“Forget about Cable Cars and Sourdough. San Francisco is becoming known for one thing — parking tickets. Almost two million were issued last year and it feels like half of them ended up on our windshields at DriverSide,” says Trevor Traina, co-founder and chairman of the newly launched company. “We hate parking tickets”
So, as he explains in this youtube video, his company has decided to pay 100 San Francisco parking tickets, randomly selected from entries, valued at $75 or less. Winners will be notified by July 25, …

Photo via theFrontSteps.com
Going up!
Because I sell real estate, I get asked every day how the market is doing, and when I respond that the luxury market in San Francisco is still very active, people are often surprised — especially in the last few months. Everything you see on TV or in the news is very gloomy when it comes to real estate, especially if you watch the business channels (I hope none of my readers had stock in Citigroup!) But the numbers don’t lie. First Republic …

There’s something slightly absurd about the front-page New York Times article that ran on Sunday about San Francisco’s “rich young princes” (the Internet m/billionaires of our area), which focussed mostly on the remarkably un-glamorous lifestyle of 32-year old Max Levchin, a PayPal founder who is worth $100 million or so.
I say it’s absurd because it’s something I don’t think we’ve ever seen before in this country — obscenely rich people who don’t seem to care, or even want to acknowledge, that they are, indeed, filthy with cash.
According to the Times’ …

Amber Marie Bently at the Opera opening last week. Photo by Drew Altizer.
In the last installment of “15 Minutes With…” SFluxe spoke with Peter Dundas, designer for Emanuel Ungaro (just a few months before he departed from the company.) Today I catch up with jeweler Amber Marie Bently, who is launching her new one-of-a-kind collection at a party this Thursday (September 13th.)
She and husband Christ Bently, founders of the Kamalaspa on Union Square, are flying the legendary actress Tippi Hedren in for the event, and are donating a portion …

This week Variety magazine has profiled 37-year-old Todd Traina, of Red Rover Films, as one of the “Ten Producers to Watch.” Dave Mcnary reports:
‘ His profile rose this year after joining forces with producers Arnold Rifkin and Chris Eberts on a feature based on Colin MacKinnon’s “Morning Spy, Evening Spy,” a book Traina optioned about an aging CIA operative who deals with his son’s death by becoming obsessed with the capture of Osama bin Laden.
Traina doesn’t overhype what he’s done. “I have a very good assistant, and I give …

Vanity Fair has released its 2007 list of the 100 people they rank as leaders of “The New Establishment.” No big surprises on the list, which is really quite a silly thing anyway. I mean, what does it mean to say that in 2006 Steve Jobs was number three on the list, with Sergey Brin and Larry Page number two — whereas this year, Jobs is two and Brin & Page are three? Does anybody take this seriously?
And like there needs to be a list to tell us that …

These thirteen ladies got the party started for Virgin America’s launch party in San Francisco Wednesday.

Airlines have always known that high heels and long legs keep passengers happy, and as these photos by Bill Wilson show, that’s not changing anytime soon.

After the dancing act they apparently decided to entertain the crowd by throwing a little girl up in the air. One slip, and her parents would have owned the place!

Gavin Newsom was caught chatting up these two ladies, causing SFist.com to immediately declare that a distraught Jennifer Siebel was seen …

One of SFluxe’s favorite billionaires, Richard Branson, will be flying to San Francisco with Stephen Colbert on August 8th to inaugurate Virgin Atlantic’s SFO-JFK and SFO-LAX flights.
It’s going to be a super-cool, star-studded sort of day, just as you’d expect from Virgin. While Branson, Colbert and some “special guests” fly in to SFO from New York, another flight of entertainment folks from Los Angeles will also be on the way. At LAX celebrity DJ Samantha Ronson will spin records while celebrities walk the red carpet. Both flights …

Verdiem, the firm that sells a new software product to slash a PC’s energy usage, has just received another $8.3 million in funding, said venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers on Friday. The startup firm had previously raised $7 million from Steve Westly, David B. Johnston (Phoenix Partners), Michael J. Riccio, Jr. (Falcon Partners), Jed Smith (Catamount Ventures), Yaniv Tepper (Angeleno Group), and Trevor Traina.

Further Information: Verdiem [verdiem.com]

Photo of Larry Page’s helicopter, via Niall Kennedy at flickr.com
Google’s Larry Page flew into Sebastopol, 45 minutes north of San Francisco, over the weekend to attend the popular Foo Camp, put on by the O’Reilly publishers. Everyone else took a car. He took a helicopter, which is great because plenty of photos were taken and now the whole world can know what his helicopter looks like.

It was rather hot that day in Sebastopol, as you can see by this unfortunate photo of Page himself. It’s nice to see that …