Last October, “Steven Jobs et al” filed an application with the U.S. patent office for a technology-based “enforcement routine” preventing users from bypassing ads on various devices. What’s more, the device can be frozen until it’s satisfied the ad has been paid attention to.
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Shock, horror, “say it ain’t so” was the near-universal reaction, before the story quickly died, and to which Apple Inc. has yet to respond. Maybe we’ll learn more now that Apple, with its purchase of Quattro Wireless, has decided to go full bore into the mobile ad business. Just as online ad king Google Inc. is invading Apple’s hallowed ground with its Nexus One phone.
One possibility: The patent application (links.sfgate.com/ZJAT) refers to the compulsory ads possibly as “part of an approach where the user obtains a good or service, such as the operating system, for free or at reduced cost.”
Come on down: If Steven Pan, one of Taiwan’s richest men, is back in town, picking up cut-rate commercial properties, can others be far behind?
“There’s a trend developing,” says Anton Qui, a principal with San Francisco real estate brokerage TRI Commercial. Qui was commenting on Pan’s deal, announced in late December, to buy 49 Stevenson St., a midsize office building, for $24.5 million, 40 percent below its assessed value.
Pan – net worth $650 million, according to Forbes’ – owned a substantial slice of San Francisco in the mid- to late 1990s, including Chevron Corp.’s former headquarters on Bush Street and the former Apparel Mart building at Fourth and Market, currently occupied by Old Navy and the Hotel Palomar. Pan sold everything in 2000, telling the San Francisco Business Times that prices had gotten to the point “it’s absolutely impossible to find opportunities here.”
That was then, as Keck Seng Investments Ltd. knew last July when the Hong Kong firm took the W Hotel off Starwood Hotels’ hands for $90 million, about half what it would have had to pay in 2007.
“A lot of my Asian investors are back in town looking for bargain deals,” said Qui.
Going, going: If Qui’s investors are interested in apartment buildings, the Lembi Group’s molting empire might be one place to look.
Ten formerly Lembi-owned buildings, nine in San Francisco and one in Burlingame, were scooped up just before Christmas by San Francisco real estate private equity firm Tribeca Cos. The price: $31 million in cash, half the approximate face value of Lembi’s $62 million mortgage debt carried on the buildings by the Swiss bank UBS AG.
That’s 10 more gone in addition to the 51 buildings Lembi handed over to UBS after defaulting on $300 million worth of loans in 2008. But there’s plenty more where that came from.
‘F’ for effort: Aye, 5. Nay, 8. Present, 5. Absent (family member passed away in combat overseas), 1.
Down went the eminently reasonable idea, in the Assembly Health Committee, of a 10-cent fee on drinkers to help cover the $8.3 billion the state pays out for alcohol-related problems. And with it the first seriousness-of-purpose test we suggested the Obama administration impose before responding to California’s pitch for a multibillion bailout.
At least the eight committee members voting no, five Republicans and three Democrats, had the courage to show their hand. But the five gutless wonders, all Democrats who sat there on their hands – what, one might ask, are we paying them for?
The bill’s sponsor, San Jose Assemblyman Jim Beall Jr., says he will offer an “iteration” of AB1019 next month. Time enough for committee members to prepare for a makeup test. List of committee members at links.sfgate.com/ZJAR. Phone: (916) 319-2097.
Blogging at sfgate.com.columns/bottomline. Tweeting at @andrewsross. E-mail bottomline@sfchronicle.com.
This article appeared on page D – 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle