San Francisco

Gregor Blanco had a pinch hit, two-run triple in the seventh inning, leading the San Francisco Giants to a 4-2 victory over the San Diego Padres on Wednesday.

July 9-10, 2013 San Francisco, CA Tickets On Sale Now Shopping for clothes online can easily turn into a downward spiral of frustration. “Buying engine” TheFind has unveiled its new iPad app that seeks to turn e-commerce into pleasant shopping experience. TheFind was founded in 2005 back in the early days of e-commerce. It applies machine learning and semantic search to shopping, crawling the web and collecting information on over 500 million products from 500,000 stores. Shoppers enter search terms and filters and the system will surface what you are looking for and provide product comparisons. Sources like Amazon and Google feature content based on advertising, while e-commerce sites like Fab, Polyvore, Wanelo, and Zazzle rely on social activity to make recommendations. TheFind’s goal is to help shoppers find exactly what they are looking for, along with relevant discounts. TheFind gets 18 million unique visitors a month. Director of Corporate Communications Usher Lieberman said in an interview with VentureBeat that 30 percent of TheFind’s traffic is now mobile and its iPad traffic has grown by more than 250 percent in the last year. He said that the iPad will become the device that people use to shop but there are no apps yet that make the most of this opportunity. “An app like this will be destructive in e-commerce,” Lieberman said. “Tablet shopping has exploded, but shopping in the browser just isn’t going to cut it. Our app can fundamentally provide a better experience by cutting across all stores with personalized search, making check out easy, and storing your information. We want this iPad app to become the defacto starting point for shopping and ultimately a daily habit.” eMarketer found that global e-commerce sales topped $1 trillion in 2012 and the numbers are continuing to rise. Mobile commerce is an important part of this trend. Gartner predicted that by 2015 more tablets will be sold than PCs and the Bank of America forecasted that American and European shoppers will spend $67.1 billion on smartphone and tablet purchases in 2015. Despite this momentum, mobile commerce is still held back by a few key obstacles. Many retailers do not offer sites optimized for tablets and checkout is still frustrating. TheFind put a lot of focus into a creating a user-friendly, secure, and seamless checkout process within the app to create an overall experience that encourages browsers to buy. Behind the scenes, natural language processing technology helps to identify and cluster products so you only receive relevant results. By combining metadata about each product with your own preferences and social graph, TheFind could ultimately show you things you want, without even knowing you wanted them. TheFind is based in Mountain View, California and has raised a total of $26 million from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, and Cambrian Ventures. Filed under: Business, Lifestyle, Mobile .boilerplate-before .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat { width:278px; margin:0px 0px 10px 20px; padding:10px; float:right; border:1px solid #e4e4e4; font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif; color:#000; } .boilerplate-before .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat .logo-date-wrap { width:100%; display:block; float:left; margin-bottom:8px; } .boilerplate-before .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat img { float:left; } .boilerplate-before .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat .date-location { float:right; font-size:12px; line-height:14px; text-align:center; padding-left:7px; padding-top:5px; padding-bottom:3px; border-left:1px solid #e6e6e6; color:#585a5b; } .boilerplate-before .event-boilerplate-mobilebeat .cta { display:block; clear:both; width:100%; border-radius:5px; border:1px solid #1864b1; color:#fff; text-shadow: 0px -1px 0px rgba(0,0,0,0.3); text-align:center; text-decoration:none; font-weight:600; font-size:18px; line-height:17px; padding:4px 0px 6px 0px; background: #1f80e4; background: -moz

Only two National League relievers since the end of 1983 have thrown six or more innings of one-hit ball - and arguably, neither were "really" relievers. One was the renowned "power outage" game in San Diego back in 2001, when a transformer blew during a Curt Schilling start after two innings, causing play to be suspended for the night. The next day, Randy Johnson took the mound and threw seven shutout innings, allowing one hit, for the most bizarre one-hitter ever in franchise history. Oh, and Johnson struck out sixteen: no other reliever in the live-ball era had ever K'd more than 13, and even that was more than 50 years ago now. So, not a genuine relief outing. The other was on May 4, 2002, and was somewhat more legitimate. Jason Schmidt started for the Giants against the Reds in San Francisco, but could only get two outs in the first inning - seems he was coming off a groin injury. He was replaced by Ryan Jensen, who then shut the Reds down on one hit until the end of the seventh inning, throwing 93 pitches, with one walk. There's a "however" here too, in that Jensen was almost exclusively a starter - 30 of 32 games that season - whose scheduled start a couple of days earlier just happened to fall on an off-day, and had been skipped by the Giants. Collmenter has done nothing but relieve this season. Outside of the Big Unit's outing, only two relievers in Diamondbacks' history have had five-inning appearances. Josh Collmenter this season is both of them. He worked five innings in the opening series against the Cardinals, picking up the W for his one-run effort, on four hits and two walks. But this afternoon was even better. Admittedly, the Marlins offense is one of the most historically awful of all-time - their current wRC+ of 69 is the worst in over 90 years - but they are still, at least in name, a major-league outfit. The fact that the game was scoreless, meaning the go-ahead run was at the plate every single time he took the mound, made it even more impressive. So it's not the first time Collmenter has been an absolute life-saver. Just earlier this month, in St. Louis, he threw four scoreless innings against the Cardinals, picking up the victory as we won in 14 innings. That got him a Win Probability of over +50%, only the fourth time ever an Arizona bullpen arm has reached that level of WP. It looks like his figure for the game today will be over +40%, for the second time this season, putting him alongside Jose Valverde and Byung-Hyun Kim as Arizona relievers with more than one appearance of that importance. His 2013 figure of +144% puts him in the top ten NL relievers for that statistic. That's in part because Collmenter has been particularly good when the game is on the line, with the scores tied. Including today, he has now kept opposing hitters there to a .172 average, allowed just one extra-base hit (a double) in 58 at-bats, and owns a K:BB ratio in such situations of 18:4. Frankly, I have much more current confidence in Josh's ability to put up a zero when it counts, than I do in Heath Bell. But he has also been a massive innings eater: Collmenter is now on pace for 91.5 innings in relief this year, a figure reached only once by a "pure" reliever in this league since 2007 (Matt Belisle threw 92 for the 2010 Rockies). Today was a perfect example why Collmenter is, perhaps, the unsung hero of the team thus far. Trevor Cahill was unable to complete the first at-bat in the second inning after being hit on the hip by a line-drive: even with an off-day tomorrow, it would have been a fraught process to piece together eight innings from "normal" relievers, used to one-inning stints. But Collmenter took care of almost all the heavy lifting, and produced arguably the best relief performance in team history. Indeed, had it been a start, it would have resulted in a Game Score of 76 - tied for third-best of the year by a Diamondback [trailing only Corbin and McCarthy's complete games] Enjoy your off-day, Josh: for you

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Nobody likes a cheater.Especially not baseball fans, as you can tell by the way they treat players who have only even been linked to performance-enhancing drugs. For baseball fans, juicers are subhuman monsters.But it doesn't necessarily have to last forever. Fans don't forget, but they have shown a willingness to forgive.Case in point, there aren't that many fans who are still ticked off at Jason Giambi and Andy Pettitte. They were revealed to be PED users a few years back and caught hell for it, but now they're both fan favorites.Even Alex Rodriguez had his fair share of public support not too long ago. He sunk to a low in early 2009 when he admitted to using PEDs during his Texas Rangers days, but several months later he was riding the high of being a World Series hero.There are lessons to be learned from these three guys alone about how those cast as cheaters can get back on the good side of the fans. It all boils down to a relatively simple four-step process. Phase One: Own Up to It, and Do It the Right WayFor players who are linked to or caught using PEDs, there's no way to totally avoid outrage. The fans are going to be outraged no matter what.But at the same time, there's that one word that everyone loves: accountability. Baseball fans are always going to scream and whine at mistakes, but they'll scream and whine a little more softly if mistakes are worn.Pettitte's response in 2007 to being named in the Mitchell Report, for example, was perfect. The report alleged that he had used HGH, and Pettitte came right out and A) admitted that he had indeed used HGH on two occasions and B) apologized for it."If what I did was an error in judgment on my part, I apologize," Pettitte said in a statement to the Associated Press. "I accept responsibility for those two days."Pettitte's explanation for using HGH also struck a few sympathetic chords, as he claimed to use it not to get an edge but to get healthy. He probably could have stopped and left it at that, but he chose to go one more extra mile when spring training rolled around.The very first day Pettitte reported to spring training with the New York Yankees, he put himself in front of reporters and held court with them for an hour. Here's the Associated Press' account of the session: [Pettitte] patiently spent 55½ minutes explaining what he had done and why he did it. 'I felt like I need to come out, be forward with this,' Pettitte said. 'Whatever circumstances or repercussions come with it, I'll take and I'll take like a man and I'll try to do my job.' Other athletes have ducked tough questions about allegations of drug use, using evasions and nonspecific replies. Pettitte admitted his mistakes and several times patiently asked reporters, 'Did I answer your question?' Pettitte's willingness to face the heat drew rave reviews from the Houston Chronicle, which wrote: Andy is a man of such decency and humility that it’s impossible not to admire the things he has attempted to stand for. He admitted his mistakes and asked for forgiveness. What else can he do?There are still people out there who hold a grudge against Pettitte, and there likely always will be. But Yankees fans certainly love him, and you generally don't hear boos raining down on Pettitte when he starts on the road. His villainy, which was iffy to begin with, has been largely forgotten.Jason Giambi, another villain-turned-fan-favorite, also helped clear his name by being accountable. When the San Francisco Chronicle leaked Giambi's 2003 grand jury testimony from the BALCO case in the winter of 2004, the world found out that he didn't try to hide anything. He talked about his relationship with the infamous Greg Anderson, and he didn't try to insult anyone's intelligence by saying that he didn't know what he was being given."I don't know if we got into a conversation about it, but we both knew about it, yes," Giambi said when he was asked if he knew the testosterone Anderson had provided him was basically a

As software-defined networking (SDN) startups such as Big Switch and Embrane make headway and headlines, Juniper and other big network gear vendors have been responding with big visions and insider consortiums. In doing so, Juniper is looking to help companies bring ease and scalability to their networks just as compute and storage are becoming easier to control. As companies get excited about transforming their on-premise infrastructure into private clouds, this is becoming more obvious, Bob Muglia, executive vice president of Juniper’s software solutions division, told GigaOM Research Analyst David Linthum at GigaOM’s Structure conference in San Francisco on Wednesday. “They want to have the agility associated with what they can get from building a cloud, but the network is holding them back,” Muglia said. “And SDN is the solution to that.” As Muglia sees it, SDN could enable developers keen on deploying a new application to spin up compute, storage and networking services in a matter of 15 minutes, instead of two days, using on-premise infrastructure. But while Juniper is striving to look good in front of its customers and the general network community with its SDN doings, Muglia punctured the hype bubble around the networking protocol that kicked off the wave of interest in SDN in the first place. OpenFlow is nothing but a protocol, and Juniper already supports 270 of those. “This is the 271st,” Muglia said. Indeed, its forthcoming JunosV Contrail controller does not support OpenFlow, although it could be added later. The controller is expected to become available in the second half of this year, under a new licensing model. Looking ahead three years, Muglia said he thinks Juniper will be even more of a software company. That’s well and good, but it doesn’t guarantee that Juniper customers will stick around and hold back on paying less for white-box gear. Check out the rest of our Structure 2013 live coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below: Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.The promise of SDNs in the enterpriseTakeaways from the second quarter in cloud and dataHow intelligent networks address enterprise cloud issues

Summer can be a drag in San Francisco, where the June Gloom often puts a damper on one's mood well into July and August. Luckily, sunnier and less windy weather is usually just a short drive away in any direction. Here are seven of our favorite getaway spots, we know you'll have your own to share in the comments. [ more › ]

Although we cannot officially confirm the origin nor flavor of said beverage, the Examiner reports that a milkshake, or similar blended dessert drink, played an integral part in a stabbing on Jones Street in Fisherman's Wharf. [ more › ]

Formula retail. You know: chains. They're a hot topic in S.F. right now with many rules changing every month. The Planning Department is at the messy center of the debate, and hoping, eventually, to have a citywide policy everyone can agree on. [ more › ]

JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE:JPM): Current price $53.55 Bank of America Corporation has recruited Anwar Zakkour away from JPMorgan to be co-chief of global telecommunications, media and technology investment banking, said a memo obtained by Bloomberg. Zakkour will stay based in New York, and will report to the global head of investment banking, Christian Meissner, according to the memo, the contents of which were affirmed by a Bank of America spokesperson. His co-chief will be Chet Bozdog, who is presently head of global tech investment banking. Data compiled by Bloomberg indicate that Bank of America lags JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs Group in advising on mergers and acquisitions. Are these stocks a buy or sell? Let us help you decide. Wells Fargo & Co. (NYSE:WFC): Current price $40.66 As it continues to back its Global Financial Institution customers, Wells Fargo’s International Group, which forms a part of Wells Fargo & Co., is commemorating the 25th anniversary of its Overseas Bankers Training Program. Through this program, Wells Fargo invites select bankers from its GFI customers to San Francisco and supplies education and training in topics among which are credit analysis, risk management, cross sell and trends in international banking. The 2013 participants came from banks throughout Asia, including China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Laos, Malaysia, Philippines and Taiwan. Are these stocks a buy or sell? Let us help you decide. MasterCard Incorporated (NYSE:MA): Current price $586.37 On Wednesday, MasterCard announced the naming of Gilberto Caldart as president of its Latin America and Caribbean business, effective August 1st. Caldart presently heads the firm’s GeoSouth Division, comprised of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay, for MasterCard LAC, and will report to President Ann Cairns of MasterCard’s International Markets. He takes the place of Richard Hartzell, who will assume a new role as the chief of MasterCard’s business with merchants and acquirers across its international markets. Are these stocks a buy or sell? Let us help you decide. American International Group (NYSE:AIG): Current price $44.81 Following an analyst meeting with Chief Executive Peter Hancock of AIG’s property-casualty division, Deutsche Bank upgraded its price target from $52 to $56, according to a note to investors on Tuesday by analyst Joshua Shanker. The analyst is “more confident” that AIG is ahead of schedule on its plan to boost margins in its property-casualty unit after meeting with Hancock, and also predicted that the firm will begin paying a dividend of 17 cents per share in the third quarter. Are these stocks a buy or sell? Let us help you decide. Check out our Stock Picker Newsletter now. Don’t Miss: Did Bank of America Purposely Delay Applications for Mortgage Aid? Read the original article from Wall St. Cheat Sheet