These new smart parking meters about to be tested in San Francisco automatically adjust the price you’re going to pay for your space depending on how many spots are already filled. Thanks to supply and demand you will pay anywhere from .25 cents to $6 an hour to park – expect to multiply that by 2 if these come to New York.

Reporting from Las Vegas - What would appear to be a natural — a Manny Pacquiao-Floyd Mayweather Jr. super fight — might not be. Egos, greed and grudges could get in the way.

“It’s a simple negotiation,” Ross Greenburg, HBO Sports president, said minutes after Pacquiao knocked down welterweight world champion Miguel Cotto twice en route to a 12th-round technical knockout Saturday.

“There’s so much money to be made. If it doesn’t happen, there’ll be a revolt. Nothing else is acceptable, and I’m speaking on behalf of the American public and the sport itself.”

But obstacles exist. Will the rich rivals fight over who gets more than a 50% cut of the purse? Of course. Can Mayweather and Bob Arum, Pacquiao’s promoter, set aside their deep personal dislike? Perhaps.

Richard Schaefer, the Golden Boy Promotions chief executive who has promoted Mayweather’s last three fights, expressed confidence that he’d be able to work with Arum to make a Mayweather-Pacquiao fight.

Schaefer told The Times he planned to speak today with Mayweather and Arum. Pacquiao said, “It’s my job to fight. It’s my promoter’s job to pick the fight.”

Said Schaefer: “Bob and me — how often have we failed to make a big fight?”

Yet, that deal is expected to require a diplomatic effort on a scale usually reserved for the State Department.

Mayweather (40-0, 25 knockouts) formerly fought for Arum’s promotional company Top Rank after being an Olympian but left, saying he felt obscured by the popularity of former stablemate Oscar De La Hoya. The mega paydays that followed, against De La Hoya, Ricky Hatton and Juan Manuel Marquez, have emboldened the unbeaten star’s public statements that Arum shorts his fighters, including Pacquiao (50-3-2, 38 KOs).

Arum bluntly said this week that a deal will not hinge on whether he likes Mayweather — “and I don’t,” he said.

Pacquiao, usually polite, this month directed some verbal blows at Mayweather, saying he doesn’t think the fight will happen because of Mayweather’s attitude.

“I’m sure he doesn’t want to fight me,” Pacquiao said. “With Floyd, boxing is like a business. He doesn’t care about the people around him watching. He doesn’t care if the fight is boring. As long as the fight is over and he gets the money, it’s good. I want the people to be happy. If I was in the audience, I’m going to watch the boxing because it’s a good fight.”

Mayweather hasn’t launched back, but he does strongly believe he’s the world’s best fighter and has made it pretty clear he deserves the larger purse. He was considered the world’s top pound-for-pound fighter before retiring for more than a year and watching Pacquiao seize the title with the battering of De La Hoya, Hatton and Cotto.

Cotto went to the hospital after suffering facial cuts in the loss but said he planned to fight again, with possible foes being Shane Mosley or Antonio Margarito.

As for Pacquiao-Mayweather. . . .

“All we can do is try to encourage both sides to sit at a table and hammer out a deal,” said Greenburg, who likened the situation to the 1971 deal between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, when Ali returned from boxing exile to face the champion Frazier. They settled on a 50-50 purse split of $5 million, Greenburg said.

Why not 50-50 again, with so much cash available?

Mayweather and Pacquiao have displayed tremendous greed. Pacquiao kept asking for more money to fight Hatton in May until the Hatton camp nearly walked.

Now, Pacquiao probably will be able to say his fight with Cotto easily surpassed Mayweather’s million-seller against Juan Manuel Marquez in September. But Schaefer already has a reply.

“How did Pacquiao-Marquez do versus Mayweather-Marquez? How did Pacquiao-Oscar do versus Floyd-Oscar?” Schaefer said, well aware of the disparity.

Greenburg made it clear: “Floyd’s calling the shots for this fight to happen.”

And Arum’s matchmaker at Top Rank, Bruce Trampler, said it’s naive to believe intangibles like “the good of boxing” will influence the deal.

“This has nothing to do with that,” Trampler said. “These are two businessmen who are going to do what’s best for themselves.”

Said Schaefer: “Getting them together is a mega-fight that has to be made. We’d all have to be morons to not let this happen.”

[via: LA Times]

It seems as if not even Hollywood is exempt from the fact that life has a tendency to come full circle. Nicolas Cage saw his finances crumble this year, leaving the actor currently facing a tax bill of over $5 million as previously reported here. While Cage is in the process of suing his former financial advisor for mismanaging his funds, it looks like his dire financial straits may be temporarily fixed, and by none other than fellow A-lister Johnny Depp.

In a true “that’s what friends are for” move, the Public Enemies star has reportedly called his old friend to let him know that he will front “whatever he needs” to get him out of this crisis. Depp is generous in his financial and emotional support, possibly seeing the move as a way to pay Cage back for launching Depp’s stellar career: It was Nic who arranged for Depp, then an unknown musician, to meet with his agent, which led him to A Nightmare on Elm Street.

[Via: StyleCaster.com]

Actor Nicolas Cage is reportedly completely broke and has a significant amount of debt.

According to Showbiz Gossip the star is selling his off his properties all over the world to gain capital.

The 45-year-old actor is blaming his manager, saying he sent him down to financial ruin. Cage is reportedly beginning a multi-million dollar lawsuit against him.

Sky News reported that Cage owed $6 million in unpaid taxes and defaulted on a $2 million loan. He was reportedly forced to sell a castle in Germany because of his financial situation.

Cage currently has six films due to be released in the next two years.

It’s tough to hear this story right after I watched the Family Man again recently. It’s an “Art Imitates” life situation if you look back to that movie. What’s funny is when some people say they are broke, they still own 5 homes around the globe. The broke that I’ve been accustomed to meant you didn’t have sh!t, an you didn’t own sh!t. I gotta give him props though, he has good taste. I’m always entertained by the type of characters these people are and how they lived based on the things they’ve encountered. People watching is a my cheap and guilty pleasure.

If anyone needed a huge postfight bonus at UFC 104, it was Pat Barry. The heavyweight out of New Orleans, scored Knockout of the Night and Fight of the Night for his victory over Antoni Hardonk. That was good enough for $120,000. Good thing, Barry needed the infusion of cash in the worst way. He confirmed to MMAScrapsRadio that he was completely down on his luck before the fight, agreeing that he had little to eat in Los Angeles the week of the fight.

“I still had my apartment but if something would’ve happened and the fight had been canceled, I would’ve been evicted six days later.”

Barry, 30, said he didn’t even tell his trainer Duke Roufus for fear that he would think the fighter had the wrong motivation going into the fight. Barry said he didn’t ask anyone for money including his mother:
“I could ask someone but then at the same time, how hard are you going to work for something if everytime you get in trouble somebody catches you? I did something to put myself in this position I have to work my way out of it.”

Barry got his $120,000 bonus check last Tuesday. He couldn’t believe it. When he went to deposit the check, his truck wouldn’t start. Barry got a jump and hit the bank sporting a black eye and pink striped shorts.

“I go to the bank, I’m sweaty, I’ve got the black eye, I haven’t shaven in two days, I’m strung out because I haven’t slept, I have green circles under my eyes so I’m like ‘Can I have a deposit slip mam?’. She gives it to me, I fill it out hand it to her. She looks at the deposit slip, then the check, then looks at me and says ‘Excuse me I’ll be right back.’ Then a manager comes out, a guy in a suit and says ‘What seems to be the problem?’ I was like ‘Well I have a black eye, that’s the only problem I know this looks really ridiculous.’ So he asks me for my ID, I hand him my license an he’s like ‘Your license says Pat Barry, but this check was written to Patrick Barry.’ So I decided to be funny and tell him Pat Barry is in my trunk right now. He didnt laugh. So I told him take your time man do whatever you need to do because I have no where to go and my truck probably wont start when I go outside so you can just do whatever you need to do. An hour later he came back and everything was fine, the check was in my bank account.”

Listen Here to the entire Barry interview.

Despite the economic gloom and doom, the honorees on this year’s 30 Under 30 list are building wildly successful ventures with the help of their peers, parents, professors, and patrons.

Recession? What recession? You’d think the events of the past year would have curbed Generation Y’s enthusiasm for the always-uncertain entrepreneurial life, but you’d never know it by looking at this year’s 30 Under 30 list. It’s a dynamic group of self-starters that has managed to raise money, launch new products, build new technologies, and tap into underserved markets. And they’ve done it with relentless enthusiasm and resiliency.

But they haven’t done it alone. Take at look at our list, and one of the first things you’ll notice is an astounding number of partners (Getting By with a Little Help from Their Friends). They’re starting companies with college pals (Thrillist, Apture, Foodzie, and Smathers & Branson), spouses (ModCloth), or siblings (DANNIJO,M3 Girl Designs), and that should probably come as no surprise since GenY is typically characterized as a very social generation — they are, by and large, comfortable with teamwork and collaboration.

Dig a little beneath the surface, however, and you’ll find that their tendency to start companies with partners is just the most obvious and visible element of this generation’s entrepreneurial zeitgeist. First and foremost, they are tribe-builders. By that, we mean that they seem to have an innate talent, and an almost compulsive desire, to draw others into their entrepreneurial orbits and to continually extract from them wisdom and advice. Parents, professors, mentors, investors, and complete strangers are all invested in the success of these companies. No arm-twisting required. After all, who doesn’t want even the tiniest role in an entrepreneurial success story?

For many young entrepreneurs, the tribe of support begins forming very close to home. Their baby boomer parents — increasingly disillusioned with corporate life, yet eager to help launch their children on paths to success — are probably more supportive of entrepreneurial dreams than any other generation of parents in modern times. WhenMaddie Bradshaw, the 13-year-old founder of M3 Girl Designs, came up with the idea to make and sell hand-painted bottle-cap necklaces, her mom gave her the thumbs up to spend $300 of birthday and tooth fairy money to start the venture. M3 is now a $1.6 million company with products in hundreds of stores. The three “M”s in the company name stand for Mom (the adult signature on all the corporate documents), Maddie (founder, president, and head designer), and nine-year old Margot, (vice president and assistant designer).

Then there’s Jamail Larkins, whose parents encouraged his love of aviation but insisted he help finance his passion for flying. So Larkins, who flew solo in Canada at age 14, sold aviation training books and videos to earn money for lessons. Now, in addition to being a skilled acrobatic pilot, he’s the CEO of Ascension Aircraft, a nearly $6 million firm that sells and leases airplanes. At 25 years old.

While we’re noticing an increasing number of young entrepreneurs who moved beyond the lemonade stand at shockingly young ages, like Bradshaw and Larkins, college still seems to be the incubator of choice for a good many GenY business owners. And why not? There’s no better place to build a tribe. John Goscha, Jeff Avalon, and Morgan Newman cut their entrepreneurial teeth as freshman living in Babson College’s E-Tower dorm for entrepreneurs, where idea generation apparently beats beer pong as a favored extracurricular activity. For the three friends, the very process of brainstorming led to a pretty good idea: frustrated with the limited space on whiteboards and with chore of tacking giant pieces of paper to the wall, they inventedIdeaPaint, which turns any paintable surface into a dry-erase board. The three even signed on two Babson professors as investors.

Meanwhile, Stanford grad-school classmates Tristan Harris, Can Sar, and Jesse Youngtapped into the university’s John S. Knight Fellowship for Professional Journalists for advice on a technology tool they were developing for publishers and bloggers. Based on feedback from the journalists on the kinds of Web-based features they’d most appreciate, the three developed Apture, a plug-in that allows readers to view multimedia links without leaving a website. One of the Knight Fellows introduced the Apture team to an executive editor at The Washington Post, and the paper ultimately became a customer.

At Bowdoin, roommates Peter Smathers and Austin Branson were so smitten with the needlepoint belts made by their girlfriends, that they decided to start a business selling them. Not knowing quite where to start, they drew on the Maine college’s resources by pitching a joint independent study project to both the art and economics departments. It was accepted, and the two got a crash course in both design and business planning. Their needlepoint belts and accessories, made by more than 1,500 independent contractors in 16 Vietnamese villages, now generate $2.5 million in revenue.

For all of these entrepreneurs, college campuses provided invaluable free resources in a safe, supportive atmosphere.Eric Koger, who founded ModCloth with his wife, Susan Gregg Koger, sums it up nicely. “Carnegie Mellon gave [us time] to hone our respective skills in preparation for jumping into ModCloth full-time,” he says. “We were able to work on ModCloth and get feedback from professors and classmates, during a time when we didn’t have to worry about ‘paying the bills,’ since we got our basic cost of living from student loans and help from family. It was a critical development period for us.” All start-up entrepreneurs should be so lucky, right?

The most important tribe any entrepreneur can cultivate is, of course, his or her community of customers. And the honorees on this year’s list are particularly savvy at just that. Foodzie founders Emily Olson, Nik Bauman, andRob LaFave created an Etsy-like online marketplace where “foodies” could find gourmet and artisanal treats, and where independent producers were able to reach a broader and more targeted group of consumers. The company is a graduate ofTechStars, a Boulder, Colorado-based incubator program that provides mentorship and a small amount of seed capital for start-ups. But Foodzie also landed another $1 million in funding after the program.

ModCloth, too, attracted funding largely because of its strong connection with its customer base. The website sells reasonably priced vintage-inspired and indie clothing and will likely increase sales from $3 million to $15 million this year, according to its husband-and-wife team. “They know their customer,” explains their investor Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital, “and have an intuitive sense of what products to offer and what messaging to use. They are passionate, scrappy, and persistent, yet seek advice and counsel.”

Thrillist, a subscription-based e-mail newsletter geared toward young men, has such a loyal following among its 1 million subscribers that the company expects to rack up between $5 and $10 million in revenue this year, largely from advertisers who desperately seek the coveted demographic, even as they pull ads from more traditional media amid a huge ad slump. Thrillist’s big differentiating factor: 14 local editions that segment its larger tribe of subscribers into smaller, regional markets, all the better for advertisers to target their messages.

Elliott Bisnow, the founder of Summit Series, can’t claim revenue like that yet — but his influence among the entrepreneurial tribe does appear to be growing. Summit Series is essentially a networking organization for prominent, young CEOs. Bisnow organizes retreats where they can discuss everything from business strategy to philanthropy. “We’re trying to create Davos for young entrepreneurs,” he says. Ambitious? Maybe. But last March, he got a little closer that goal. The White House, he was told, wanted him to assemble a group of 35 young entrepreneurs for a visit. The goal: to start a conversation between the Obama administration and a new generation of influential young CEOs.

Bisnow pulled it together in two weeks, assembling Tony Hsieh of Zappos, Aaron Patzer of Mint.com, Jessica Jackley of Kiva, Adam Lowery and Eric Ryan of Method, Jake Nickell of Threadless, Evan Williams of Twitter, and several others, to convene in D.C. While President Obama was not in attendance, a door to the White House was opened, e-mail addresses were exchanged, and a promise of open dialogue was made. Which makes us think that maybe the most influential tribe of all is the one we honor right here every year on the 30 Under 30 list.