Coach Darrell Sutherland and his staff have built the Bartram Trail High School football program into a perennial playoff team.
This year shouldn't be any different as the Bears are expected to make it to the postseason.? The Bears are anchored by senior QB P.J. Blazejowski, senior LB Will Tillo, and Senior OL Jesse Burkett.? All three players are featured in the video clip within this story.
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Former number one draft selection Greg Oden took the first step to returning to the NBA by signing a two-year contract with the Miami. Still, there's a long road ahead for the big man. Will an assignment or two the NBA D-League be in the cards for him?
It's all too easy to take advantage and/or manipulate some of the top stories in the NBA into eye-popping headlines.
In the case of Greg Oden and the potential of the big man spending time in the NBA D-League, however, there's undoubtedly a relevant connection.
The former number one overall draft selection took the first step to officially returning to the NBA and proving he simply isn't another bust on Friday night. Oden announced he agreed to join the defending NBA champion Miami Heat, signing a two year contract. Such a pact will include a minimum contract for the first year, and a player option for the second.
It goes without saying that such a snag is a low-risk, high-reward move for Miami. If anything positive can be taken away at this point, the Heat should gain satisfaction over the fact Oden choose them over a handful of other potential NBA destinations.
There's certain to be a long road ahead with regard to proving himself yet again for Oden. That said, what's most in Miami's favor right now is the fact that if the big man can even re-emerge as a shell of his former self, he stands to still be one of the better backup big men in the NBA.
Defensively, Oden undeniably has shown the potential of being a game-changer in the past. Though the Heat like to play small ball with the likes of Chris Bosh and Udonis Haslem at center, it could be argued that the team is more so forced to do so than anything. The now former Blazers' center would provide the defending champs with more flexibility and further options. If he's able to get himself back into shape and prove to be capable enough of playing twenty minutes or so per contest, perhaps he would even be provided with a few spot starts here or there.
But first, Oden needs to focus on re-adjusting back to the speed of the professional level. Fresh off entering a single affiliation with the Sioux Falls Skyforce, perhaps the Heat will suggest the NBA D-League be the big man's starting point.
While sharing the Skyforce with multiple NBA teams last season, Miami still managed to assign the likes of Dexter Pittman and Jarvis Varnado to the NBADL. They obviously not only trust the organization, but also believe in what the minor league should truly be utilized for.
Oden would arguably become the highest profile player the D-League has ever seen and/or hosted. Still, his situation and the scenario which he's in are also perhaps taylor made for what the minor league aims to do.
While he would stand to make major contributions if fully healthy and ready to go, the Heat won't pressure Oden to make any type of serious impact early on. Perhaps with that in mind, an assignment or two to Sioux Falls would be better use of everyone's time earlier in the season to help Oden on his road back.
After all, what Oden needs is practice, more court time, and experience against worthy competition yet again. The D-League would be able to provide all of that, and perhaps even more, too.
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(Reuters) - U.S. states are showing wide variations on the cost of new insurance plans under President Barack Obama's healthcare reform, fueled by the way Obamacare's supporters and detractors describe those prices.
Below are details of how different states arrived at their rate statistics for 2014.
STATES SUPPORTIVE OF OBAMACARE
California: Rates in plans available to individuals will range from 2 percent above to 29 percent below the average 2013 premiums that small employers pay in California's most populated areas. Critics said that when compared to plans currently available on the individual insurance market, the new rates will be far higher. California officials said such a calculation does not take into account the new requirements of Obamacare plans, including wider benefits and a ban on rejecting people due to prior illnesses.
New York: Approved rates for the plans closest to the ones on the market now - the highest tier "gold" or "platinum" plans - are at least 53 percent less than previous rates. Only about 17,000 individuals currently buy insurance directly in New York and the state is counting on 1 million to sign up in the next 3 years, a contributing factor in the price reduction. New York's prices, which start at more than $1,000 per month, have been higher than the national average in part because of existing regulations requiring insurers to take all applicants regardless of health.
Maryland: In a July 26 announcement, Maryland's Insurance Administration focused on the fact that it had lowered rates by about 33 percent during the rate review process by taking an active role in discussions with health insurers. But when compared to the average price of 2013 products, insurer rates are set to rise in a range of 4 percent to 15 percent. The state's pressure on insurers has led Aetna Inc to drop out of the exchange rather than cut its proposed 2014 rates by 29 percent.
STATES CRITICAL OF OBAMACARE
Ohio: Ohio's Department of Insurance said this week that individuals buying health insurance on the exchange that the federal government is running for the state will pay an average of 41 percent more than they did in 2013. This represents an average of the cost of currently-sold policies at the end of 2012 and those submitted for the exchange.
Florida: Florida's Office of Insurance Regulation said that rates for individuals will rise about 30 to 40 percent next year over prices it estimated for the current individual market. Because policies in the state vary so much in coverage terms, the regulator's office modeled a fictional plan for the current market that assumed the same coverage requirements under Obamacare and compared that with proposed rates for a mid-tier, or silver, plan in 2014.
Georgia: Georgia's Department of Insurance said that rates could rise as much as 198 percent over policies now available to individuals. Officials said that the insurance premiums for a 25-year-old male currently in a high-deductible plan would rise up to 198 percent in 2014 and rates for many others could rise by 20 percent to 100 percent. The government has said that young males, who traditionally have paid the least for insurance, will probably pay more next year as underwriting standards change.
(Reporting by Caroline Humer; Additional reporting by Sharon Begley; Editing by Jim Loney)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/factbox-states-over-map-obamacare-prices-213922777.html
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All Critics (78) | Top Critics (25) | Fresh (76) | Rotten (2)
Blackfish is intended to rattle and provoke in the hopes of bringing about change.
"Blackfish" is grim. But then again, so is the plight of these magnificent, intelligent whales.
Informative, earnest, but less than briskly paced.
"Blackfish" makes a compelling case that the cruelty of life in captivity is the cause for a rash of fatal attacks by orcas on their trainers, aggressive behavior that no so-called killer whale ever has exhibited in the wild.
Its ultimate message is clear: Killer whales belong with their families in their natural habitat, not performing for audiences. After listening to this film's many impassioned voices, it's hard to argue.
It not only delivers astonishing, suspenseful footage that makes it a legitimate thriller, but also serves up thoughtful meditations about using wild animals for our own entertainment.
Depressingly unsurprising.
While Blackfish isn't exactly riveting, it is thought-provoking and leaves you with the urge to admire nature in its natural habitat rather than in a contained environment.
A repetitive but still compelling piece of activist filmmaking.
An engrossing look at animal behavior.
It is gripping and thought-provoking.
As enlightening and passionate as the picture is, Cowperthwaite fails to summon the type of comprehensive journalism this type of story deserves.
The one save-the-whales movie to see when you only have time for one.
There aren't too many animal-rights documentaries that could be described as "metal," but Blackfish, one part horror movie and one part nature film, fits the bill and then some.
Cowperthwaite juxtaposes to devastating effect official PR spin with news reports and eye-witness accounts of marine park tragedies.
[An] impressive, often gripping documentary ...
Engrossing when offers alarming CSI-type forensic analysis into the death of a whale trainer [but] the narrow focus on SeaWorld raises more questions that aren't considered.
Through interviews with whale scientists and several former Sea World trainers, [Cowperthwaite] paints a disturbing picture of the profit-minded climate of deceit that prevailed at the company.
Puts 'killer whales' into wildlife and humanitarian perspective while giving you all of the dangerous action sequences you could possible want. Free Willy, it ain't.
Blackfish marries biography, activism and psycho thriller into a pleasing cinematic shape, starting with a single whale and the trainers who worked with him.
Some of the archive footage is exceedingly harrowing, but the case against commercially condoned cruelty is made without sensationalism, and few will be able to watch this without a growing sense of outrage.
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Source: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/blackfish_2013/
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama intends to nominate defense industry executive and former congressional aide Deborah Lee James as secretary of the U.S. Air Force, the White House said on Thursday.
James heads the technology and engineering sector at Science Applications International Corp and has been an executive with the company since 2004, the White House said.
She was assistant secretary of defense for reserve affairs from 1993 to 1998.
"Deborah's strong record of public service and leadership in the private sector makes her uniquely qualified to be my nominee for Secretary of the Air Force," Obama said in a statement.
Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel called James "an outstanding leader with deep experience in the Department of Defense, the private sector, and non-profit organizations that support the men and women of our armed services."
If confirmed, James would become the second woman to head the Air Force since its founding in 1947. The first was Sheila Widnall, who served in the job from August 1993 to October 1997. James currently serves on a Pentagon advisory committee on women in the services.
She previously worked for Business Executives for National Security, a non-profit group that advocates for homeland security programs. In addition to 10 years of service on the House Armed Services Committee, James also worked at United Technologies Corp.
Mackenzie Eaglen, an analyst with the American Enterprise Institute, said she was encouraged that the White House had quickly chosen a successor for former Air Force Secretary Michael Donley after his departure at the end of June.
"The Air Force has too many senior billets vacant and it's hurting all of the service's priorities, including budget, strategy and readiness," she said.
Eaglen said tighter budgets were squeezing the Air Force nearly as much as the Army, which appears to be bearing the brunt of big budget reductions in recent years.
"The service needs a competent leader who can be confirmed quickly and start throwing their weight around in the Pentagon budget debates," she said.
The Air Force has had a turbulent time in recent years, dealing with an array of acquisition problems and sexual assault scandals.
(Reporting by Jeff Mason and Andrea Shalal-Esa; Editing by Jackie Frank and Eric Beech)
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/obama-nominate-deborah-lee-james-air-force-secretary-030920313.html
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Last year MediaMath Sales VP Charles Cantu approached his CEO, Joe Zawadzki, to give his notice. He had gotten a competitive job offer that included a major pay raise and the opportunity to manage a team.
Zawadzki asked him, "What do you want to do after this?"
Cantu replied, "I want to run my own thing."
Zawadzki came back, "Then why don't we skip this step?"
The result of this exchange was Huddled Masses, a small agency ? or, if you prefer, "boutique trading desk" -- of five people that is funded by Zawadzki and uses the MediaMath platform to develop optimized digital ad campaigns.
Huddled Masses isn't the only such firm. MediaMath and Zawadzki have fostered a growing family of service-based companies that are built on its platform. Some are run by former MediaMath employees (Kepler Group) and some by former customers and partners (Big Lens). A few have direct investments from Zawadzki and a new entity called MediaMath Ventures.
John Wren and Maurice Levy, the CEOs of Omnicom Group and Publicis Groupe, would do well to keep their eyes on these young firms, which represent a new and agile source of competition to large media agencies. The proposed mega-merger of the holding companies has been read by some as a response to the rise of "big data" and the primacy of software platforms. But that theory takes for granted that innovation in the "service layer" already exists in-house at one of the two holding companies, or at their competitors (Interpublic, Havas, Dentsu, MDC Partners).
That's not necessarily the case.
"Innovation tends to come from the edges, because creative destruction is hard," says MediaMath's Zawadzki. "For a big agency that may have 11,000 people trained around the old model, it's going to take time to roll out the change. You can't say, 'You used to have these tools now you have this one.' Everything takes time."
MediaMath's TerminalOne ad platform has licensing relationships with about 650 agencies globally. Among them are holding company agencies and trading desks (such as VivaKi AOD), large independents (Mediasmith, Merkle), regional agencies and "boutique trading desks." You can debate the semantics of the word "agency," but all these businesses are predicated on the idea of a services offering directly to an advertiser ? or in some cases, another agency ? and are usually billed on a media margin, or percentage of spend.
Let's meet a few of them.
Huddled Masses
Zawazki doesn't care what kind of agencies use MediaMath, but he clearly sees an opportunity for very small shops to do more with less.
"The holding companies' centralized trading desks are saying, 'Let us learn this stuff and we'll lend it out to our operating agencies,'" he said. "And you've also seen it from the outside, where you may have a team of 50 specialists. Now all I need is one person and a platform, and I can deliver optimized programs from Fortune 1000 advertisers without the investment in staff."
Hence a number of the young agency companies building on MediaMath are very small ? some between two and five people.
Huddled Masses is one such company. After accepting Zawadzki's investment (worth 20% of the business) and becoming CEO of his new firm, Cantu began casting around for new business. Two accounts came from MediaMath directly.
"Outside of that everything has been biz dev, past relationships with Sony and other folks I've known for a long time," Cantu said.
Part of the goal was to grab test campaign budgets that were flowing to MediaMath, but which MediaMath didn't want to manage. The demand-side platform receives considerable inbound interest from clients with small budgets or those wanting to run $10,000 or $20,000 experimental campaigns.
"MediaMath really is a tech company, so there's an opportunity for a sales and service organization to home in on clients and help them grow their business," Cantu said. "We can function as an agency. The truth is we don't very often. I'd rather work with small and mid-sized agencies and be their solution."
Huddled Masses works with 30 advertisers, of which three are direct relationships. The rest are agencies. Most clients spend in the realm of $20,000 per month.
On performance, he said, "It's very easy for us to walk in the door and increase ROI by 10%. If we start adding other layers like dynamic creative, remarketing, first-party data, attribution partners, then we can start talking about 60% lift ? We've also done some hacks and created best practices around smaller budgets."
In terms of revenue model, "It's all margin. We are starting to have conversations about marking up private exchange deals, but we haven't done that yet."
Cantu's goal in two years is for the company to make $40 million to 60 million per year. "If someone wants to buy us, great. If that means we keep trucking along we'll do that too. We love what we do."
What help, if any, does Huddled Masses get from MediaMath? "They help out when it comes to marketing and press."
Huddled Masses pays MediaMath a flat margin. Cantu calls it the "family rate."
"The beauty of Joe Zawadzki is he is invested in his people when they are inside the company and when they are outside the company," he said.
Kepler Group
The best known of MediaMath's offspring is Kepler Group. Formerly the direct-to-client managed-services unit at MediaMath, it was spun off a year ago as its own data-centric agency led by former MediaMath-er Rick Greenberg.
Since that time Kepler has doubled its clients, from nine to 18. Its headcount has tripled from a base of six, all former MediaMath employees, to 18 today. It's now going after consulting and cross-channel budgets.
That acceleration is possible because clients have begun to feel their legacy media agencies are moving too slowly on programmatic, Greenberg told AdExchanger.
"You've got this confluence of forces everyone's aware of," he said. "The agency/advertiser model hasn't evolved quickly enough, particularly at the traditional agencies."
(More in our recent story on Kepler Group)
Big Lens
Washington D.C.-based Big Lens is even smaller than Huddled Masses. The agency is run by CEO Beth Wallace, a seasoned digital media exec with experience on the client side. Her CV includes a marketing role at AOL, where she was among the first to buy exchange-traded media from Right Media founder Mike Walrath. She has strong personal ties to Zawadzki.
As with Charles Cantu at Huddled Masses, part of the reason Wallace launched her firm was to pick up business that was being "dropped on the floor" by MediaMath. But while MediaMath was meant to be the main source of leads for Big Lens, that hasn't turned out to be the case. Rather, Wallace has relied more on her own network.
Big Lens' biggest client is Neustar, which uses it for several campaigns. ?Her firm employs three other people and outsources creative services and other functions.
MediaMath didn't fund Big Lens, or spin it off. Rather, Wallace said, "They support me. There've been some campaigns they've run as a managed service for me. And I get some help with marketing."
Big Lens's website bears a "powered by MediaMath" tagline.
"The only reason I can have a media agency is because of the platform," she said. "I'm not empire-building here, which I think is hard for Joe to understand sometimes. I want to take on as much work as I and my team can do well."
"And I want to have fun," she added. "I'm not looking to be Kepler."
Merkle
Baltimore-based CRM agency Merkle first partnered with MediaMath in 2010, early in the development of its digital media practice. It built its own technology around MediaMath's, according to VP/GM Display Media Megan Pagliuca.
"We get all the data out of MediaMath, run our analytics and push it back in," Pagliuca said. But, she insisted, "we don't want to compete in the technology business." It's all about building a custom solution around the MediaMath platform.
Merkle runs the majority of its display business with MediaMath, but it's not an exclusive partnership. It's begun using Turn on behalf of one client, and DoubleClick Bid Manager (n?e Invite Media) on behalf of another.
"We have a very sticky relationship with them because of how much investment we have around their platform. There's a certain degree of stickiness relative to other platforms," Pagliuca said.
There was a hiccup in the relationship last summer, when MediaMath spun off Kepler. Prior to that, Pagliuca and her colleagues had viewed themselves as a preferred agency partner ? i.e. a recipient of business leads from large clients. "There was concern originally over how that would play out," she said.
That concern turned out to be unfounded, as MediaMath continued to refer business to Merkle. This would often take the form of a "programmatic RFP," triggered by a client call to MediaMath.
"They will make introductions to us, to Kepler, to all the other agencies on the plan," she said. This referral and RFP process has happened several times already this year for Fortune 500 companies.
Turn is doing a premium reseller program for agencies that enables the same kind of referrals. If you're certified as a reseller, Turn will recommend the business.
Adroit Digital
Adroit Digital deserves a mention in this story, even though it's internal to MediaMath and not a standalone agency company.
After the spinoff of Kepler Group, there were still some managed-services people left at MediaMath. Zawadzki didn't want that. So when it bought Advertising Decisioning Solutions (ADS) from Akamai, the company merged that new division with the rest of its trading services and managed-services teams.
That new unit became Adroit Digital, and has roughly 60 employees. ?While owned by MediaMath, "They're another separate entity? We're not providing managed services at MediaMath," Zawadzki said.
Zawadzki is clear that his priority is building out the MediaMath technology, and that his motivation for spinning off and funding agency companies is not to compete with established agencies but to sustain that focus on the platform. There are good entrepreneurial and financial reasons for pursuing that strategy, including that SaaS businesses earn higher multiples in an eventual sale.
Which of these new agency and trading desk companies is Zawadzki pulling for?
"I want all of our customers to do well," he said. "I think there is so much innovation that's happening right now, in terms of different ways of affecting change and rolling out innovation that there's not going to be a single answer."
He added, "It's like kids. You don't have favorites. You want them all to be successful, and they're all going to be different."
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