Storage

The biggest home in Los Angeles County is ready for a new nickname: The 56,500-square-foot Manor, dubbed Candyland after owner Candy Spelling, has been sold to another wealthy socialite, British heiress Petra Ecclestone, in an all-cash deal for $85 million. As steep as that price is, it's not a record or even close to what Spelling was asking. The priciest Southland home transaction was the 2000 sale of an 8-acre estate in Bel-Air to financial executive Gary Winnick in a deal that included the trade of other land, for a total value of about $94 million.

The tales of survival almost strain belief. There's the off-road endurance race car that rolled down a steep and rocky slope, but the drive team's gear was undamaged inside their plastic storage cases. Then there's the military helicopter brought down by missile fire where, after the pilot and passengers escaped, the only thing salvageable inside was a plastic storage case. And when an improvised explosive device detonated under an armored vehicle in Pakistan, ripping apart the engine compartment, a U.S. Army combat engineer was able to walk away because of the plastic case that sat beneath his feet.

The school locker, long feared as a repository of drugs and weapons, is making a comeback. Some administrators are returning the metal boxes to campus, figuring it's better than creating a generation of students with back problems. In one Orange County school district, a board member who watched a student wobble and fall over from the weight of her backpack has proposed reinstalling lockers in middle schools.

With the advent of Google Drive, we talk about cloud computing as if the bits and bytes of our lives are stored somewhere up in the air, but, really, the "clouds" are very terrestrial. What's more up in the air are the laws that govern who can access your stuff and how. Originally a way for geeks to explain to the rest of us the notion of remote servers storing and serving up content, cloud computing can be defined several ways, depending on whom you ask. In some ways, even email is a form of cloud computing.

The Inland Empire has become a new battleground for unions looking to organize warehouse workers and broaden labor's clout in international trade, a $300-billion industry in the Southland. The fledgling movement is backed by a coalition of unions with more than 6 million members known as Change to Win.

With the economy in a tailspin, aircraft "boneyards" across the country are filling up with Boeing 747s and other jetliners no longer needed to ferry passengers. Call it airline limbo. Air carriers are grounding planes at a rate not seen since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and industry experts say this year is likely to set a record for planes sitting on the ground.

As warehouses go, there are few like Skechers USA Inc.'s new 1.82-million-square-foot distribution center. This warehouse is so big that it takes half a minute to drive from one end to the other at 60 miles per hour. The setup is so advanced that human hands will hardly touch the cargo as it is unpacked, categorized, stacked and prepared for delivery. The building is so green that it uses prevailing winds for ventilation instead of air conditioning. For its new North American operations warehouse, the nation's No. 2 footwear company chose the Inland Empire's Moreno Valley.

As the regional economy continues to sputter, vacancy rates are beginning to climb at warehouses and distribution centers for industrial goods, putting the already hard-hit Inland Empire at further risk of decline and threatening facilities in Los Angeles and Orange counties as well. After years of high occupancy and rapid construction of cargo hubs, immense spaces are now standing empty.

If Amazon.com Inc.'s Kindle Fire turns out to be the blockbuster that many are predicting it will be, it won't be because of design or hardware features. If Fire ignites consumers, it will be because it sells for $199, wears the trusted Amazon Kindle brand name and serves as a direct and easy-to-use pipeline to Amazon's online store, a massive offering of e-books, music, movies, TV shows and apps matched only by Apple. But although Fire's content offering is top-notch, the hardware is as plain as you can get. The 7-inch screen on the Fire is bright and clear, and its 1024-by-600-pixel resolution provides ample room for reading books or watching TV shows and movies.

Milpitas-based Storage Dimensions Inc. said it will buy larger Artecon Inc. for about $60 million in stock, with Artecon's president, James Lambert, replacing David Eeg as chief executive. Separately, Storage Dimensions, a seller of tape drives and other computer data storage devices, said it expects to report a fourth-quarter loss of 10 cents to 15 cents a share on revenue of $16.5 million to $17.5 million.

As more people look to the cloud for digital storage, such as the recently unveiled Google Drive, the era of being able to mindlessly click "OK" or "Agree" may be over. When your stuff is stored on your computer at home, you alone are responsible for keeping it safe, secure and backed up. Your roof, your rules. But when you shift from local storage to remote, you live by terms set by someone else - and it's best to read them. This is true for any cloud service, not just Google's.

The burgeoning cloud storage space business got more crowded Tuesday as Google launched its much-rumored and highly anticipated remote storage service, Drive. Cloud-based storage gives users a place to park their documents, photos, presentations and other files so they can easily and immediately access and share them with various digital devices wherever they have an Internet connection. But Google said its Drive service also gives users the ability to collaboratively edit documents in real time.

Google has made its latest move, launching Drive, as it angles to be the one-stop hub for search, Web browsing, social networking, and now storage and content creation. And it has the attention of the competition. Just Monday, Forrester Research released a report about what will be the explosive relevance of cloud services. Today's announcement underscores that evolution. “Google Drive is significant because now all Google account holders have one click signup to free file storage, sync and sharing, which has the potential to quickly build a large volume of users," said Frank Gillette, the Forrester analyst who wrote the report.  "Integration with Google Docs/Apps and eventually with Gmail will make it more natural and seamless than managing from a separate account....So Google Drive will cause more individuals to begin using personal cloud services and more companies, those that use Google Apps, to use cloud-based file sync and sharing.” Some already established personal cloud providers have responded to Google's storage salvo by focusing on the growing importance of the burgeoning shift to remote storage.  "It's an insanely exciting time in the cloud storage and collaboration space, and Google's entry underscores the importance of this multi-billion dollar category," Box co-founder and Chief Executive Aaron Levie wrote in an emailed statement.

Upload something into Google Docs this morning, and you'll notice a 4-gigabyte boost to your storage. A sign that Google Drive is on the horizon? TechCrunch reported it this morning, and we checked it out. Indeed, our storage went from 1 gigabyte to 5 gigabytes after we uploaded a document. It has been widely speculated that today is G-Day , the day Google Drive is to be announced. Sites across the Web have posted leaked documents suggesting the cloud-storage service will offer users 5 gigabytes of storage for free, rivaling SugarSync and Box and dwarfing DropBox's free 2 gigabytes.

If only these stage sorcerers could reach into a black top hat and pull out a home for their magical paraphernalia. Short of cash and abracadabra moments, the Society of American Magicians is struggling to find a public venue for its vast collection of antique stage illusions. After a freak accident forced the closure of the group's Hall of Fame and Magic Museum in Hollywood, the society moved its trove of tricks into a Pico Rivera self-storage center. "We'd love to reopen the museum.

The Wilshire corridor condominium owned by the late actress Farrah Fawcett has sold for $1.55 million. The 2,767-square-foot unit in the Wilshire building features a direct-access elevator, a master suite with three walk-in closets, an office that can be converted to a third bedroom and 21/2 bathrooms. The 97-unit building was constructed in 1991. It features concierge service, valet parking, 24-hour security, wine storage lockers, a gym and a swimming pool. Fawcett, one of the original "Charlie's Angels" (1976-80)

West Anaheim residents opposed to the building of a storage facility on La Palma Avenue west of Gilbert Street will ask the City Council on Tuesday to reject the project. Residents appealed the Planning Commission decision last month to approve the 161,800-square-foot self-storage facility and warehouse. The facility would be built on a nearly four-acre site in an industrial zone. Tina Salmon, founder of the Gilbert/Crescent West Neighborhood Assn.

Retailers may be hurting, but one category of furniture is doing just fine: storage. "Customers are looking for solutions as they move back home with parents, or take roommates as a way to control expenses in this tough economy," says Yumiko Whitaker, an IKEA spokeswoman for Los Angeles and Orange counties. In many instances, the hottest pieces offer stealth storage -- compartments large or small that are camouflaged by the design. For a look at these clever pieces, including budget-minded buys from Macys, EQ3 in Burbank and West Elm in Santa Monica and Rancho Cucamonga, head online to latimes.com/home.

If Amazon.com Inc.'s Kindle Fire turns out to be the blockbuster that many are predicting it will be, it won't be because of design or hardware features. If Fire ignites consumers, it will be because it sells for $199, wears the trusted Amazon Kindle brand name and serves as a direct and easy-to-use pipeline to Amazon's online store, a massive offering of e-books, music, movies, TV shows and apps matched only by Apple. But although Fire's content offering is top-notch, the hardware is as plain as you can get. The 7-inch screen on the Fire is bright and clear, and its 1024-by-600-pixel resolution provides ample room for reading books or watching TV shows and movies.

Barnes & Noble Inc. has unveiled its Nook Tablet, the bookseller's answer to rival Amazon.com Inc.'s Kindle Fire tablet. The Nook Tablet is now available for preorder and will be shipped to Barnes & Noble stores and other retailers (Target, Staples, Wal-Mart, Office Max and others) late next week at a price of $249 — about $50 more than the Kindle Fire. Barnes & Noble Chief Executive William Lynch said Monday that for the extra $50, the Nook Tablet will offer beefier specifications that will add up to a faster, smoother experience when reading books, playing games or watching movies.