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He said on Friday, “I love this job, I love working with you guys.” Rumors had been swirling that Lauer would be leaving, but apparently executives at NBC were confident all along that Lauer would remain with the show and the network. Of the various rumors that arose during that time, one included a report that Ryan Seacrest was potentially being groomed for Lauer’s position when the latter decided to leave his post.

Noted Lauer, “Truth be told, I was developing an idea for a new show, where viewers could tune in every morning and see someone they know lose a little more of his hair every single day right in front of their eyes, but then I thought, I could just stay here and do that.” A bit of levity ensued during Friday’s show as well. When Lauer turned to Al Roker for a check on the weather, Rocker replied wryly, “Yeah, because it was either you or Keith Olbermann.”

Design-oriented retailer Fab.com has seen its referral traffic from Facebook double since upgrading for timeline, and its membership has shot up to 3.2 million from 1.8 million.

In a post on the Facebook developers blog, Fab.com was touted for using action verbs including bought and faved, and for aggregating content including purchases, favorites, and I just bought this. The blog post went on to say:

Fab.com offers a limited-time, promotional monthly credit to encourage people to opt into the social shopping experience. Fab.com also displays a face pile of friends during authentication to make the experience more relevant to each person, which increases conversion.

Fab.com prompts people to use the most popular feature — add to favorites — on their product pages to increase sharing and generate stories that appear in news feed and timeline on Facebook.

If you learn nothing else from reading this next article, you should at least take away that there is no reason a cover letter should not be submitted with any business plan.

When creating a cover letter for a business plan, many people attempt to summarize the entire plan in the cover letter. If you do that, what’s the point of the Executive Summary of the plan?

The true purpose of a cover letter is simply to introduce your business plan. Though it is not a component of the actual plan, it should be delivered along with it. If you think about it, you are actually addressing two separate audiences. The cover letter should address the one person you have been in contact with and the actual business plan should address a larger audience, meaning all of the others who are going to have any involvement.

With this being said, by forming your cover letter with similar characteristics of that of a personal letter, you will do more to assist your efforts and leave the nuts and bolts of the operation in the actual business plan. In other cases, it will be more appropriate to create a more formal cover letter, but in both cases, they should have a personal touch.

A Personal Touch

When it’s appropriate, your cover letters should be as personal as possible; mirroring the type of dialogue you have been using in your previous correspondence. A good opening would be to thank your contact for their time and attention, making a special effort to point out specific areas in which they have been of assistance.

Cover Letter Example:

Dear Chris,

Enclosed you will find the business plan that I promised.

I also want to take this time to thank you for all of your assistance. Designing a suitable business plan for your company required me to become familiar with your products and industry. As a result, your answers to my questions and guidance proved to be invaluable. Through your assistance, I was able to create the enclosed professional business plan.

I will contact you on Thursday to discuss this plan after you have had a chance to review. As always, please don’t hesitate to call me or send me an email if you have questions or if I can be of further assistance.

I look forward continuing to work with you.

Sincerely,
Joe Salesman

Despite sending this type of letter because of the cordiality of it, a personalized cover letter should also be sent because it is more persuasive than a stodgier, professional cover letter. Haven’t you realized that when you receive a compliment, you are more likely to give one in return? This may result in a leg up with having your business plan accepted.

What it boils down to is that a cover letter should always be included when submitted your business plan. But in doing so, you should not overstate the obvious and try to be something or someone that you aren’t. Keep it professional, with a slight personal appeal; appropriate to the relationship in which you have already established with your reader.

Frame it
Once in a while, your child will come up with a creative gem that will merit a permanent display. Special creations deserve to be put up in frames, as they will thus be cherished for years to come. On the other hand, you also have custom-made frames that can hold several sheets at a time, allowing you to rotate the display.

Create an Art Gallery
Your child’s room can be converted into an art gallery, and what’s more – your child can be involved in decorating it. Display the artwork into transparent plastic sleeves and hang them around the room. Hand over the charge of changing the images to your child. Cover one wall with magnetic paint so that the very latest can be put up on it.

Go Online
You can scan the artwork and put it up online. This way, they get more exposure, and your child will be thrilled to bits. Once the artwork is uploaded, there is no dearth of options – you can create online albums, put them up on Facebook or your personal web page or even send it to family and friends via e-mail. Specialized art websites aimed at children are a great place to put up pictures too.

Send it
If you know of any children’s publications that accept artwork from readers, do send them copies of your child’s work. Do keep it as a surprise and watch the amazement on your child’s face when he/she sees it in print. This serves as an excellent way to encourage creativity in your child.

On the Refrigerator
The refrigerator is a popular and traditionally-coveted place to put up any designs or drawings. Purchase some fancy magnets, or better – ask your creative genius to make some, and use them to put up all the artwork that you think deserves a special mention.

Put On a Show
Artwork is obviously not limited to paper paintings, if your child has explored the art of glass painting, ceramic work, paper mache or clay modeling, which will give you some unique home décor items. Put them up on display and watch the compliments pour in.

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Portfolio managers will be doing some last-minute shopping for winners from the big stock market rally as they take part next week in the quarter-end ritual of window dressing.

The activity could help stocks resume their upward course in the week ahead and keep a long-expected pullback at bay.

The benchmark Standard & Poor’s 500 index <.SPX> is up 11.1 percent so far for the first quarter and the year. That would follow a gain of 11.2 percent for the fourth quarter.

If the trend holds, the S&P 500 will book its best back-to-back quarters since the second and third quarters of 2009.

The S&P 500 lost some ground in the past week, ending down 0.5 percent after five straight weeks of gains, but that’s only its second negative week for the year.

Much of the quarter’s gains have been driven by signs of improvement in the economy, particularly a pickup in jobs, which has been lagging other areas in the recovery.

Window dressing typically involves investors grabbing some of the quarter’s best performers to dress up their portfolio listings.

Some of the last-minute buying is likely to come from the hedge fund community, said Phil Orlando, chief equity strategist and senior portfolio manager for Federal Global Investment Management Corp in New York.

Hedge funds “by and large have not been believers about the improvement in the domestic economy … so they’ve been very much out of the market. Yet here we are with the first quarter looking like the best first quarter since 1998,” he said. “They’ve got a huge gain to catch up.”

But retail investors, he said, have probably also noticed that they’ve missed a lot by having kept their money in Treasuries and other fixed-income assets over the quarter.

“They have woken up to the realization that the surge in yields has resulted in a significant loss of capital for them,” Orlando said.

If the S&P 500 manages to end the first quarter with an 11.1 percent gain, that would be its best quarterly performance since the second quarter of 2009.

By comparison, the 10-year U.S. Treasury note’s yield has risen nearly 36 basis points. If this holds, the 10-year note’s yield will record a quarterly rise for the first time in a year.

In the final week of the first quarter, Wall Street will get a more complete look at the economy through a whole suite of indicators. Among them will be March consumer confidence on Tuesday, February durable goods orders on Wednesday, the final look at fourth-quarter Gross Domestic Product on Thursday, plus February personal income and spending data on Friday as well as the Chicago Purchasing Managers Index, and the final reading on March consumer sentiment from the Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan surveys.

“The bottom line is: The economy is improving and while inflation is trending higher, there is no threat of corporate profits disintegrating,” said Peter Cardillo, chief market economist at Rockwell Global Capital in New York.

“I am looking for a rally,” he said.

FINANCIALS, TECH TOP PERFORMERS

Gains this quarter have been broad-based, with most of the 10 S&P sectors on track to end the quarter in positive territory.

But the S&P 500 financial sector index <.GSPF> and the S&P technology sector index <.GSPT> stand out, with gains so far of 21 percent for the financials and 19.9 percent for techs. The more defensive S&P 500 utility and consumer staples sectors have underperformed, with the utility index <.GSPU> down 3.9 percent and the consumer staples index <.GSPD> up 3.7 percent so far.

Still, the S&P energy sector <.GSPE>, a cycical sector that tends to gain with the economy like financials and technology, is up just 4 percent for the quarter so far.

Because of the S&P 500′s big move this quarter, some strategists expect to see some funds shift out of equities.

“Given the fact that stocks have had a big move and bonds have sold off, portfolio managers in asset-allocation mode may trim a little bit of equity holdings and move them into fixed-income holdings to rebalance target weights,” said Fred Dickson, chief market strategist of D.A. Davidson & Co. in Lake Oswego, Oregon.

According to Thomson Reuters’ Lipper service, investors in U.S.-domiciled equity funds have splurged so far in the first quarter of the year, pumping a net $ 32.7 billion in fresh capital into the sector.

This follows net outflows for the previous nine-month period, which saw a high of $ 66 billion in net redemptions occur in the second quarter of 2011. For all of last year, equity funds experienced net outflows of $ 50.4 billion, only the second full year of redemptions since Lipper started tracking fund flow data in 1992.

The S&P 500 ended 2011 virtually unchanged, but is up 23 percent since the end of September.

Even as money has moved back into equities, taxable bond funds are also enjoying a banner start to the year.

Lipper data shows $ 85 billion in net inflows so far in 2012, on pace to be the best since the $ 98 billion of net inflows recorded in the first quarter of 2010.

Taxable bond funds have not had a negative quarter since the fourth quarter of 2008. The record inflow year for this category was 2009 when investors bought an additional $ 384 billion of taxable bond funds. The last full year of net outflows was the $ 54 billion in 2000.

Stocks have benefitted not just from the upbeat economic data, but from speculation that the Federal Reserve could add further stimulus to the economy.

“What may have driven some of this sustained support for the market is continued indications from the Fed that QE3 is not out of the question. That would certainly be extremely negative for anybody who has a short position on U.S. equities,” said Natalie Trunow, chief investment officer of equities at Calvert Investment Management in Bethesda, Maryland.

(Reporting By Caroline Valetkevitch; Additional reporting by Daniel Bases, Richard Leong and Chuck Mikolajczak; Editing by Jan Paschal)

Facebook barely finished moving into its new headquarters in Menlo Park and yet a handful of local publications have run articles this week about the social network’s real estate staff eyeing digs in another suburb.

The company’s demands for more local infrastructure than the original move-in involved has also inspired national media coverage of negotiations with Menlo Park city officials, but for now both sides have a long-term view of Facebook’s occupancy in the area.

Tucker Bounds, a Facebook spokesperson, commented:

It’s our hope that Menlo Park and East Palo Alto see the incredible economic benefits to having a good neighbor, like Facebook, join the community. We expect to grow and thrive responsibly in Menlo Park, but it’s important for us to evaluate other options in the case that our plans are not fully approved and supported.

Menlo Park city council has yet to approve Facebook’s proposed expansion plans that would enable the company to house up to 9,400 employees, something the social network had first asked for almost a full year ago.

The way Facebook wants to allocate this, according to the Silicon Valley Business Journal, is:

6,600 on the campus it now occupies and 2,800 on a nearby campus it wants to build. It is only permitted to have up to 3,600 at the original site now.

Facebook is seeking approval to add five buildings totaling 440,000 square feet on 22 acres at 312 and 313 Constitution Drive across Bayfront Expressway. The original campus and the new one would be connected by an underground tunnel.

The Silicon Valley Business Journal learned from a realtor that Facebook had previously looked at a similarly-sized property, Pacific Research Center, across the bay in Newark, California, a while ago and was going to keep that property in mind as a backup option in case things didn’t work out in Menlo Park.

In the mean time, Facebook has offered to keep more of its employees off the local roads during rush hours — hello, shuttle service — if Menlo Park would allow the social network to staff up at that location. According to The Almanac News:

Facebook is asking Menlo Park to swap an existing cap of 3,600 employees for a traffic cap instead at its main Willow Road campus — now known as 1 Hacker Way. The requested cap is for 15,000 daily trips, with 2,600 during rush hour.

Menlo Park officials said they’d consider that request if Facebook ponied up more money for infrastructure, among other concessions.

With plans well underway for an initial public offer, the likelihood that the social network would pick up and move seems slim (quite possibly, some of the 31 investment banks underwriting the IPO may have designs on bond-financing the municipal infrastructure that will accommodate the ongoing expansion in Menlo Park.)

Yet Menlo Park has enough affluence among existing occupants to make it a demanding negotiator with Facebook.

Leoness Cellars, located on the Deportola Wine Trail, is as inviting as it is beautiful. It sits on top of rolling hills overlooking Mount Palomar and the vineyard, with a breathtaking view no matter what time of year. I have had the pleasure of tasting many of their fine wines, including everyone’s most favorite, the White Merlot, which they are well known for. Leoness Cellars offers a great wine tasting experience whether you are in their tasting room, curled up in front of the fire in the main room, or outside on the patio enjoying an evening sunset. I always end my visit at Leoness with a taste of their Cinsault Dessert Wine accompanied by a scrumptious chocolate truffle, which is what makes Leoness Cellars my favorite winery. Leoness is open year round for tasting from 11 a.m. till 5 p.m.

Thornton Winery, known for their award-winning champagnes and wines, is one of the first wineries you come to as you enter Temecula Wine Country on Rancho California Road. Thornton Winery offers a unique wine tasting experience in that you also get to sample some of their decadent food pairings from their award-winning Cafe Champagne along with your wine. The food and the wine will keep you coming back for more, as renowned Chef Steve Pickell changes up the menu every week so that each visit will be a new and delightful experience. I recently had the pleasure of sampling their new line of chocolate wines (which is what makes Thornton my favorite), along with some amazing new food creations. Imagine, if you will, a smooth red wine, with the aroma of chocolate-covered strawberries, accompanied by an almond and coconut crunch cake drizzled with a Grand Marnier creme sauce. I was also pleasantly surprised to find out that chocolate wines are not just for dessert. So, make sure you stop by Thornton Winery and try their amazing new food and wine pairings, and you, too, will be pleasantly surprised. The tasting room and gift shop are open daily from 10 a.m. till 5 p.m.

Oak Mountain Winery is a little more down to earth and has a more casual and welcoming atmosphere, along with a little extra surprise. You can taste the wonderful locally grown wines from Oak Mountain and from Temecula Hills Winery under one roof. It is like two stops in one. Their specialties are the intense Bordeaux classics that every wine snob adores, like Cabs and Merlots. My husband enjoys their well-blended Port wine as an after-dinner treat as often as he can get it. Oak Mountain offers something else that makes them special (which is what makes them my favorite). They also have an avocado oil tasting bar set up in the wine tasting room. They have many different flavors to choose from, and all are delicious. You will not be able to leave Oak Mountain Winery without purchasing both their wine and their avocado oil, so be prepared. Oak Mountain Winery is also located on the Deportola Wine Trail and is open daily 11 a.m. till 5 p.m.

So, as you can probably tell from my thoughts, there is no absolute favorite in my book. There are just a lot of great wineries to choose from depending upon what you might be in the mood for. Every visit to Temecula Valley wine country can be a different but equally as wonderful experience as the last.

Apple plans to launch a smaller version of its popular iPad tablet later this year according to an unnamed official at Samsung.

While speaking with The Korea Times, the anonymous Samsung official said that Apple will likely spend a record $ 11 billion on Samsung-sourced parts for its various devices in 2012. “The amount of the current contract is around $ 9.7 billion,” The Korea Times was told. 

The site’s source continued, “The contract is expected to rise to $ 11 billion by the end of this year as Apple is planning to release a smaller iPad, probably with a 7.85-inch screen, and to sell more of its MacBook Air PCs using Samsung’s faster solid state drive (SSD) storage.”

Apple’s 7.85-inch iPad has been rumored on a number of occasions, and Samsung Securities mentioned the unconfirmed tablet recently in a confidential report. Samsung currently supplies a variety of parts for Apple’s PCs and mobile devices, and the company is reportedly the sole supplier of Retina Displays for Apple’s new iPad, which goes on sale Friday, March 16th.

This content was originally published on BGR.com

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