Endrit's Blog

The smartest children of history

2013-12-30T13:37:00.003-08:00

At the age most of us were playing with sand and discovering our toes, child prodigies around the globe were learning complex languages and studying fields we've never heard of.

Many of these children went on to do great things. Others were crippled by emotional instability. Some have great potential and are just getting started.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart—The six-year-old composer

At the age of three, Wolfgang Mozart played the harpsichord and by six, he had written his first musical composition. This was followed by the first symphony at the age of eight and opera at 12.The legendary composer’s musical talents were quickly discovered shortly after his birth in Salzburg, Austria in 1756.As a five-year-old, Mozart performed at the University of Salzburg with the piano and at the imperial court in Vienna the next year. At the age of 14, he set out to Italy to become an opera composer.

He died at the age of 35 and left behind more than 600 composed pieces.

William Rowan Hamilton—Multilingual by the age of five

Born in Dublin, Ireland in 1805, William Rowan Hamilton showed his intellectual abilities at an early age, mastering Latin, Greek and Hebrew by the age of five.

By the time he was 13, the future mathematician knew 13 different languages, including Sanscrit, Persian, Italian, Arabic, Syriac and Indian dialects.

At the age of 15, Hamilton found errors while studying the works of French mathematician Pierre-Simon, marquis de Laplace.He was appointed Professor of Astronomy, Director of the Dunsink Observatory and the Royal Astronomer of Ireland while he was still studying as a university student.

His greatest contributions includes a theory of dynamics and quaternions, a method used for three-dimensional space in mathematics.

Ireland’s greatest mathematician was knighted in 1835 and died in 1865.

Pablo Picasso

Born in Spain in 1881, Pablo Picasso developed his skills early, producing complex pieces with the support of his artist father and by the age of 15, his first large oil painting The First Communion was displayed in Barcelona.The following year, his painting Science and Charity won a gold medal in Malaga and received honorable mention at a national exhibit for the fine arts in Madrid.His interest in modern art eventually caused a rift between him and his parents.
In the early 20th century, Picasso co-founded the Cubist movement. His technique and style would change often throughout his life.
The artist died in France in 1973.

Theodore Kaczynski—The Harvard graduate turned unabomber

Theodore Kaczynski, known by most as the “Unabomber,” started out as a child prodigy, receiving his acceptance to Harvard University at the age of 16.

He later went on to earn a doctorate in mathematics from the University of Michigan where his thesis paper was so complex, his professors at the time admitted not really being able to understand it.
At 25, Kaczynski became the youngest professor at the University of California, Berkeley but resigned two years later, moved in with his parents and eventually to a secluded cabin in the woods.
His mail bombing spree lasted twenty years, killed three people and injured 23. He is currently serving a life sentence.But before the Unabomber, there was a young boy who measured an IQ of 167 in the fifth grade.

Kim Ung-Yong—A guest physics student at age three

At the age of three, Kim Ung-Yong began taking courses as a guest physics student at Hanyang University in South Korea. By the age of eight, he was invited by NASA to study in the United States.Born in 1962, Kim Ung-Yong is listed as having the highest IQ at 210 in the Guinness Book of World Records.

The young prodigy began speaking at four months old and merely two years later, he was able to read in Japanese, Korean, German and English.As a 16-year-old, Kim left NASA and decided to attend college in Korea to earn a doctorate in civil engineering.Kim has been an adjunct professor at Chungbuk University since 2007 and has published approximately 90 papers on hydraulics in scientific journals.

Michael Kearney—The world's youngest university graduate

At age ten, Michael Kearney received a bachelor’s degree from the University of South Alabama and at 17, he received his second graduate degree from Vanderbilt University.Hawaiian-born, Kearney is listed as the world’s youngest university graduate in the Guinness Book of World Records.At 21, Kearney had collected four undergraduate degrees and a year later, he received his doctorate in chemistry.In 2006, Kearney won $1 million in AOL’s Gold Rush and $25,000 on Who Wants To Be a Millionaire in 2008.He has had early aspirations to be a game show host. At a young age, Kearney was diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

Gregory Smith—The four-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee

In 1999, at ten years old Gregory Smith received a four-year scholarship to Randolph-Macon College worth approximately $70,000. The young boy eventually graduated cum laude with a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and minors in History and Biology.Two years later, Smith added meeting with Bill Clinton and Mikhail Gorbachev, speaking in front of the United Nations, and being nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize to his list of life achievements.Smith has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize three times since then for his humanitarian work in East Timor, Sao Paolo, Rwanda and Kenya.

As a 16-year-old, Smith entered the University of Virginia to study for doctorates in mathematics, aerospace engineering, international relations and biomedical research.

Best companies in 2013

2013-12-30T09:54:00.004-08:00

Wal-Mart took the top spot, Berkshire Hathaway made the top five and Apple grew enormously.

Historia e pilotit të aeroplanëve luftarakë, Sinan Abedin Vitija nga Konjuhu i Lipjanit

2013-12-29T08:04:00.004-08:00

Plot 20 vjet nga zhdukja enigmatike e pilotit dhe instruktorit të pilotimit të aeroplanëve luftarakë, Sinan Abedin Vitija (01.05.1961) nga Konjuhi i Lipjanit me banim në Zarë dhe me shtetësi kroate.

Kapiteni i klasit të parë të aviacionit luftarak në ish Jugosllavi, më 1986, në aferën e mirënjohur të KOS-it (shërbimit ushtarak të kundërzbulimit), Sinan Vitija, ka qenë një ndër ata oficerë shqiptarë të keqtrajtuar dhe persekutuar në ish APJ, bashkë me shumë të tjerë,-si Rrahim Ademi, Skender Hasimi, Ahmet Krasniqi etj.
Në momentin e shpërthimit të konflikteve në ish Jugosllavi, Sinan Vitija ka bërë kërkesë zyrtare për demobilizim nga APJ, mirëpo ligjet nuk i kanë mundësuar këtë kur vendi ishte në gjendje lufte.

Sinani me kadetet e Akademise ushtarake te aviacionit ne Zare

Sinani ka gjetur mënyrë për të braktisur ushtrinë dhe i është bashkangjitur forcave çlirimtare kroate. Për mbrojtjen e Zarës, Sinan Vitija ka formuar një njësit ushtarak shqiptar, të cilin e kanë emëruar “Skenderbeu”, duke u emëruar komandat të atij njësiti. Ky njësit i është bashkangjitur Gardës kroate për mbrojtjen e Zarës. Për këtë dëshmon edhe “Deklarata solemne” që është dhënë pranë Shtabit të Krizës, në fshatin Përkos, më datë 11.02.1992. Ka marrë pjesë aktive në çlirimin e urës së Maslenicës, që lidhte Dalmacinë me pjesën tjetër të brendisë së Kroacisë (që është një ngjarje e veçantë për Sinanin dhe njësitin e tij shqiptar). Pas përfundimit të Luftës në pjesën e Zarës-Dalmaci, Sinan Vitija për një kohë demobilizohet, për t’iu përkushtuar familjes, bashkëshortes Sevdije dhe fëmijëve: djalit Fisnikut (lindur më 4 dhjetor 1988) dhe vajzës Fatbardhës (1 gusht 1991). Mirëpo, për shkak të gjendjes shëndetësore, shkon për kurim në Gjermani.

Sinan Vitija

Ditën kritike, me 28 nëntor 1993, ai zbret në aeroportin “Petrovec” të Shkupit. Ai vjen me linjën e rregullt të fluturimit nga Gjermania. Zbritjen e tij në aeroport e ka konfirmuar vëllai Hashim Vitija.Po të njëjtin pohim e ka bërë më 1996 ministri i MPB-së, Tomislav Cokrevski, në pyetjen e deputetit të atëhershëm Nazmi Maliqi. Nuk ka asnjë dilemë se Vitija ka qenë në duar të policisë maqedonase. Nga pohimi i ministrit Cokrevski, nuk ka dilemë se ai i është dorëzuar organeve policore serbo-jugosllave pa asnjë procedurë dhe asnjë vendim valid të mbështetur në dispozitat ligjore në fuqi në Maqedoni, ose duke iu referuar marrëveshjeve ose konventave ndërkombëtare. “Arsyetimi” i përgjigjes me shkrim që lëshon MPB-ja, e nënshkruar nga ministri Cokrevski ka qenë se “është konstatuar se pasaporta e Sinan Vitisë ka qenë e falsifikuar dhe pasi ai ka qenë shtetas i Serbisë, i është dorëzuar organeve policore serbe pa asnjë protokol të nënshkruar apo depozituar!
Ekspertë të kësaj lëmie thonë së ky dorëzim konsiderohet i kundërligjshëm, duke lënë hapësira për tu diskutuar nëse pas këtij ekstradimi fshihet diçka tjetër. Megjithatë rasti bëhet i qartë pasi autoritetet kroate konfirmojnë se pasaporta me të cilën ka udhëtuar Sinan Vitia ka qenë e rregullt dhe se ai ka qenë shtetas kroat pa asnjë shtetësi tjetër.

Sinani ne aeroportin e Shkupit me gruan e tij

Është fakt se Sinan Abedin Vitija ka qenë në kërkim nga organet policore dhe ushtarake serbe, me status të dezertorit të luftës. Po ashtu, është thënë se ai është mbajtur katër ditë në paraburgim ushtarak në Prishtinë. Prej aty është “përcjellë” në Nish. Prej Nishit humbet çdo gjurmë e tij! Ka thashetheme se është dërguar në “CZ” (burgu qendror”) në Beograd, por këtë askush nuk e konfirmon.Dilemat e shumta kanë qenë dhe janë:
Mbi bazë të cilëve kritere, konventave apo dhe dispozitave ligjore, shtetasi kroat i dorëzohet organeve serbe, kur dihet se ai nuk është shtetas i Serbisë? Pse kanë vepruar organet policore kësisoj dhe cili është motivi?Mbase kooperimi dhe marrëdhëniet “aq të mira” të ministrit të atëhershëm të MPB-së, Lubomir Frckovski (ministër i Brendshëm 1992-1996), me organet policore serbe, duke ditur se çka përjetojnë të gjithë ata që kanë reputacionin e luftëtarit kroat kur bien në duart e organeve policore serbe, Vitija i dorëzohet Serbisë pa procedurë zyrtare konform normave ndërkombëtare.Habitë edhe indiferenca shumëvjeçare e vetë shtetit kroat dhe shoqatave të luftëtarëve të dala nga lufta; habitë sjellja e Komitetit të Helsinkit për të Drejtat e Njeriut në Maqedoni dhe Kroaci; habitë sjellja e Shoqatës së viktimologëve botëror (kryetar i së cilës një kohë të gjatë ishte akademiku Zvonimir Separovic nga Kroacia); habitë fakti i sjelljes indolente të Kryqit të Kuq Ndërkombëtar...

Kryetari i të gjitha shoqatave të luftëtarëve në Kroaci, koloneli Ivan Grujic, që merret me këtë problematikë, sidomos për të zhdukurit gjatë luftës në Kroaci, pas kontakteve të shumta është prononcuar se nuk ka asnjë njoftim për Sinan Vitinë. Po nga kjo Zyrë (shoqatave për personat e zhdukur në Zagreb), Zdenko Ognjencic, gjatë kontaktit të fundit u shpreh: “Ka kaluar kohë e gjatë nga zhdukja, preferoj, dhe është e mirëseardhur që familjarët e Sinan Vitisë, vëllezërit, bashkëshortja dhe fëmijët të ndihmojnë në identifikimin e kufomave nga varrezat e shumta në Kollubarë, Padinska Skelë, Mitrovicë, Batajnicë, Ovçar etj. duke dhënë materiale për analizën e ADN-së”.Megjithatë, ndër ata që janë përpjekur për të ndihmuar në rastin e Sinan Vitisë, duhet përmendur ish shefin e Akademisë së aviacionit në Zarë, gjeneralin tashmë të ndjerë, i cili ndërroi jetë në shkurt të këtij viti, Imra Agotic (Vitija ishte specializant i tij). Përpjekjet e tij të pareshtura, megjithatë nuk e sollën Sinanin!Bashkëshortja e tij, Sevdije Vitija (Sadriu), që edhe sot e kësaj dite jeton në Zarë, gjatë tërë këtyre viteve është ballafaquar me sfida të shumta që sjell ironia e jetës. Jeton me ndihmë minimale sociale, pa iu njohur e drejta e pensionit të luftëtarit të lirisë së luftës në Kroaci.Tani, edhe pas 20 viteve fati i Sinan Vitisë mbetet i paqartë

A po bëhen njerëzit skllevër të teknologjisë?

2013-12-28T07:00:00.002-08:00

Tashmë jemi bërë të varur nga teknologjia,por njëherë e në një kohë nuk ka qenë kështu për njerëzit (para disa dhejtra vjetësh) dhe besoj që kishte më pak stres dhe probleme.

Si do të ishte jeta sot po të na hiqnin këto katër gjëra? Si e imagjinoni?
Pa televizor? Pa celular? Pa internet? Pa kompjuter?

Avancimi teknologjik është duke u bërë gjithnjë e më i sofistikuar. Ai është i arritshëm pothuajse te të gjithë, duke u bërë një pjesë e rëndësishme e shoqërisë sonë moderne. Qeniet njerëzore varen nga teknologjia në çdo gjë që ata bëjnë . Megjithatë, për shkak të këtyre situatave , ka disa ide se qeniet njerëzore janë duke u bërë skllevër të teknologjisë moderne. Unë pajtohem me këto mendime

Si rezultat i nevojës teknologjike, qeniet njerëzore janë tani duke u mbështetur në teknologji shumë. Natyrisht , njerëzit janë gjithmonë në kërkim të një jete të përshtatshme dhe të lehtë.Kështu sado që ata të bëjnë përpjekje për të përmirësuar jetën e tyre, teknologjia nuk u lejon atyre të kenë më shumë kohë të lirë për të shijuar jetën e tyre.

Është fakt që njerëzit janë bërë skellvër të teknlogjisë, si fëmijë ashtu edhe të rritur.Për shembull fëmijria jonë para vitit 2000 ka qenë më e bukur, m'kujtohen ato lojrat që bënim me fëmijët e fshatit deri në orët e vona të mbrëmjes e pastaj shkonim në shtëpi pasi që prindërit tanë ishin të nervozuar me ne edhe se kishim një kamion detyra për të bërë.Është për tu trishtuar se si tani fëmija është bërë skllav i një paisje elektronike, me të cilën e qon kohën e tij i vetëm dhe e cila ndikon shumë keq në të.Shohim se si fëmija qysh në klasë të dytë e përdorë Facebook-un dhe pastaj i bëhet si obligim për të hyrë në të, ose fëmijët tjerë që luajnë lojra kompjuterike agresive dhe luftarake të cilat nuk mundësojnë që ai të zhvillohet qysh duhet dhe bëhet shumë agresiv me prindërit dhe shokët e tij.

Pastaj mendoj sa kohë të arta kemi pasë...Tani fëmijët nga mosha 11 vjec rrijnë gjithë kohës para PC në chat dhe akoma më keq, duke parë pornografi sepse prindërit e tyre as që i kontrollojnë.

Është e vërtetë që na është lehtësuar komunikimi më teknologjinë aktuale, por kemi humbur shumë nga ana jone njerëzore.Njerëz të fiksuar pas politikes, jo se lodhemi se çfarë po thot Thaçi,Ramushi e kta, por sepse nuk ka asgjë tjetër në TV përvec VIP-ve tanë.Shoh vajza të vogla që nuk dinë se cfarë është të luash me kuklla apo gjëra të tjera por rrijnë nga ora 10 e mëngjesit deri në 7 pasdite duke parë telenovelat.Ndoshta në fakt duhet të ngushëllohemi me faktin që shqiptarët në veqanti kanë arritur ta mësojnë Spanjishten dhe Portugalishten në mënyrë perfekte e tash janë në mësime të Turqishtes.

Sa herë që je bërë gati ta hedhësh celularin, ti mbyllësh rrjetet sociale dhe të mos ia kujtosh më as emrin sepse nuk gjen as një moment qetësie, ty të janë bërë drogë dhe s'ke mundur.Është e trishtueshme se si i sheh të rinjët nëpër lokale duke qëndruar bashkë por jo duke komunikuar me njëri tjetrin, secili duke ia hapë sytë telefonit të tij. Më herët kur vinte ndonjë mysafir tek ne qoftë edhe për të bujt, e kishte at kënaqësinë e muhabetit dhe lojërave të ndryshme dhe të qeshurave pa fund, e tash kur t'vie edhe musafiri gjëja e parë pasi që të thotë "si je" është "qysh osht passwordi i wiffi-së?".

Për të përfunduar , nuk mund të mohohet se teknologjia moderne është tani pjesë e pandarë e jetës. Çështja është se të gjithë duhet të bëheni të sigurtë që jeni të vetëdijshëm për ndikimin e keq dhe të mirë që avancimi teknologjik ka në jetë.

Skllevër të teknologjisë, skllevër të vetës tonë...

The power of imagination

2013-12-25T13:37:00.001-08:00

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."

Albert Einstein

Imagination is the ability to form new images and sensations that are not perceived through sight, hearing, or other senses. Imagination helps make knowledge applicable in solving problems and is fundamental to integrating experience.A person may imagine according to his mood, it may be good or bad depending on the situation.

The imagination is a sensitive feeling, where you crate your own world there.By using your imagination, it can make your day much more exciting and interesting. You'll find yourself more motivated and happy. Most adults grow out of their imagination, therefore they think they don't have one. By learning to take control of your imagination and by expanding it, you will be feeling much more calm and carefree.

I have my imaginary world which i have created long time ago and i go there when i feel bad or sad. It's a nice place full of light, with peace and nice air. It's the place where i meet my soulmate, it's really something strong that its in my head long time ago.

It looks like reality, when you close your eyes and you think of it, you can see images of unknown places or places that do not excist in this world.Then you think "are these images of the eternal life?".Imagination also enriches the mind with hopes and different meanings, usualy unattainable and amazing by the others.It helps to build or capacity of brain and our fancy skills, which send us in places that we dream to go and things we like to do in the real life.

Imagination is that thing to which we find the escape from this world and from the undesirable things that happen here.There we feel cozy and there we find spiritual comfort.The only place where we find ourselves on the brilliant things that we do not usually find in this world, because this is something that we create in our mind, some of them based in the present events that we have here.

‘Republika Srpska’ Inside Kosovo

2013-12-25T05:37:00.000-08:00

After a lot of wars and sufferings that people in Kosovo had along centuries for the independence, and after declaring it in 2008, it seems like Kosovo is going in a "Inside Republic" inside its territory.

After a long debates with the Serbian state that EU placed and after some agreements with it, Kosovo still does not have a comfort situation.

The Association of Serbian Municipalities, due to be established in Kosovo, could resemble a local version of the separatist ‘Republika Srpska’ in Bosnia, a Pristina-based NGO has warned.

As Pristina and Belgrade mull options about how the future Association of Serbian Municipalities will operate on the ground, an NGO in Kosovo, the Group for Legal and Political Studies, says the association “might soon play a role similar to that of Republika Srpska in Bosnia and Herzegovina”.The warning was a reference to the 1995 Dayton accords, which turned Bosnia into a loose federation, composed of a weak state and two highly autonomous entities – the Bosniak and Croat-dominated Federation and the Serb-dominated Republika Srpska.Bosnia has since struggled to become a coherent and functional state, with the Republika Srpska openly clamouring for outright independence.“This would make Kosovo incapable of functioning as a fully independent state,” the group said in an analysis called: “Analysis of Serbian Municipalities: From a tool of integration to a disaster in the making”.
Agron Bajrami, author of the analysis and chief editor of the newspaper “Koha Ditore”, said the association might “be transformed into a third level of power which would act, if not de jure then de facto, outside the legal framework of Kosovo.“This might de-functionalize and de-stabilize the legal system of the country,” he added.The establishment of an Association of Serb Municipalities forms a key part of the EU-brokered deal on normalizing relations between Pristina and Belgrade agreed in Brussels in April.
It remains unclear what responsibilities the association will have, as both sides have contradictory views on this matter.While Serbia wants the association to be formed on the basis of Serbian laws, Kosovo's Prime Minister, Hashim Thaci, has said the association should be more like a kind of NGO.
Behlul Beqaj, a political analyst, said Kosovo should not underestimate its likely importance.
“The Association of Serbian Municipalities will be a Serbian political entity physically placed inside Kosovo's territory,” he said.“There will be temptations to change its status, maybe by calling a referendum, maybe by asking for the federalization of Kosovo, or maybe by seeking its partition,” he added.
The association is to be formed following local elections held in November and December in Kosovo, the four Serb-dominated areas of the north of Kosovo included.Candidates from the Belgrade-backed “Srpska” list won in all four northern municipalities of Leposavic, Mitrovica North, Zubin Potok and Zvecan, while the party also won in five other municipalities in central Kosovo.These five municipalities had been governed by Pristina-backed Serbian parties since 2009, when the last local elections were held. “The mission of 'Thaci’s Serbs' is over, while [Serbian Prime Minister Ivica] 'Dacic’s Serbs' just launched their mission,” Beqaj stressed, referring to the defeat of the more moderate Serbian parties in the centre and south of the country.

Autobiography

2013-12-24T08:00:00.000-08:00

I was born in 11th of August 1993 in Prishtina, on a sunny day around 14:00 o'clock. How its known in Albanian law based on a document called "Kanuni i Lekë Dukagjinit", the albanian should have a son in their family to continue the generation of the tribe.

An old photo of me, my dad and my sisters.

I was born after two girls (my sisters) and the family was very happy about this, having a son after two girls in the albanian family was known as something huge. I never knew my grandfather, but my grandmother was still alive when i was born.Of all her disease pains she was very happy that was alive to see that her son is having a son.She died then after one year.

My mom worked as a nurse in QKUK, but after the war when the serbian occupation was here, she

left with violence.

I had a complicated childhood, we were not so rich and my dad worked as a seller in a shop.Then after 5 years my mom had another child, and it was a boy. I was so happy that now i will have a brother and all day long i kissed his clothes that dad bought for him.

Me as a 10 year boy

I wanted to go to school as a 5 year old but the teacher in that time told me that im still young to go to school. I was so sad about that and cried all day long.

The elementary school was really good time for me, i made lot of friends there and i was a really good pupil. As i was successful in the elementary school, i applied for the high school at "Ulpiana Gymnasium" for Natural Sciences.

The first year of high school was not so good for me, cuz as a teenage boy i was not so concentrated so much on lessons and i didnt get good marks. The other grades were better for me, i began learning more and showed success at school by having better marks.

In high school i met other people,i had bestfriends which i still have them.Some of friends were nice for me, some of them not.The second grade was sad because one of our classmate died on a car crash.We were really sad about it but this is life and nobody gets out of it alive anyway, we had to accept it and continue.

2012 school grade with classmates

In 2012 i finished high school and then applied for English Literature at University of Pristina but the application was refused. As we know, Kosovo is going in a full corruption, which includes the University too. Few are the people who get registred by their lore, cuz most of them "pay" the leaders of the University to go to it.

Anyway i had jobs, worked as a bartender in some bars, was part of a popular page called "Kodi i Balave" in Facebook, where a television called us to take a interview for it.Was part of a internet group called "xag", where most of people in Kosovo knew about this group. I had a internet radio without benefits, i did it with a pleasure. I had really much visitors and did funny stories about events in Kosovo. Now im co-founder and author at another portal of news, which has funny news, called Llafet.com

I have a twitter account (@endrgashi) were i post my opinions about life in general.

This was a small part of my history, which i think people will like it.

How Facebook turned into the Web's Hottest Platform

2013-12-24T07:07:00.001-08:00

It was summer 2006, a little more than two years after Mark Zuckerberg had created Facebook in his Harvard dorm room as a way for him and his friends to better connect with schoolmates. In the intervening years, he'd raised $37.7 million from venture capitalists and transformed his modest Web site into a certified social phenomenon. College kids across the nation clamored for access, which Zuckerberg doled out, school by school. By mid-2006, about 7 million users, most of them college students, had a Facebook account. But for all of Facebook's success, there were also signs of trouble. Zuckerberg wanted the site to be more than a campus thing. He wanted to supplant and surpass MySpace and make Facebook the largest social network on the planet. He wanted it to become the next Google, a site that people of all ages would find useful in their daily lives. But that hadn't happened. Facebook had cornered the market for college students, but its 11-month-old effort to capture the attention of high school students — and take users away from MySpace — was going nowhere. Indeed, Facebook's growth was leveling off, inching its way toward 8 million members, while MySpace's continued to surge, with 100 million members in August of 2006.

Photo: Emily Shur

At the same time, suitors like Viacom and Microsoft had begun to take a serious look at Facebook, and they were tossing out numbers with lots of zeroes. Some investors and executives began wondering if it was time for Zuckerberg to sell. It was starting to look like Facebook had peaked.
Zuckerberg disagreed, but when Yahoo came calling with a bid of $1 billion in cash, the pressure became too much. He relented in July, verbally agreeing to sell Facebook to Yahoo. Strategically, it seemed like a good match. Yahoo had hundreds of millions of users, but its foray into social networking was struggling. Facebook had cool tools and was looking for a mass audience.
The timing, however, couldn't have been worse. In the days after Zuckerberg agreed to sell, Yahoo announced it was projecting slower sales and earnings growth, and that the launch of its new advertising platform would be delayed. Its stock price plunged 22 percent overnight. Terry Semel, Yahoo's CEO at the time, reacted by cutting his offer from $1 billion to $800 million. Zuckerberg, who had been warned about Semel's reputation for last-minute renegotiations, walked away. Two months later, Semel reissued the original $1 billion bid, but by then Zuckerberg had convinced his board and executive team that Yahoo wasn't a serious partner and that Facebook would be worth more on its own. He rejected the offer and became famous as the cocky youngster who turned down $1 billion.
Today, Zuckerberg, 23, is famous for other reasons. For one thing, analysts think he could be the nation's richest man under 25, with a net worth estimated at $1.5 billion. But more important, he has transformed his company from second-tier social network to full-fledged platform that organizes the entire Internet. As a result, Facebook is the now most buzzed-about company in Silicon Valley, and Zuckerberg is constantly compared to visionaries like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Even some of the tech industry's most legendary figures are genuflecting before Zuckerberg. In an entry on his blog, Netscape cofounder Marc Andreessen called Facebook's transformation "an amazing achievement — one of the most significant milestones in the technology industry in this decade." Says Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, "I'm in awe." (So am I. I have known one of Facebook's executives since childhood.)
As for those concerns that Facebook's membership had peaked? Well, now it's signing up nearly 1 million new users a week. By the end of August there were 36 million of them. And these aren't just the tweens or college kids you might suspect; the fastest-growing segment of Facebook users is over 35, a group that represents 11 percent of all site users. Total registrations have more than quadrupled over the previous year. The number of employees has tripled, as has revenue. And venture capitalists say that if Facebook were to go public today, investors would value it at more than $5 billion — five times what Yahoo had been prepared to pay.
But Zuckerberg's greatest contribution goes beyond Facebook's success. His company suggests a new model for how connection, communication, and commerce can work online — a radical and ambitious rethinking of the Internet's potential.
Zuckerberg's journey from snot-faced upstart to dotcom deity began in the summer of 2006, just after the demise of the first Yahoo bid. Zuckerberg won't speak directly about this time period, but associates and friends say that, for the first time in his career, the curly-haired tyro found himself facing immense external pressure. Sure, he'd retained control of his company for the time being, but he hadn't solved any of the problems that led him to consider a sale in the first place. Critics were accusing him of hubris and foolhardiness. He had something to prove.
Zuckerberg designed Facebook to re-create online what he calls the "social graph" — the web of people's real-world relationships. That was different than most social networks. Sites like MySpace practically encouraged users to create new identities and meet and link to people they barely knew. Zuckerberg didn't care about using the Internet to make new friends. "People already have their friends, acquaintances, and business connections," he explains. "So rather than building new connections, what we are doing is just mapping them out."
To that end, Facebook has always emphasized two qualities that tend to be undervalued online: authenticity and identity. Users are encouraged to post personal information — colleges attended, workplaces, email addresses. Facebook also emphasizes honesty: Because users typically can view profiles only of people they're linked to, and they can't link to them unless both partners confirm the relationship, there's little point in creating a fake identity.
Zuckerberg saw that if he could successfully map the social graph, he'd create a powerful new model of communication — a giant word-of-mouth engine. Imagine if, every time you logged on, you weren't greeted by NYTimes.com or even a Google News like aggregator, but a collection of headlines and blog postings, written or handpicked by your closest friends and relatives. Instead of information spreading hub-and-spoke like from major media outlets, it would flow to consumers the way it does at a dinner party, through people they know and trust. The result, Zuckerberg says, is that "it may no longer be optimal to have a few big media companies in the center controlling the flow of information."
When Zuckerberg walked away from Yahoo in July 2006, his grand vision had yet to be realized. He had a network of 7 million students, not an alternative media empire. To transform his company he would have to accomplish three things: First, make it easier for friends to communicate with one another; then extend Facebook's membership to the entire world; and finally, open the site to developers and encourage them to build Facebook applications that would keep people signing up and coming back to the site.
Zuckerberg's first step was almost his last. Previously, Facebook users had to visit one another's pages or send an email to see what they were up to — what features they'd added, announcements they'd posted, new friends they'd linked to. Zuckerberg wanted to streamline that process . His solution: News Feed, a feature that automatically broadcasts users' most important activities to everyone in their networks. Add a friend, post a photo, install a feature — almost anything you did was filtered through Facebook's computers, which then sent bulletins to all of your friends, notifying them every time they logged on to the site.
News Feed was announced on September 5, 2006 — about a month before Zuckerberg turned down Yahoo's second bid — and launched the same day. The freak-out began almost immediately. The new service didn't look like a means of easing communication between friends; it looked like Facebook was manipulating and spreading their information without permission. Hundreds of thousands of Facebook users emailed to protest. A student at the University of Florida organized a boycott, calling it A Day Without Facebook. "The New Facebook is too... well, creepy," wrote Carlos Maycotte in The Cornell Daily Sun. "It just makes too much information visible."
The easiest thing for Zuckerberg to do was simply dismantle News Feed. But he refused. News Feed was not just any feature. It was the infrastructure to undergird the social graph. So, three days after the feature launched, he posted a 485-word open letter to his users, apologizing for the surprise and explaining how they could opt out of News Feed if they wished. The tactic worked; the controversy ended as quickly as it began, with no real impact on user growth.
With the News Feed engine in place, the next step was obvious, if terrifying. So far Zuckerberg had tightly controlled Facebook's user base, opening membership slowly to colleges, high schools, and a few businesses. Now it was time to let anyone in the world join.
The notion was risky. When Facebook opened registration to high school students, the tepid response helped spur talk of a sale. A similar showing would make it even harder for Zuckerberg to keep prospective buyers at bay. But this time, open registration turned out to be a huge success. Adults, many of whom had yet to sign up on a social network, were drawn to Facebook's relatively staid and conservative structure. By January 2007, Facebook's user base had grown to nearly 14 million, up from almost 9 million in September.
Fully engaging those new users proved to be more difficult. They were happy to log on, share photos, and send quick messages, but when they wanted to do something a bit more complicated, like keep track of their eBay auctions, for instance, they had to leave Facebook to do it. Zuckerberg knew the site needed more applications, but he also knew that his development team wouldn't be able to satisfy every whim of his user base. "We said, ‘This is a problem,'" says Dustin Moskovitz, one of Facebook's cofounders. "What people really want is one online identity to do all these different things. What users wanted was the long tail of applications." It was time for Facebook's third, and most audacious, step.
On May 24 of this year, when Zuckerberg announced he was opening Facebook to independent developers, it was clear to Jonathan Sposato that the company had done something revolutionary. He knew how to develop and successfully distribute software: In 2005, Sposato, a former group manager at Microsoft, started a company that made it easy to create software widgets, and he sold it to Google later that year. In mid-2006, he and two fellow Microsoft alumni created Picnik, a slick online photo-editing site.
But even Sposato was surprised at the response from Facebook users when Picnik was included as one of the 85 initial applications in Facebook Platform, the new development tool. Within three days, more than 100,000 users downloaded his program — about 10 times more than he'd anticipated. Because News Feed instantly and automatically notified friends whenever someone downloaded Picnik, word of the application spread exponentially. Sposato called colleagues in a desperate — and ultimately successful — hunt for extra server capacity and bandwidth to avoid outages. Currently almost 250,000 Facebook users have installed Picnik on their pages, making it the network's top photo-editing tool.
Sposato's experience shows the power of Facebook Platform as a new model for disseminating software. The plummeting costs of bandwidth, processing power, and storage had driven down the price of application development. But unless you could figure out a way onto the Google homepage, it was still tricky to tell the world what you'd created. Facebook now gave even the most modest developer the opportunity to win instant and mammoth distribution through its word-of-mouth engine. Users no longer need to search for applications that they may not even know they want; instead, the applications find them.
Since then, more than 3,200 new applications have sprung up on the site, a number that is growing by about 180 a week. Those offerings have made Facebook a fully functioning social hub, where users can keep track of one another's favorite music and videos, share and compare movie reviews, and hit one another up for contributions to pet causes. Facebook promises to become an online identity for recruiters, bosses, and colleagues looking to hire and promote; a souped-up business card for job hunters; and a dossier of people's likes and dislikes that vendors can use to provide targeted products and services. Salesforce's Benioff even imagines Facebook pages serving as universal health records.
And by turning itself into a platform for new applications, Facebook has launched a whole new branch of the software development industry, just like Bill Gates did with MS-DOS in the 1980s. By allowing developers to charge for their wares or collect the advertising revenue they generate, Zuckerberg set up a system for every programmer to get paid for their efforts. Now venture capitalists like Bay Partners are scrambling to fund almost anyone who has an idea for a Facebook application.
Skeptics may argue that we've seen this movie before — in 1999, say, when anyone with a vague concept for a Web site could get VC backing. And, they point out, nobody actually does pay for Facebook applications. Still, the startup costs for developers are extremely low, and the potential is high. For the Internet, email was the killer app — a program so useful that it transformed the platform into a massive communications tool. There's no killer app for Facebook yet. But if someone can develop one, they will be sitting on a gold mine.
For all the excitement, one sobering fact remains: Facebook has yet to prove itself as a business. The site's nearly 40 million active users generate more than a billion pageviews a day, but ad clickthrough rates are low. An estimated half of its $150 million in revenue comes from an advertising deal with Microsoft. Independent developers are drawn to Facebook because Zuckerberg lets them keep any advertising revenue their applications generate; if Facebook can't prove itself as an advertising venue, the deluge of new applications will slow to a trickle.
Nevertheless, Zuckerberg's notion of the social graph has proven so powerful that almost every other company in the Valley is trying to replicate it. Jeff Weiner, one of Yahoo's top executives, refers to users of Yahoo Mail as a Facebook-esque "dormant social network" that his company "needs to activate." And MySpace is expected to respond to Facebook's challenge; CEO Chris DeWolfe has made vague statements about the site's "evolution."
Whatever ultimately becomes of Facebook, Zuckerberg has already had an impact. A year ago, the Valley wondered if this cocky youngster had turned down his only shot at $1 billion. Now it's wondering if he has defined the future of the Internet.

Llafet.com - A new different way of news

2013-12-23T18:22:00.002-08:00

Llafet.com is an funny albanian portal of news, which was founded as a idea by Denis Avdiu in 2012.

This website is the first of its kind, and started its work at the end of the year 2012.Later on, in February 2013 the portal came to its "best success" by having 160.000+ clicks for just a month.The authors who made the posts and the news were Dardan Hasku and Endrit Gashi including Denis too. This website was "out of use" for some months because of some technical reasons but now its in function and is also well-known in the Kosovo and outside of it.

Number of visits in February

This website its the first website in this style, by posting funny news and enjoying reading them by the readers.The number of total clicks its 237.000 and continues having by posting news each day.

The most shared post of this website was about a girl called Aurona, wich had 9500 shares on facebook and u can read the post by clicking this link: Aurona: Si u bera e famshme me nje mbishkrim...

Suarez: I dream of winning title at LFC

2013-12-23T17:39:00.001-08:00

Suarez: I dream of winning title at LFC

The prolific and creative Uruguayan has been a revelation for the Reds since completing a switch to Anfield in January 2011, plundering 70 goals in 109 appearances for the club.
Remarkably, 19 of those strikes have been recorded in 2013-14 - despite the No.7 missing the opening five league matches of the season - to help Brendan Rodgers' team currently claim top spot.
Suarez has no intention of relinquishing that position either; the talismanic forward instead wants to hoist the Premier League trophy aloft with Liverpool.

"It's my dream; I hope to win the league and a big trophy with Liverpool," he explains in a brand new episode of LFC TV's 'Kop Kids'.
"It's my dream. When I win that, I will remember my family," Suarez adds.
Supporters can see Suarez like never before in the latest 'Kop Kids' show, which will air exclusively on LFC TV at 10am GMT and 3pm GMT on Boxing Day, December 26.
Tune in to find out exactly what the striker's mysterious tea contains and whether he shouts 'megs' when he bamboozles a defender - plus, the man himself provides a rendition of the Luis Suarez song.

Lipjan, the old place of Ulpiana

2013-12-23T17:34:00.001-08:00

Lipjan or Lipjan (Albanian: Lipjan or Lipjani; Serbian: Липљан, Lipjan) is a city and municipality in the Pristina district of central Kosovo.

In Roman times the city was known as Ulpiana from which the name Lipjan is derived. Ulpiana was named by the Romans in honor of the Roman Emperor Marcus Ulpius Nerva Traianus. The neo-Latin form Lypenion for the city occurs for the first time in a Greek text from 1018 AD.
It is thought^{[weasel words]} to be the birthplace of Lekë Dukagjini (1410–1481), who replaced Skanderbeg as leader of the Albanian resistance against the Ottomans following the latter's death in 1468. During the reign of Lekë Dukagjini as Prince of Dukagjini Ulpiana was his second capital city.^[1]

The municipality is predominantly agriculture-oriented. After the 1999 conflict, most of the businesses are no longer operational. Many shops and restaurants have opened in the town, but approximately 80% of the population remains unemployed