The Devil wears Prada and dates Vatican real estate guy

They are the couple of the day, beautiful, rich and famous. She, Anne Hathaway, 24 years next November 12th, already a teen age idol in Princess Diaries, became a celebrity after Brokeback Mountain and then a real star acting with Meryl Streep in the last movie about fashion world. He, Raffaello Follieri, 28, was born in San Giovanni Rotondo, Italy (the famous Holy Padre Pio home town) and is the head with his father Pasquale of a real estate group based in Park Avenue New York City, in charge of reselling buildings owned by the Catholic Church in America, thanks to solid connections with Vatican top officials and famous yet sometimes embarassing friendships.
There is enough to feed intercontinental paparazzi for a while, it sounds like the story of Stefano Ricucci and Anna Falchi, let's hope that, thanks God, this is not ending so badly... In the picture, the two are taking part in a charity funded by the Follieri Group in Nicaragua.
Anyway she's delicious and in The Devil Wears Prada, inspired by the character of US Vogue chief editor Anne Wintour, is perfect as the boss assistant, a ugly duckling who becomes swan and then flies away. The story is a little unoriginal but funny, and if not else there are a lot of beautiful shoes.

There Is Something About YouTube

The recent purchase of extremely popular video web site YouTube by Google for $1.65 billion in stock is probably one of the biggest news to date in the internet world. The site, which was started by three 20-somethings last year, is a free video warehouse that allows users (something like 100 million a day) to upload or download movies. Rumors emerged that Yahoo was in the bidding war until very close to the end. Sequoia Capital, which funded YouTube with $11.5 million, earned more than 40 times what was invested in a company founded in February 2005. Other news report of CBS, Vivendi-Universal and Sony BMG joining a new branded channel on YouTube to deliver featured content.
On the other hand News Corp-Fox, which owns MySpace, the first YouTube competitor in the web video market, didn't hide sort of unease about Google's move, given the recent agreement for hosting Google ads on the famous social networking community. Last weekend, subtle changes occurred on MySpace’s homepage and user pages to make MySpace videos much more prominent and accessible. The default user profile page now has a video section that automatically displays a video if the user has one uploaded.
In other words the web video world is exploding, and the "viral" video technology invented by YouTube is the engine of this explosion. What's this "viral" stuff? It's the ability of embedding any YouTube video in a blog or web site just as simply as this...

$500,000 of 9/11 victims fund money spent on designer shoes

One of the widows of the September 11th 2001 attack to the World Trade Center, Kathy Trant, whose husband Dan was a trader for Cantor Fitzgerald on the 104th floor of North Tower, went public last year, saying she spent nearly all the $5 million she received from the U.S. government compensation fund in an attempt to allay her grief. "It's disgusting, I'm ashamed of it" she said, hoping that telling her story could help others with the same problem of compulsive shopping.
She traveled to Italy, Jamaica and Asia, obsessively gave gifts to friends and strangers, and spent $1.5 million on luxurious additions to her Long Island home, including a full basketball court and a floor-to-ceiling shoe rack, filled with half a million dollars' worth of shoes signed Prada, Marc Jacobs, Manolo Blahnik, Jimmy Choo, Emilio Pucci and Vera Wang.
She became a celebrity after her partecipation in Oprah Winfrey TV show, where she candidly admitted she was down to her last $500,000. She was recently hosted by british Channel Four for Ground Zero fifth anniversary cover-up.

A True Italian Story

Sorry for the Berlusconi-like title, nothing in common. After four years maybe it's time to make a little history and a summary of this meritorious activity. Around year 2001, using my skill and experience in CAD, I started designing the first pair of slip-on shoes. It was just for hobby, but in the end they looked cool to me, so I decided to publish them, and then this web site was set up since may 2002. Due to the remarkable success, I was convinced that there could be a market, and by the end of 2003 I prepared a collection of samples of boots and pumps, thanks to a firm from Parabiago (nearby Milan), which, after some insistence, sent me the goods "on one's word". You can see these gorgeous models on the cover from my home page. Unfortunately the first customer, this not Italian but Mexican, turned out to be a professional swindler and paid with a check that in the end proved to be false.

Although I keep receiving e-mails asking how to order these shoes, I could never sell a pair via Internet, nor find a shop or a distributor seriously interested in retailing them. I sold the remaining pairs to friends and relatives. The firm that produced the samples, by unanimous consent of excellent quality, was owned by Finpart financial group (holding brands like Cerruti, Frette, Moncler, Marina Yachting, Andrea Pfister and Colette). This holding went recently bankrupt, leaving a hundreds million gap, with accusations of rigging the market and fraudulent bankruptcy, and dragged in the storm also the Banca Popolare of Intra, that "generously" lavished its subscribers' money to knit the accounts. Probably those qualified craftsmen that made my shoes (which however I regularly paid for) are now unemployed. The usual "tricky guys of the neighbourhood" made other innocent victims. Another well known story, a true Italian story.