‘Shake’r joins hot UWS list

Star restaurateur Danny Meyer has joined the top-flight tenant tasters at the now-shuttered Ollie’s space next door to the Apple store on the Upper West Side, Side Dish has learned.

The 7,500-square-foot space at 1991 Broadway by Lincoln Center is coveted in large part because of its current neighbor.

“Being directly next door to Apple is a dream for any retailer or restaurateur, and we expect a tremendous amount of interest,” said property agent Jeffrey Roseman of Newmark Grubb Knight Frank Retail.

Sources say brands including Microsoft, Nike, Anthropologie and Patagonia have expressed interest, along with other restaurant groups such as the Cheesecake Factory and Junior’s.

Meyer is the CEO of Union Square Hospitality Group, whose restaurants include Union Square Cafe, Gramercy Tavern and the burger phenomenon, Shake Shack.

***

LA-based Michael Della Femina — whose father, ad guru Jerry Della Femina, just sold his home in East Hampton for $25 million — is looking for pop-up restaurant spots in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Hamptons.

His plan is to replicate Slate, the LA café and panini bar pop-up he owns with fellow actor Josh Weinstein, in New York. Slate, at 6541 Santa Monica Blvd., is around the corner from Rao’s new LA outpost.

Della Femina and Weinstein also partnered on “Bloody” Bill Annesley’s 2009 pop-up, Libertine, in West Hollywood.

So far, Della Femina has looked at a 500-square-foot gallery space on Sullivan Street and at a 400-square-foot butcher shop on Court Street in Cobble Hill. He also checked out a gallery space in Sag Harbor.

No leases were signed, however, and Della Femina will be back in a couple of weeks to continue the hunt, a source said.

***

SIGHTING: Joanne Binder bringing the fake diamond necklace featured in the title sequence of the James Bond movie “Diamonds are Forever” to a friend’s birthday dinner at Da Tommaso. Her uncle, Maurice Binder, was the film’s title designer.

jkeil@nypost.com

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Three-generation family businesses share their secrets of success

In 2009, when Larry Zinn took over as sales manager for the Infiniti dealership that his father owned, he had a great idea: retrain the sales staff in a team approach and offer customers complimentary add-on services for the first year.

Some salesmen who were used to selling the same way for decades up and quit. But that didn’t deter Larry from insisting a new sales culture and value proposition for new car buyers was necessary. “I was persistent with everything I’ve believed we needed to do going forward. People were going to embrace change or move on,” says Larry, 28.

The resistance quieted, however, after Larry recruited young salespeople and had them trained in the new advantage program. The new approach helped push sales volume up 72 percent. "We had a lot of success with it,” he says.

Larry Zinn’s experience is not unusual for family-owned businesses that survive into a third generation and employ new tactics to keep from becoming obsolete.

Nationally, family-run businesses account for nearly 35 percent of the largest companies including Ford, Koch Industries, Hilton, Wal-Mart, Loews and Ikea. In South Florida, family-run businesses are particularly prevalent and account for a majority of the largest Hispanic companies, including Goya, Bacardi, El Dorado and Sedano’s Supermarkets.

But while more than 30 percent of all U.S. family-owned businesses survive into the second generation, only about 12 percent are passed onto the third generation, according to Family Firm Institute, a Boston-based association for family enterprise professionals. Those that do survive have a few intriguing commonalities: an ability to stay relevant, think bigger and take a long term view.

“They try to figure out where they want to be in 10 years and take steps to make that target,” says Wayne Rivers, president of The Family Business Institute in Raleigh, N.C.

Most third-generation family businesses, particularly those in South Florida, were started by a scrappy entrepreneur who saw business ownership as a way to provide for the family. Those businesses include grocery chains such as Sedano’s, restaurant operators such as Las Vegas Cuban Cuisine and airport concessionaires such as NewsLink.

Typically, in those businesses, the founder brought his kids with him to work, put them in the kitchen, the stock room, the sales floor, and taught them on-the-spot business lessons. Those kids eventually came to work full time and helped the company evolve beyond a seat-of-the-pants start-up into a more sophisticated business with processes and systems.

Now comes the third generation, who are more likely to have received formal business education before they return to the company. Often, they are able to leverage that training and move the company forward dramatically. But the succession also comes with challenges. They must keep the respect of longtime employees and show the same dogged commitment to seeing their company succeed, even after having already grown up enjoying the fruits of its success.

In successful third-generation businesses, the senior generation often stays on to ensure that commitment, adopting a role as mentor or advisor while creating an environment where younger family members can take on real responsibility, says Rivers, who consults for family businesses. “They get out of the way, let the next generation make their own mistakes, and gracefully exit when it’s appropriate.”

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Timeline: Kim Dotcom’s year, from Megaupload to Mega

AUCKLAND (Reuters) – Here are the milestones in the past year for Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom. Dotcom plans to launch on January 20 a new online file storage system, known as Mega.

January 20, 2012 – Seventy armed New Zealand police raid Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom’s mansion outside Auckland, acting on a request from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Dotcom and his colleagues Finn Batato, Mathias Ortmann and Bram van der Kolk are served extradition and search warrants, arrested, and taken into custody. As operators of the website, they are charged with online piracy, fraud and money laundering, and their computers and files are seized. Megaupload is closed down. The raid occurs on the same day U.S. lawmakers axe anti-piracy legislation following heavy public opposition.

February 22 – Dotcom is released on bail, but his movements are restricted and he is prohibited from leaving New Zealand. His bail conditions are eventually relaxed to allow him free movement within the country, while the millionaire is given some access to his frozen funds to pay his legal team and living costs.

June 28 – A New Zealand court rules that search warrants used by local police to raid the Dotcom mansion were illegal, and moves by the FBI to copy data from Dotcom’s computers to take offshore were also unlawful. The court’s action is seen by many as weakening the extradition case against Megaupload.

August 16 – U.S. efforts to extradite Dotcom are dealt another blow as a New Zealand court rules that prosecutors must show evidence to support charges of internet piracy and copyright breaches. The judge in the case says withholding evidence from Dotcom would give Washington a significant advantage in the extradition hearing. She also rules that the document used to order his extradition was illegal.

September 27 – New Zealand’s Prime Minister admits that the country’s spy agency illegally carried out surveillance on Dotcom, a resident of the country, despite a law which prohibits monitoring citizens and residents.

October 10 – A U.S. federal judge rules that the U.S. government’s criminal case against Megaupload will proceed, while leaving open the option of dismissing the case at a later date on grounds including the possibility that delays in proceedings have denied Megaupload to its right to due process.

January 20, 2013 – Dotcom is due to launch his new cyberlocker, Mega.co.nz, whose encryption system is designed to offer water-tight privacy protection of user files. The launch comes as Dotcom and his colleagues await their extradition hearing, which has been delayed until August.

(Reporting by Naomi Tajitsu)

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Michelle Obama on Inauguration President Barack Obama

ET's Rocsi Diaz sat down first with First Lady Michelle Obama at the Kids' Inaugural Concert to discuss a variety of topics from her new hairstyle and birthday celebration to Lance Armstrong.

RELATED: Actors Who've Played Presidents

Mrs. Obama debuted her shoulder-length bob with eye-level bangs via Twitter on her birthday, Thursday, January 17, and she told Rocsi that Dr. Jill Biden may have had an influence on her.

"I've been coveting [Dr. Biden's] bangs for four years," joked Mrs. Obama, quipping that they're "the bang sisters." She also revealed that husband President Barack Obama gave her a "beautiful necklace" as a recent birthday gift.

On the topic of Lance Armstrong's interview with Oprah in which he admits to doping, Mrs. Obama said, "I didn't even get a chance to see it. It's a sad situation for everyone who's watching ... I think we have to remember all the people that have been helped and who will continue to need the help of [The Livestrong Foundation]. We should focus on making sure that cancer survivors and people dealing with the disease have the kind of support, medical and research, that they need to deal with the situation. We can't lose sight of that accomplishment."

Rocsi will present at tonight's Kids' Inaugural, which marks the latest efforts by the First Lady and Dr. Jill Biden's Joining Forces initiative to urge Americans to support our troops, and our Gold Star and Blue Star families.

The First Lady described the event in a video message, explaining that it's about "celebrating who we are as Americans and the people who make our country great -- our men and women in uniform, our military spouses, and our amazing military kids. So it's no surprise that when Jill and I decided to host this event, everyone wanted to join us -- from Katy Perry to Glee, from Nick Cannon to Usher. They know that military kids serve this country right alongside their moms and dads, and we’re really looking forward to celebrating our military families this weekend."

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The ungodly gross-out epic H’wood’s A-list wants to forget

You’d think a movie starring Hugh Jackman, Kate Winslet, Naomi Watts, Halle Berry, Richard Gere, Liev Schreiber, Uma Thurman, Emma Stone, Jason Sudeikis, Elizabeth Banks and Terrence Howard — just to name a few — would have a prestigious December release date, a splashy premiere and a shot at the Oscars.

So why is “Movie 43” getting dumped — quickly and quietly — in theaters this Friday?

“The studio is not hiding it,” says producer Peter Farrelly. “We knew it would have to find its audience, and believe me, it will.”

Even if half of Hollywood is running the other way.

“Movie 43” was 10 years in the making. It’s the brainchild of Farrelly’s longtime producing partner Charlie Wessler, who wanted to make a “Kentucky Fried Movie” for the modern age.

No studio would touch it. Nor would a certain segment of the A-list: Farrelly says that when he approached George Clooney about playing himself in a sketch (the gag: George Clooney is bad at picking up women), Clooney told him, “No f--king way.”

None of the stars has promoted the film on talk shows or in magazines — which only generates more curiosity about what may the weirdest theatrical release ever.

Judging from the trailer, it’s not hard to see why most of the cast is keeping their distance. A loose assemblage of self-contained comedy sketches, “Movie 43” features Anna Faris as a young woman asking her boyfriend “Will you poop on me?”; Berry shoving her breasts in a bowl of guacamole; Jackman and Winslet on a first date, with Winslet distracted by the balls hanging from Jackman’s chin; Stone and Kieran Culkin fighting over who gave whom STDs; Gerard Butler as a leprechaun who threatens to cut off Johnny Knoxville’s “balls and feed ’em to ya!”

“I just want to reinforce that the movie wasn’t an attempt to shock,” says producer John Penotti. They did, after all, cut a sketch about necrophilia.

“That’ll be on the DVD,” Wessler says.

Initially, Trey Parker and Matt Stone — creators of “South Park” and “The Book of Mormon” — were involved, but they dropped out. So did the famed Zucker brothers (“Kentucky Fried Movie,” “Airplane!”).

“I pitched this thing to every studio,” Wessler says. “Every executive. Nannies at parties.”

Farrelly remained the biggest name on the project; in the mid-’90s, he and brother Bobby were responsible for hits such as “Dumb & Dumber,” “Kingpin” and “There’s Something About Mary.”

The $6 million budget was funded by Relativity Media, which is also distributing the film. Other potential backers, Farrelly says, “didn’t believe it could happen — a movie with Kate Winslet for $6 million.”

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Investors await word from Apple

No company today elicits such devotion and dedication among its customers and shareholders like Apple. The fervor felt by Apple fans for its products, its leaders and its business underscore the company’s technological eco-centric strategy. While that loyalty has made for rich rewards over the long term, it will mean very little to a myopic stock market when Apple reports its latest financial results Wednesday.

When a company so dominates a business like Apple does, it is subject to plenty of rumors, especially when that company, like Apple, is disciplined to not respond to speculation. There have been a series of anonymous and Wall Street analyst worries floated in the past quarter centered on the iPhone 5. First were concerns Apple couldn’t get enough supplies to build the phones fast enough. Then there were hints Apple cut its supply orders, suggesting slower sales.

Apple optimists have been quick to defend the company even as its stock has fallen from $700 to around $500 per share since September. The stock drop has come even as Apple probably sold a record number of iPhones and iPads during the holiday quarter.

No doubt Apple will trumpet its financial prowess on Wednesday. And it should. After all it generates more than $500 million dollars a day. But the short-sighted stock market has been conditioned to expect big numbers. Therein is the challenge for Apple: incubating such devotion without inflating expectations.

Tom Hudson is anchor and managing editor of Nightly Business Report, produced by NBR Worldwide and distributed nationally by American Public Television. In South Florida, the show is broadcast at 7 p.m. weekdays on Channel 2. Follow him on Twitter, @HudsonNBR.

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King’s son brings message to South Florida

The past few days have kept the eldest son of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. busy. He’s been to at least three states to carry on his father’s message: ending violence and learning from historical wrongs.

In a Fort Lauderdale Baptist church early Friday, he delivered another directive:

“A nation is judged on how we treat our most prized possession,” Martin Luther King III said. “And our most precious resource, I think, is our children.”

King served as the keynote speaker at the ninth annual Martin Luther King Jr. inspirational breakfast hosted by the YMCA of Broward County.

More than 500 gathered inside the First Baptist Church on Broward Boulevard, selling out the $2,500 per table event, to honor King’s legacy.

“My concern was that it would not be reduced to a day of relaxation,” said King III. “We have to look at this as a day on — not a day off.”

The Rev. King, a prominent civil rights leader, was born this week 84 years ago. He lead peaceful protests and bus strikes working for racial equality until his 1968 assassination.

The younger King told the South Florida audience about spending his youth at the local YMCA in Birmingham, learning to swim and working out with his dad.

“Those were wonderful experiences, experiences that I will never forget,” he said.

Like his father, King III has been a fighter for human rights, justice and non-violence in the United States and abroad. He also served as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s president, a position his father once held.

During his 2009 inauguration, President Barack Obama declared the holiday honoring King should be spent as a national day of service.

At Friday’s event, 15 youngsters from the Lauderhill YMCA were honored for their service to the community. The young friends managed to clean up a popular overpass and get rid of gangs who were harassing children.

They called their project “Own the Overpath.” The idea started when 14-year-old Kervens Jean-Louis was attacked by a gang on a fenced in walkway that spans the Florida Turnpike while coming from the YMCA, based at Boyd Anderson High School. But Jean-Louis didn’t back down.

He and other students mobilized and launched a campaign to clean-up the area surrounding the “overpath.” The youngsters made a formal presentation to the Lauderhill City Commission and Florida Department of Transportation officials.

Now, there is a $400,000 project in the works to install more lights on the bridge to increase visibility. The city broke ground in November.

“I learned that when you speak out loud it makes a difference,” said Jean-Louis.

For Jean-Louis, speaking loud meant going back to the bridge to warn others of the dangers of traveling across it at night.

He will spend this upcoming Saturday as a volunteer, painting and cleaning up a garden.

“Now I tell others what’s going on and how they can help out,” he said, much like the man they had all come to honor.

After the youngsters were honored, King III left the crowd to ponder a final thought: “We can either be a thermometer or a thermostat.”

A thermometer, he explained, takes the temperature while a thermostat regulates the temperature.

Despite the progress his father saw in his lifetime, and the decades since his death, there is still much work to be done, King III said.

“I always come with a heavy heart in January,” he said. “Because we have not fully realized the dream.”

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Twitter co-founders move Obvious Corp into spacious new digs

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Evan Williams and Biz Stone, the co-founders of Twitter, have leased three sprawling floors in a historic downtown San Francisco tower for their low-profile start-up incubator, The Obvious Corporation.

Obvious said Friday it leased 75,000 square feet at the busy 760 Market Street location – known as the Phelan Building – in one of the city’s larger commercial real estate deals in recent months.

The downtown space will be able to hold roughly 500 employees and signals ambitions at Obvious, which was re-constituted when Williams and Stone both left Twitter in 2011.

The incubator, with no more than two dozen employees, has mostly stayed out of the press except when it unveiled two new blogging platforms called Medium and Branch last September.

Although still thinly staffed, Obvious’s new space is larger than start-up Pinterest’s recently inked lease in the city.

“We need the right space from which to grow the Medium team and position Obvious to focus on bringing our new ideas to life,” Obvious CEO Williams said in a statement Friday about the new lease.

The company will occupy the seventh, eighth and ninth floors of the triangular building, which wraps around a central courtyard, said Jenny Haeg, a real estate agent who has brokered leases for Square Inc, Dropbox, Airbnb and other large tech startups.

(Reporting by Gerry Shih; Editing by Bob Burgdorfer)

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Drew Barrymore on Oprah's Next Chapter

Drew Barrymore opens up about her complicated childhood and the lessons she's learned when it comes to being a new mother on Oprah's Next Chapter, and we have a sneak peek!

Pics: Celebs and Their Cute Kids

Marking the first time cameras have ever been allowed inside her home, Drew also talks to Oprah about her new marriage to Will Kopelman, shares details about their newborn baby Olive, and reveals the story behind why her mother did not attend her wedding.

Related: Drew Barrymore's Daughter Olive Lands First Cover

Oprah's Next Chapter with Drew Barrymore airs Sunday at 9 pm ET/PT on OWN.

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An infantile spectacle

Rich Lowry

President Obama set a new standard for stupidly exploitative White House events by appearing onstage with children to unveil his gun-control proposals.

He quoted from the kids’ letters. He invoked their Solomonic authority: “Their voices should compel us to change.” He signed executive orders as they gazed on adoringly. He hugged and high-fived them.

No doubt every parent thinks his or her little Johnny or Sally is the next James Q. Wilson. That doesn’t make it so. Some of the wisdom that the president shared from his adorable pen pals was, “[I] want everybody to be happy and safe,” and “I feel really bad.”

News flash: Kids don’t want bad things to happen. This would be a genuinely useful insight . . . if we could write public policy in crayon. The White House event smacked of the old unilateral disarmament campaigns of the 1980s when we were supposed to abolish nuclear weapons because they scared youngsters.

We can assume that the kids onstage with Obama don’t have a fine-grained sense of the limits of gun control or a proper regard for the Second Amendment. That’s OK, though — neither does he.

It can’t be said that using kids as props was beneath the gravity of occasion, since the occasion was all about feel-good PR and make-believe. For all the emphasis on stopping another Sandy Hook, Obama didn’t offer any gun-control proposals that would do it.

The president plugged for a universal background check. Adam Lanza’s mother, who owned the guns he used on his rampage, passed a background check. James Holmes, the Aurora, Colo., shooter, passed two background checks. So did the Virginia Tech shooter (although he shouldn’t have).

The president wants a new assault-weapons ban. He told of how another school shooting happened in California while networks were broadcasting a Joe Biden news conference about his task force. He didn’t mention that the shooter used a shotgun, not an assault weapon. He could have said that there was yet another recent shooting at a Kentucky community college. The shooter used a semiautomatic pistol.

During his remarks introducing the president, Biden invoked Colin Goddard, a survivor of the Virginia Tech shooting in the audience. Seung-Hui Cho shot him four times. Not with an assault weapon. Cho perpetrated the worst school shooting in U.S. history with a semiautomatic pistol.

The president called for a ban of magazines of more than 10 rounds (fewer than some guns have as a standard feature). This would have made a difference in Newtown only if you presume that Lanza, who knew his way around firearms, couldn’t have reloaded in the permissive environment of an elementary school without a guard.

Unfortunately, no one can write a law against mothers owning guns that one day might be turned against them by deranged sons who then commit horrific acts of murder-suicide. Shooting rampages are very hard to prevent because they are so often committed by disturbed young men without criminal records who don’t care if they are caught and usually want to die.

These are adult facts that don’t intrude on the childish world of White House policymaking. They must have eluded Biden in the course of his consultations with 229 different groups that just happened to result in recommendations from his task force that anyone could have predicted beforehand.

To justify any gun-control measure, no matter how ineffectual or symbolic, Biden talks of adopting an “if it saves one life” standard. If that really were the White House’s guiding principle — politics and the expense be damned — it would push massive stop-and-frisk crackdowns in the nation’s cities. It would take up the National Rifle Association’s proposal for armed guards at every school in America. But what it really wants is as much gun control as it can plausibly get in the aftermath of Newtown. As Rahm Emanuel might put it, never let a massacre go to waste.

There’s no reason for kids to see through it. Discerning adults should.

comments.lowry@nationalreview.com

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