Review: Nintendo’s TVii tops button-laden remotes

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Nintendo‘s TV-watching tool for the new Wii U game console beats my regular remote control hands down.

Called TVii, the service transforms how you watch television in three key ways. It turns the touch-screen GamePad controller for the Wii U into a remote control for your TV and set-top box. It groups your favorite shows and sports teams together, whether it’s on live TV or an Internet video service such as Hulu Plus. And it offers water-cooler moments you can chat about on social media.

It takes some getting used to, and I had a lot of re-learning to do after years of using my thumb to channel surf. But once I did, I found the service an advance from the mass of buttons on most TV remote controls.

TVii comes free with the Wii U, although it didn’t become available in the U.S. until mid-December, about a month after the game machine’s debut.

One nice touch is that TVii gives you a way to search for shows over Internet video apps and live TV all in one place. I can then choose whether to watch it on the big TV or on my controller’s touch screen, which measures 6.2 inches diagonally.

Handling these different sources of video at once is a tall order, and Nintendo Co. does it pretty well. No one else has combined live and Web TV as seamlessly before. As the lines blur between the two, I would hope some of TVii’s advances are copied and improved upon by other gadget makers and TV signal providers.

For starters, TVii asks for your TV maker, your set-top box maker, your location and your TV provider (that could be an antenna). TVii then uses infrared codes to control your TV just like the old remote, and it can offer a traditional channel guide for live TV shows. TVii also asks for your favorite shows, sports teams and movies. This helps it create an easy-to-understand grouping of shows you might want to watch.

I appreciate the way TVii walked me through the setup process. It was refreshing, given the misfortune I recently had of trying to program the remote control that came with my cable set-top box, which is about as fun as doing your tax returns. TVii takes away the need to read folded-up instruction manuals that appear to be written by and for electronics hobbyists.

After the setup, TVii presents you with a series of icons for Favorites, TV, Movies, Sports and Search. A little avatar of your identity is in one corner, and tapping on it lets you adjust your favorites or go through the setup again. Each person in a household can have a different avatar and set of favorites.

In Favorites, your shows are listed with cover art, and you can swipe through the offerings. Tapping one, say, “The Mindy Project,” will pull up an episode list with pictures and brief summaries. Choosing an episode will bring up a range of options — the channel if it’s on live TV, or buttons for Hulu Plus or Amazon, where you can pay for monthly access or just one episode through the service’s app. (The free version of Hulu is blocked on gadgets, including the Wii U and tablet computers. Apple’s iTunes, unsurprisingly, isn’t integrated.) The option of clicking through to Netflix will be added some time in 2013.

One hiccup is that if you want to watch a show on live TV now, it asks if your TV’s input source is already set to the set-top box, rather than the Wii U or another gadget such as a DVD player. If it is, you tap “yes” and the channel changes. If not, you have to tap until the source switches to the right one and then tap “yes.” Still, there’s no need to go back to your TV’s remote control.

The other menu items for TV, Movies, Sports and Search operate pretty similarly. Eventually you’ll get a range of options to watch. In the case of sports, you’ll likely see several game possibilities, with the latest score showing up on each game icon.

As an alternative, you can resort to a physical TV button on the GamePad that brings up touch controls that mimic a simplified, standard remote.

Another option is using an altogether separate interface in which favorite channels and other controls are displayed graphically on a semi-circular wheel. It looks strange, and I wouldn’t recommend it.

Anyone who is frustrated by the jumble of cables and boxes that now surround TVs will see TVii’s appeal. My wife said she liked the ease of holding and touching the controller, rather than fiddling with the button-laden remote. One downside I can see with TVii is that you have to keep looking down to figure out what to watch. And you have to plug it in frequently, as the GamePad controller will die out after three to five hours of use.

TVii also offers a standard channel guide in which you can scroll up and down for programs on different channels or right and left for different times of day. A touch will change the channel to the program, which is nice.

For certain shows and sporting events, TVii will supply a running list of key events called “TV tags.” These descriptions of events, like the precise moment when Mindy’s Christmas party descends into chaos, are displayed on the GamePad’s screen, along with a screenshot. Tapping on one opens up a comment window, and an onscreen keyboard allows you to make a comment. For sports, you get a description of each play, such as the number of yards thrown in a pass, beside a graphic that gets updated.

Not many people have Wii U consoles yet, nor is everyone tuned to TVii. As a result, I found myself with only one or two commenters to share my thoughts with.

If you’ve connected TVii to Facebook and Twitter (again, some sign-up is involved), your comments will go out to your friends and followers, but the TV tag that you are commenting on won’t show up, so they might not know what you’re talking about. TVii adds the hashtag “NintendoTVii” to help readers take a guess.

In the end, TVii isn’t perfect.

It isn’t yet able to program your digital video recorder, although it will do so for TiVo DVRs by March. Sports are limited to pro and college basketball and football, and there’s no integration with fantasy sports leagues. And the battery life of the GamePad is short.

A review unit I was sent failed to take a charge and had to be replaced, although I haven’t found others who have had the same problem.

These irritations aside, Nintendo has given us a way to control the clutter of channels, apps and devices crowding around the TV. It’s relatively easy and intuitive and some updates are on the way. Considering the garble of the TV universe, that’s pretty good.

___

About TVii:

TVii turns the GamePad controller for the Wii U into a remote control that integrates your live TV and Internet video experience. The service is free, but you’ll need a Wii U game console, which starts at $ 300. You’ll also need to pay extra to use video services such as Hulu Plus, Amazon and Netflix.

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U.S. pop singer Patti Page dies at age 85

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) – American pop singer Patti Page, whose 1950 hit “Tennessee Waltz” topped the charts for months, has died in Southern California, her manager said on Wednesday. She was 85.

Nicknamed “The Singing’ Rage,” Page sold more than 100 million albums in her 67-year career, which included 1950s chart toppers “(How Much Is That) Doggie in the Window,” “I Went to Your Wedding” and “All My Love (Bolero).”

She died on Tuesday in a nursing home in Encinitas, north of San Diego, after suffering congestive heart failure, her manager, Michael Glynn, told Reuters.

“She’d been having some health issues for the past couple of years,” Glynn said. “She was actually doing better yesterday. I spoke to her and she sounded well.”

Page won a Grammy for her 1998 album “Live at Carnegie Hall: The 50th Anniversary Concert” and will be honored with a lifetime achievement Grammy in February. She had expected to attend the ceremony, Glynn said.

Page was born in Oklahoma as Clara Ann Fowler in 1927 and was known for her light, every-girl voice. Her first big hit was “With My Eyes Wide Open, I’m Dreaming,” which peaked at No. 11 on the charts in 1950.

Eight years later, Page scored her penultimate top-10 song, “Left Right Out of Your Heart,” as rock ‘n’ roll was emerging as the dominant trend in popular music.

Her final big hit was “Hush … Hush Sweet Charlotte” in 1965. The song served as the theme of a film of the same name starring Bette Davis.

Her reputation was burnished in recent years when rock group The White Stripes covered her 1952 song “Conquest” on their Grammy-winning 2007 album “Icky Thump.”

She was married three times, most recently in 1990.

Page is survived by her two children, and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

(Reporting by Eric Kelsey; Editing by Jill Serjeant and Peter Cooney)

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Op-Ed Contributor: Our Imaginary Weight Problem

ACCORDING to the United States government, nearly 7 out of 10 American adults weigh too much. (In 2010, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention categorized 74 percent of men and 65 percent of women as either overweight or obese.)

But a new meta-analysis of the relationship between weight and mortality risk, involving nearly three million subjects from more than a dozen countries, illustrates just how exaggerated and unscientific that claim is.

The meta-analysis, published this week in The Journal of the American Medical Association, reviewed data from nearly a hundred large epidemiological studies to determine the correlation between body mass and mortality risk. The results ought to stun anyone who assumes the definition of “normal” or “healthy” weight used by our public health authorities is actually supported by the medical literature.

The study, by Katherine M. Flegal and her associates at the C.D.C. and the National Institutes of Health, found that all adults categorized as overweight and most of those categorized as obese have a lower mortality risk than so-called normal-weight individuals. If the government were to redefine normal weight as one that doesn’t increase the risk of death, then about 130 million of the 165 million American adults currently categorized as overweight and obese would be re-categorized as normal weight instead.

To put some flesh on these statistical bones, the study found a 6 percent decrease in mortality risk among people classified as overweight and a 5 percent decrease in people classified as Grade 1 obese, the lowest level (most of the obese fall in this category). This means that average-height women — 5 feet 4 inches — who weigh between 108 and 145 pounds have a higher mortality risk than average-height women who weigh between 146 and 203 pounds. For average-height men — 5 feet 10 inches — those who weigh between 129 and 174 pounds have a higher mortality risk than those who weigh between 175 and 243 pounds.

Now, if we were to employ the logic of our public health authorities, who treat any correlation between weight and increased mortality risk as a good reason to encourage people to try to modify their weight, we ought to be telling the 75 million American adults currently occupying the government’s “healthy weight” category to put on some pounds, so they can move into the lower risk, higher-weight categories.

In reality, of course, it would be nonsensical to tell so-called normal-weight people to try to become heavier to lower their mortality risk. Such advice would ignore the fact that tiny variations in relative risk in observational studies provide no scientific basis for concluding either that those variations are causally related to the variable in question or that this risk would change if the variable were altered.

This is because observational studies merely record statistical correlations: we don’t know to what extent, if any, the slight decrease in mortality risk observed among people defined as overweight or moderately obese is caused by higher weight or by other factors. Similarly, we don’t know whether the small increase in mortality risk observed among very obese people is caused by their weight or by any number of other factors, including lower socioeconomic status, dieting and the weight cycling that accompanies it, social discrimination and stigma, or stress.

In other words, there is no reason to believe that the trivial variations in mortality risk observed across an enormous weight range actually have anything to do with weight or that intentional weight gain or loss would affect that risk in a predictable way.

How did we get into this absurd situation? That is a long and complex story. Over the past century, Americans have become increasingly obsessed with the supposed desirability of thinness, as thinness has become both a marker for upper-class status and a reflection of beauty ideals that bring a kind of privilege.

In addition, baselessly categorizing at least 130 million Americans — and hundreds of millions in the rest of the world — as people in need of “treatment” for their “condition” serves the economic interests of, among others, the multibillion-dollar weight-loss industry and large pharmaceutical companies, which have invested a great deal of money in winning the good will of those who will determine the regulatory fate of the next generation of diet drugs.

Anyone familiar with history will not be surprised to learn that “facts” have been enlisted before to confirm the legitimacy of a cultural obsession and to advance the economic interests of those who profit from that obsession.

Don’t expect those who have made their careers on fomenting panic to understand that our current definition of “normal weight” makes absolutely no sense.

Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the author of “The Obesity Myth: Why America’s Obsession With Weight Is Hazardous to Your Health.”

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Your Money: Piecing Together a Tax Plan’s Effects

It is tempting for people who earn less than $400,000 to think that they got off easy this week under the tax deal to end the fiscal impasse, given that only those with incomes above that level will be in a higher income tax bracket in 2013.

But the legislation that both houses of Congress have now approved could increase taxes on people with incomes that are not quite that high as well. That’s because the bill includes language that begins to do what both President Obama and Mitt Romney proposed at various points in the past: Limit certain tax breaks available to people who are affluent.

The new rules target two tax breaks: personal exemptions and many popular deductions like those for state and local taxes, mortgage interest and charitable contributions. For both breaks, single people with at least $250,000 in adjusted gross income and married people filing jointly with at least $300,000 in income are vulnerable. A hypothetical Texas couple could end up paying about $2,500 more in taxes, for instance.

The mechanics of how the new limits will work are now clear, though it takes a fair bit of explaining to lay them out in plain English. What we don’t know yet is how many people will end up paying more in 2013 than they did in 2012.

The uncertainty is tied to the fact that many of the targets of the legislation often end up ensnared by the alternative minimum tax. The A.M.T., and its high tax bill, may continue to catch most of them.

But let’s start with the basics. Most of the discussion here begins with that adjusted gross income figure. That’s the number you get when you subtract items from your salary or take-home pay that are often referred to as above-the-line deductions.

For the income range we’re talking about, these deductions tend to include things like health savings account contributions and alimony. People who work for themselves also get deductions for health insurance premiums, certain retirement contributions and self-employment taxes that an employer would otherwise pay.

Mark Luscombe, principal analyst with CCH, a tax information provider, points out just how confusing the use of adjustable gross income is, given that the new tax limits, the new tax bracket and the new Medicare tax are all based on different definitions of income.

Under normal circumstances, a personal exemption, for a specific dollar amount, is available for each member of your household. You then add all of the exemptions and subtract the total from your adjusted gross income, which has the effect of lowering your taxable income. CCH predicts that the personal exemption amount for 2013 will be $3,900 per person.

The new law requires taxpayers in the targeted income range to reduce the amount of their exemptions by 2 percent for every $2,500 by which their income exceeds the $250,000 or $300,000 limit. So a married, childless couple with $400,000 in adjusted gross income and $7,800 in potential exemptions could lose $6,240 of that $7,800.

The math for the limit on deductions is different. There, the rules call for you to add up the applicable deductions. Let’s say that equals $50,000. Then, you subtract from that 3 percent of the amount by which your adjusted gross income exceeds those $250,000 or $300,000 thresholds.

So if you’re a married couple with $400,000 in income, you’re $100,000 over the threshold. Three percent of that is $3,000. So you’d subtract that from $50,000. The rule, which existed for years but had been phased out more recently, is known as the Pease limitation, for Representative Donald J. Pease, the Ohio newspaper editor-turned-legislator who got it passed. As before, you can’t lose more than 80 percent of your deductions, no matter how high your income gets.

If you’re trying to figure out whether and how this may affect you, well, join the club. So much depends on your income, your state and your various deductions. All of that will affect whether the A.M.T. hits you as well.

For people who are already in the A.M.T. but will not end up with the $400,000 (for individuals) or $450,000 (for married couples filing jointly) in income necessary to be in the new 39.6 percent tax bracket in 2013, the new exemption and deduction rules may not hurt you. “I don’t think there’s enough there that you would no longer be in the A.M.T.,” said Jude Coard, a tax partner at Berdon L.L.P., of people with income in the $300,000 to $400,000 range.

Much will depend on your own situation. CCH ran two hypothetical cases for me, which you can see in the accompanying graphic. The first examined a family of four in New York with $400,000 in adjusted gross income and $79,000 in total itemized deductions. The household pays the A.M.T. in both 2012 and under the new tax rules in 2013. They pay just $790 more in 2013, but that includes $1,350 in new Medicare taxes. (The total does not include the Social Security payroll tax that has been restored to its prerecession level.)

A family in Texas, however, might have the same income but lower property taxes and no income tax and thus lower deductions for its federal tax return. Their deductions are just $43,700, but they end up being hurt more by the new rules. They would have no A.M.T. liability in 2013 and would end up paying $3,852 more, or about $2,500 if you don’t count the $1,350 from the new Medicare tax.

This is a lot to digest, so much so that even the experts at the Tax Policy Center have not yet finished updating their online calculator. Once they do, if you have the stomach to gather (or try to predict) all of the data, you can take your shot at projecting what these new rules may cost you.

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OneVietnam nonprofit connects donors with people in need

When the nonprofit OneVietnam first revved up its outreach efforts with a $5,000 grant, it did something that left supporters stunned.

Charity representatives bought iPods and distributed the then-trendy devices to disabled people in remote villages in Vietnam, urging them to share their stories, their hardships, their views on life in a country that many people had fled during wartime.

"Everyone told us, 'If you give them an iPod, they will sell it to ease their burdens,' " said Uyen Nguyen, a former economic consultant and a co-founder of OneVietnam.

Instead, recipients seemed to understand that it was their moment to let fellow Vietnamese scattered around the globe know that they need their help. Through the iStories, OneVietnam connected donors with the disabled and the desperate, leveraging fundraising through social media.

The San Francisco-based group, started by a trio of friends, re-launched this fall with a network of about 30 groups. It won a $100,000 grant from the Ford Foundation and created its iPod story-sharing effort with $5,000 from Yahoo. The charity also gained a vote of confidence from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who invited the group to do a demo at a conference focusing on immigrant populations

"We saw others like Kickstarter.org or Kiva.org emerge and do really well. And they're fantastic, but I see their main focus is on one project at a time," Nguyen said. "Everything now is powered by sustainability."

Participants log onto OneVietnam.org and scroll through a menu of organizations, from the Vietnamese American Arts & Letters Assn. in Santa Ana to Boat People SOS. Would-be donors can connect directly with a person who needs help, whether a refugee still struggling to rebuild from Hurricane Katrina or a person in Vietnam largely out of touch with technology.

By providing a one-click portal for both donor and recipient, OneVietnam seeks to make giving, and receiving, easy.

"Unlike other platforms, this is specific to one community," said donor Erin O'Brien of Los Angeles, who teaches Asian American studies at UC Irvine and the Claremont Colleges. "It's very difficult to donate to people in Vietnam because electronic banking isn't the norm, and online money transfers aren't common. They make it more accessible through their website."

Since September, OneVietnam has collected more than $75,000 for nonprofits through its portal, according to organizers.

While people of Vietnamese descent once had only a vague idea of what their peers were doing in Los Angeles or Sydney or Montreal, OneVietnam allowed them to connect and share social service efforts. Vietnam Talking Points, the news arm of OneVietnam, mixed in news and features about the diaspora's different generations.

"There's a silent majority out there who care about Vietnam, who understand the historical implication of what happened in the past, the plight, the migration," said Paul Pham, another co-founder who studied computer science at UC Santa Cruz.

"But they want to move forward," he said. "They no longer associate it with war but with people — people who need our attention and help to continue with their lives."

Pham, who once engineered Hotmail's bulk mail delivery system, volunteered for years in Vietnam's outlying provinces, crafting huts destroyed by seasonal flooding. He met Nguyen and James Bao, both UC Berkeley graduates, when they came to him in 2009 with the OneVietnam concept.

Diep Vuong, president of the Pacific Links Foundation, working to fight human trafficking along Vietnam's borders, describes OneVietnam as "one more tool" to aid nonprofits in their constant and sometimes desperate search for dollars.

"It's the direction of the times to operate online," she said, "but I worry that the generation who are well-connected on the Internet may not have enough money to give regularly versus some of the older people who have set aside the money to give."

David Teece, who heads the Institute for Business Innovation at UC Berkeley and serves on OneVietnam's board of directors, said he's confident the group will evolve into "something stronger."

"They're really pioneering, with an emphasis on philanthropy and development. Sharing news, sharing events, keeping people in touch with what's going on back home and here is not relevant just to Vietnam," he said. "It's a concept that can be applied to the Philippines, or Indonesia. It's 90% inspiration, 10% best practices, again all for sharing."

anh.do@latimes.com

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Thieves stole more than $1 million worth of Apple products during a New Years Eve heist

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Playboy Hugh Hefner marries his ‘runaway bride’

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Hugh Hefner is celebrating the new year as a married man once again.

The 86-year-old Playboy magazine founder exchanged vows with his “runaway bride,” Crystal Harris, at a private Playboy Mansion ceremony on New Year’s Eve. Harris, a 26-year-old “Playmate of the Month” in 2009, broke off a previous engagement to Hefner just before they were to be married in 2011.

Playboy said on Tuesday that the couple celebrated at a New Year’s Eve party at the mansion with guests that included comic Jon Lovitz, Gene Simmons of KISS and baseball star Evan Longoria.

The bride wore a strapless gown in soft pink, Hefner a black tux. Hefner’s been married twice before but lived the single life between 1959 and 1989.

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Ground Zero Volunteers Face Obstacles to Compensation

On the day the terrorists flew into the World Trade Center, the Wu-Tang Clan canceled its meeting with a record mixer named Richard Oliver, so Mr. Oliver rushed downtown from his Hell’s Kitchen apartment to help out.

He said he spent three sleepless days at ground zero, tossing body bags. “Then I went home, ate, crashed, woke up,” he said. He had left his Dr. Martens boots on the landing outside his apartment, where he said they “had rotted away.”

“That was kind of frightening,” he continued. “I was breathing that stuff.”

After the Sept. 11 attacks, nothing symbolized the city’s rallying around like many New Yorkers who helped at ground zero for days, weeks, months, without being asked. Now Mr. Oliver, suffering from back pain and a chronic sinus infection, is among scores of volunteers who have begun filing claims for compensation from a $2.8 billion fund that Congress created in 2010.

But proving they were there and eligible for the money is turning out to be its own forbidding task.

The other large classes of people who qualify — firefighters, police officers, contractors, city workers, residents and students — have it relatively simple, since they are more likely to have official work orders, attendance records and leases to back them up. But more than a decade later, many volunteers have only the sketchiest proof that they are eligible for the fund, which is expected to make its first awards early this year. (A separate $1.5 billion treatment fund also was created.)

They are volunteers like Terry Graves, now ill with lung cancer, who kept a few business cards of people she worked with until 2007, then threw them away. Or Jaime Hazan, a former Web designer with gastric reflux, chronically inflamed sinuses and asthma, who managed to dig up a photograph of himself at ground zero — taken from behind.

Or Mr. Oliver, who has a terse two-sentence thank-you note on American Red Cross letterhead, dated 2004, which does not meet the requirement that it be witnessed or sworn.

“For some people, there’s great records,” said Noah H. Kushlefsky, whose law firm, Kreindler & Kreindler, is representing volunteers and others who expect to make claims. “But in some respects, it was a little bit of a free-for-all. Other people went down there and joined the bucket brigade, talked their way in. It’s going to be harder for those people, and we do have clients like that.”

As documentation, the fund requires volunteers to have orders, instructions or confirmation of tasks they performed, or medical records created during the time they were in what is being called the exposure zone, including the area south of Canal Street, and areas where debris was being taken.

Failing that, it will be enough to submit two sworn statements — meaning the writer swears to its truth, under penalty of perjury — from witnesses describing when the volunteers were there and what they were doing.

Proving presence at the site might actually be harder than proving the illness is related to Sept. 11, since the rules now allow a host of ailments to be covered, including 50 kinds of cancer, despite an absence of evidence linking cancer to ground zero.

A study by the New York City health department, just published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found no clear association between cancer and Sept. 11, though the researchers noted that some cancers take many years to develop.

Unlike the original compensation fund, administered by Kenneth Feinberg, which dealt mainly with people who were killed or maimed in the attack, “This one is dealing with injuries that are very common,” said Sheila L. Birnbaum, a former mediator and personal injury defense lawyer, who is in charge of the new fund. “So it’s sort of a very hard process from the fund’s point of view to make the right call, and it requires some evidence that people were actually there.”

Asked how closely the fund would scrutinize documents like sworn statements, Ms. Birnbaum said she understood how hard it was to recreate records after a decade, and was going on the basic assumption that people would be honest.

In his career as a record mixer, Mr. Oliver, 56, has been associated with 7 platinum and 11 gold records, and 2 Grammy credits, which now line the walls of his condominium in College Point, Queens. He said he first got wind of the Sept. 11 attacks from a client, the Wu-Tang Clan. “One of the main guys called me: ‘Did you see what’s on TV? Because our meeting ain’t going to happen,’ ” he recalled.

Having taken a hazmat course after high school, he called the Red Cross and was told they needed people like him. “I left my soon-to-be-ex-wife and 1-year-old son and went down,” he said. “I came back three days later,” after surviving on his own adrenaline, Little Debbie cakes handed out to volunteers and bottled water. After working for three days setting up a morgue, he was willing to go back, he said, but “they said we have trained people now, thank you very much for your service.”

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Commercial Real Estate Web Sites Increase in Popularity

In terms of marketing tone, the commercial real estate industry has long played the quiet cousin to the brasher residential business. While apartments are routinely sold using splashy, multifaceted ad campaigns, commercial brokers and developers have favored lower-key, brochure-based approaches.

But the two branches of the family may be growing closer. In recent months, the marketing teams for some New York office buildings have decided to get the word out by deploying the type of stylish Web sites once used only by luxury condominiums.

Unlike the Web sites of office buildings past, which tended to be bare-bones and buried deep within a landlord’s corporate home page, this new crop stands alone and crackles with animation, exuberant language and videos.

And by publicizing details like where telecom cables enter the building, these sites add transparency to a business that can seem clubby and secretive.

“Lunches with brokers is an old-school way of getting your message out,” said Grant Greenspan, a broker and principal at the Kaufman Organization, a landlord that has set up Web sites for two of its buildings, 100-104 Fifth Avenue and 550 Seventh Avenue. But, he added, “it’s only as good as the group of brokers who you perceive to have the clients.”

By introducing buildings to the public online to generate demand, Mr. Greenspan said, “you get clients going to their brokers and saying, ‘Why aren’t you showing me this building?’ ”

The site for 100-104 Fifth Avenue, a pair of joined, early-20th-century buildings near Union Square that Kaufman co-owns with Invesco Real Estate, was also useful in chronicling the $15 million renovation that occurred after the development team bought the property out of bankruptcy in 2010 for $94 million.

The renovation, which took two years, included adding a fire safety system and six elevators and redesigning a pair of lobbies. All of this is described in a colorful, animated timeline on the Web site, 100-104fifth.com, as are the specifics about those telecom cables.

The Kaufman Organization credited the site with helping to fill the 270,000-square-foot building quickly. It is at 98 percent occupancy today, up from 60 percent when the landlord bought it.

According to Mr. Greenspan, all six tenants signed there since 2010 said the site had played a major role in piquing their interest. Those tenants include Yelp, the online review business; Apple’s iAd, an advertising network; and Net-a-Porter, a women’s apparel retailer. They pay rents ranging from $45 to $60 per square foot, Kaufman said.

Similarly, at 550 Seventh Avenue, which Kaufman recently began managing for Adler Group, a new Web site is being used to rebrand the 12-story building in the garment district, where fashion tenants have historically held sway.

The Web site, 550seventhave.com, may surprise property owners who tend to be tight-lipped about their tenants. It shows the directory in the building’s lobby, revealing that Lilly Pulitzer, Donna Karan International and Oscar de la Renta have offices inside.

The site, introduced in October, is already paying off. An 11,000-square-foot space on the 10th floor is expected to be leased this month to a software company, Mr. Greenspan said, adding that the $30,000 cost of making both sites, plus the hours logged by a full-time worker, had been worth every penny.

If Web sites “facilitate renting the spaces 60 or 90 days sooner, they make all the sense in the world,” he said.

Some major New York landlords, like the Chetrit Group, have no online presence. And even when Web sites do exist, they can be a bit stolid, offering little more than the year the building was completed, its architect and its total square footage, as with the General Motors Building, owned by Boston Properties. Brokers say that when a high-rise has existed for years and is one of Manhattan’s prized addresses as well, it may not have to promote itself online.

A new office building must do more, especially when it hasn’t even come out of the ground yet. In those cases, a Web site is essential to allow tenants to visualize their future home, said Christopher V. Albanese, president of the Albanese Organization, a Long Island-based developer. These sites tend to be extremely eye-catching and could easily be mistaken for ones intended to sell multimillion-dollar condos.

In November, the Albanese Organization unveiled 510w22.com, for 510 West 22nd Street, a planned 170,000-square-foot office building in West Chelsea. The centerpiece of the artful Web site is a four-minute video narrated by the architect Rick Cook, which brims with dramatic music and soaring shots of the adjacent High Line.

Creating such a Hollywood-caliber product, which includes renderings that normally would not have been commissioned, doubled the building’s marketing budget — “but without it, tenants might think that this was just some ordinary building, and it really isn’t,” Mr. Albanese said.

Also, financing for the $150 million project cannot be secured until the building is 30 percent leased, he said, making a dynamic marketing tool all the more important.

Though online videos for commercial real estate are not widespread, they are gaining in popularity.

The Web site for 7 Bryant Park, a 28-story office building that Hines is developing on Avenue of the Americas, features a two-minute video. A piano tinkles; the camera swoops.

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Lunar New Year celebrants get no rest after Western holidays

At her store in Chinatown, Tracy Tieu replaces red and green Christmas trinkets with red and gold Lunar New Year decorations as she greets shoppers fresh from Las Vegas.

A mother strokes a jade dragon leaping from a dark wood emblem. A man and his wife unfurl scrolls bearing symbols of wealth. A student buys assorted little Buddhas, lining them up by belly size.

Inside the shop, Wing Ha Hing Gifts & Arts, Asian travelers this past weekend talk about how many aunts, uncles, cousins and grandparents they expect to host at noisy family gatherings.

One new year celebration may have ended — but for many Southern Californians the bustle of preparing for the Lunar New Year continues full force, with no time for holiday fatigue.

"We can't afford it," Tieu says. "We go with the season.... I order supplies six months in advance."

At crowded shopping plazas in Los Angeles' Chinatown and Koreatown, the San Gabriel Valley and Orange County's Little Saigon, seasonal foods line bakery shelves, holiday music plays on open-air speakers and Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese consumers are spending big — yet again — on their most important annual celebration.

The Year of the Snake begins Feb. 10. Those born under this sign are believed to have a good temper and strong passion, but can be suspicious.

The Lunar New Year is a time when debts are paid, arguments are laid to rest, hair is cut and homes are painted and polished and rituals are followed to sweep away ill fortune and welcome good luck. Doors and windows are decorated with themed images of happiness, prosperity and longevity, and incense is lighted in temples to pay respect to ancestors.

In the narrow, colorful shop her father opened in 1990, Tieu is surrounded by flowers, feng shui diaries, floating lotus candles and other traditional gifts.

Regina Gomez, a Chinese American from Nevada, was one of those hunting for bargains along Chinatown's main drag Sunday. She stopped at Tieu's store to prepare for the coming festivities. "When we buy for entertainment, it's better to buy for it here. It's less," she says, browsing with her kids, Shelby and Brittany. "I came to L.A. for Christmas and knew I should take a look before going home."

On the first morning of the new year, as everyone exchanges gifts and good wishes, Tieu plans to pass out crisp dollar bills in lucky red envelopes to some 20 nieces and nephews. "I have to give each of them at least $20 – anything smaller just isn't acceptable."

"It doesn't matter what we do or how much we gave for the previous holidays," adds Angie Tieu, her younger sister. "We have to remember the Lunar New Year, it's tradition, and we must spend."

On top of the financial costs, the extended holiday season carries health costs, said Calvin Ho, founder of the Plaid Bag Connection, a blog exploring the links between Asian groups outside their ethnic homeland. "We've been eating since the Moon Festival" in September "to Halloween, to Thanksgiving to Christmas and forward. Everyone overindulges because it's impossible not to."

Ho, who doesn't eat fried foods, says "with the holidays it's really hard to avoid it."

"Everything involves family," he said. "And when you are making multiple visits to different members of family day after day, you must sit down and share a meal. I get all my cravings in and it'll last until next fall."

Visiting Chinatown with her husband on Sunday, Elisa Aquino, who is half-Chinese, said she intends to serve dim sum dishes when she invites friends and relatives to her Carson home. "We go for a bang. High impact, lots of songs, lots of jokes.... I'm not cooking. We order," she adds.

Stephanie Yuan, working a souvenir kiosk nearby, said sales are brisk post-Christmas. "We are sold out of snake lucky charms," she says proudly, noting that the item features the animal highlighted in the 2013 Chinese zodiac.

"Here, you buy this one," she tells passing tourists, pointing to an Asian version of the Cheshire cat, complete with battery-operated paw, happy face and money pouch. On its white ceramic body is the Chinese character for $1 million. "It will lead you to a good way."

Merchants like Yuan and Thanh Ly, of neighboring Tambaba Fashion, can't take Lunar New Year off. "It's the day to sell," Ly says, folding traditional dresses made in Vietnam and Hong Kong. "We would like to have a vacation but we think about our living first. Some people buy last-minute."

Kevin Vong of Fresno isn't one of those. Outside Lien Hoa BBQ, he loads his truck with a whole roast pig, costing $195, carting it to a gathering to pray for the souls of his ancestors. He does this at the end of the Western new year, then again at the Lunar New Year. "I do not forget," he says. "I want someone doing that for me later. Years later."

anh.do@latimes.com

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