30 million from Measure R, a half-cent sales tax passed in 2009 that contributes to financing the county’s transportation projects.

But some critics say the project will more likely heavily depend on the private financing.

Environmental activists might also oppose the project.

Transportation official noted in the report that solar panels will be installed along the freeway, and creators hope they will produce energy for charging stations, according to the Metro’s website. 

With the solar panels producing energy for streetlights and  electric cars charging stations, Metro officials say they hope the highway will be self-sustaining and bring new economic opportunities to the region.

The newest version of WeChat, China’s biggest messaging communication service, brought a bringing a new video capture and sharing feature called Sight. Holding a button to a 6-second video clip and share, sounds familiar?- yes, it’s basically just Vine.

Already impacting the overseas market, Vine’s potential is undeniable. Kids with huge numbers of followers are a great medium to promote a product. Vine, as a simple video-sharing platform, is everything advertisers want.

Sixteen-year-old Lauren Giraldo has 2.8 million followers on her Vine account. Her fans love the six-second videos she posts on Vine, which show what she describes in her profile as “my random life.” The latest clips include her trip to Europe, dancing in a wired cloak, and attending concerts. Whether you like it or not, she has 2.8 million people following these abrupt snippets of her life. The account started as a hobby for her, but she now makes about $2,000 per sponsored vine by simply clicking on the “re-vine” button to share her sponsor’s video.

Vine’s parent company is Twitter. Twitter acquired Vine in October 2012 for $30 million in a move widely viewed as a counter to Facebook’s presence in the mobile messaging market. The easiest comparison to Vine is Facebook’s photo-sharing service, Instagram. Instagam stepped into Vine’s territory in December 2012 by launching similar video functionality with a 15-second length.

In terms of functionality, the biggest difference is that Instagram can share videos that are 15 seconds in length as compared to Vine’s six seconds. Instagram also retains many of its photo-sharing options for this new video-sharing functionality, such as filters, importing videos, image stabilization, save to camera roll, and so on. Vine, meanwhile, could not be simpler, with only a “save to camera roll” option.

Instagram users can share posts to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, email, foursquare, etc., but Vine’s sharing platform is limited to Facebook and Twitter. This could be a reason that brands on Twitter refer to Instagram more than Vine. In a study looking at how often brands posted on Twitter using Instagram or Vine between November 2013 and February 2014, the statistics shows there are 4 times as many brand accounts using Instagram to advertise than Vine.

After Instagram’s short video service debuted last year, the company now offers two forms of content sharing. Vine still offers its signature 6-second videos, which, one could argue, is no longer as big a draw.

However, on June 7, 2013, four days after Android released a new version of Vine on its system. Vine reached the milestone of having more vines shared on Twitter than were Instagram pictures and videos combined. The user base is still growing, and, with its monetization trend, Vine could be Twitter’s best weapon for holding its valuation in the long term.

As simple it is, Vine seems more interested in giving creators a platform to make more interesting and creative moving imagery. In particular, content that is more “idea oriented.” The 6-second length can be viewed as a challenge, but it can also push users to squeeze only the most useful and important information into the video. In comparison, Instagram’s user base is more likely to document the details of their life no matter how seemingly trivial. The most-shared posts typically revolve around coffee, pets, family party, feet, hands, selfies, and other aspects of users’ daily lives.

Despite having fewer features than Instagram’s new service, Vine’s looping and embeddable function makes it easier to embed content to other websites, circumventing the limitations on sharable platforms to some degree.

Six seconds, looping, idea-oriented: these features are what advertisers are looking for. It mimics the powerful technique of sound-bite advertising, which is characterized by repeating a short phrase or sentence that captures the essence of a certain topic.

Vine, to some extent, achieves that effect. Instagram users upload pictures more than videos, and many users don’t watch videos on Instagram because they tend to take up more memory. Vine videos are very small — usually taking up only bytes. Without so many filters, playing in a loop, users might watch the GIF-like video multiple times, something marketers crave.

People often compare Vine to Instagram because they both offer short video sharing platforms. But in essence Vine is more like YouTube, a platform to share creative video content. The comparison is somewhat ridiculous, though, because there’s no way to put Vine’s 40 million active users into the same context as YouTube’s 1 billion active users per month.

Vine is now in its early stages of growth, but based on the speed at which the number of households with computers, tablets, or smartphones that can film videos is growing, Vine could reach YouTube’s scale much faster than YouTube did. With the now-rapid pace of adoption in the digitalization era, Vine was born in a good age.

 

May 2012, Facebook’s IPO turned into a huge Wall Street debacle and plumped to $17.73 that summer. Today, the tech giant’s stock price has remained around $76 since this July, doubling the company’s IPO price of $38.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg belled ringer by his mobile strategy. When the social network went public, almost all its revenue came from desktop-based ads. But with more than 500 million people consuming Facebook portably, Zuckerberg needed to transition his business.

And that transition to mobile business turned out to be smooth and successful. What has been doubled is not only its stock price, also its mobile active users — around one billion people are actively using Facebook mobile app. What’s more, the social network’s mobile ad revenue takes up more than two-thirds of its total ad revenue. Facebook’s share of total mobile advertising market is predicted to pass 12 percent in 2014, quadrupling that in 2012. That makes Facebook the biggest beneficiary of the mobile age.

Google is another big player of mobile advertising. But its mobile ad revenue accounts for only one-third of its total ad revenue and the price tag on Google’s mobile ads are much less than that of its desktop ads, according to The New York Times. From Facebook’s perspective, things look completely different: one year after its IPO, Facebook’s VP of global marketing solutions Carolyn Everson claimed that Facebook’s mobile ads cost more than desktop ads.

The new auto-playing video product is helping Facebook’s mobile monetization as well. The company wrote in a blog post that its 15-second Premium Video Ads will start playing without sound in the News Feed, and the sound will start only when users tap the video.

The company started testing premium video ads last December and introduced these ads on Facebook with a select group of advertisers this May. Facebook will sell and measure the ads “in a way that’s similar to how advertisers already buy and measure ads on TV.” This new function targets “advertisers who want to reach a large audience with high-quality sight, sound and motion.”

Facebook-owned Instagram’s performance will also charge the giant’s mobile business ahead. The photo-sharing app, with 150 million active users, only started to play ads last November. Michael Kors and Ben & Jerry’s are Instagram’s early-stage clients. Spending $1 billion on Instagram two years ago, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has every reason to expect the photo-sharing app bringing in real dollars.

This March, Instagram made a 40 million digital ad deal with Omnicom, a major holding company having a great many big-brand clients, including Nissan, AT&T and Pepsi, and looking to establish a strong relationship with the growing mobile platform. Instagram will be displaying video ads some time as well, just as its parent does.

For today’s Facebook, “Every moment is mobile.”

The day after Thanksgiving, otherwise known as “Black Friday,” was anticipated to reach record sales. The economy is improving, gas prices are low, and the savings were enticing; however, in the end, consumer spending disappointingly did not satisfy the hype for retail profits. Although there are multiple ways to analyze consumer habits during the holidays, Cyber Monday came out on top as the big money maker during the weekend shopping frenzy.

The one-day shopping event of the year has morphed into a week of savings. Thanksgiving has become “Gray Thursday,” then there is the penultimate “Black Friday,” followed by “Small Business Saturday,” and “Cyber Monday.” Although the intention is to initiate the spending spree early, the result may be less spending overall because the consumer expects better savings for a later day.

According to the National Retail Federation, spending on Black Friday was approximately 11% less than a year earlier. Consumer spending was $50.9 billion over the Thanksgiving weekend, compared to $57.4 billion in 2013.

The competition for retail stores to get consumers in their doors is increasingly difficult as shopping online is both easier to scope out deals, and can be done in one’s pajamas on the couch. With the lower price of gas, expectations were higher for in-store traffic, but this was not the case. According to IBM Digital Analytics, sales grew 8.5% on Cyber Monday, making it the largest online shopping day of the year. Holiday shopping online rose 17% to a record $2.04 billion – shedding light on consumer habits.

Although sales faltered on Black Friday, the amount consumers plan to spend on gifts has slowly increased the last couple years, showing the “gift-giving” is still alive in the American economy. The American Research group quantified a series of consumer habits for the holidays, including the trend for spending more money on gifts for 2014.

As consumers are shifting from in-store spending habits to online, it is evident that shopping overall is down from previous years. This, in part, could be due to shifting consumer priorities for their dispensable income. In an interview with Macy’s CFO, Karen Hoguet, she stated, “Shoppers are spending more of their disposable dollars on categories we don’t sell, like cars, healthcare, electronics and home improvement.” This seems to show that even though the economy is improving, it doesn’t mean consumers aren’t entirely comfortable with spending their income on nonessential goods.

There are many other trends to size up the economy during the holidays, including the amount of money consumers are willing to spend on Christmas trees. The desire to bring some holiday cheer to one’s home can be used as an economic indicator. For example, spending money on a fake tree tends to be more economical when you can put up the same tree (with the same pre-hung lights) for many years to come. Although the sales of real trees still dominate this market, the trend to buy a fake tree has increased while the sales for real trees is on the decline.

A final last thought to wrap up the economics of the holidays– need help picking out a Christmas gift for a loved one? According to Joel Waldfogel, author of the books, “Scroogenomics,” people value gifts about 20% less than the price tag number. In his own words, Waldfogel believes, “The choice to buy presents turns out to destroy a lot of value.” It does sound a bit scrooge-like, but maybe giving a gift card isn’t impersonal after all – it’s just economical.

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Affordable Care Act (ACA) or “Obamacare,” is a revolutionary regulation aimed to change the landscape of American healthcare system.

The two major changes under ACA include expanding the number of subsidies available to people with lower income, and also providing insurance to people regardless of their pre-existing conditions. The Obama government wishes to enroll more people into the healthcare system through the establishment of ACA, and thus cover the deficit the government has been spending on healthcare industry. However, is it really going to work? Probably not.

If we take a closer look at how ACA works, we will be able to see the problem. The fundamental principal of Affordable Care Act is to use the money from young and healthy people to pay for the bill of unhealthy or elder people who have higher medical costs. Hence, the health insurance company should enroll younger demographics to balance the risk pool. According to a research conducted by California Association of Health Plans, people in their 20s will experience an increase in premiums by 33% under Affordable Care Act, whereas elder people will see an decrease in their cost of premiums. Now, here comes the question, will young and healthy people who only spend a small amount of money every year on visiting hospitals or doctors be willing to pay more for health insurance? Moreover, will they be able to pay that amount of money since they just start to live on their own? I guess most young people will find that hard.

In fact, although the health plan premiums for young people grow by over 30%, the benefits under ACA also increase by 42%, which means the health company is able to provide members with better services and networks. However, it seems that young people don’t care much about the benefits. According to a survey conducted by USC Annenberg students, the issue that concerns young people the most is the cost of health insurance. They use the word “expansive” frequently to describe the healthcare system. And most people admit that it’s the high cost of insurance that prevent them from enrolling in it.

Some people may argue that there are subsidies available for young people with limited income. Yes, there are. But the truth is, for those who earn a little more than the poverty line, it’s hard for them to choose whether to earn more with no subsidy or to earn less with a small amount of subsidy. More importantly, for those healthy people who usually don’t have health problem, they would rather end up with paying penalties instead of purchasing health insurance, which is far more expansive than the penalty.

All in all, the Affordable Care Act alone couldn’t make the healthcare system operate better. If the government tries to enroll more young people, they should definitely invest more on educating younger demographics the importance of purchasing health insurance. As long as people feel the necessity of doing so, they will be willing to purchase the health insurance initiatively.