OFF TOPIC!! Founder of eGroup Dies in Plane Crash at age 37

[Guest guest]

Dear Group,A pall has been cast over this Happy Christmas Day with the news of Klein's death. I imagine nearly everyone who has a computer belongs to one or more Yahoo Groups. Groups allow people with common interests to find each other and communicate. Until fairly recently groups did not exist. People like me never knew of anyone who had EN, let along PG. What a magnificent contribution this young man made to the world.3 Dead, 1 Survivor in Panama Plane Crash

By JUAN ZAMORANO – 2 hours ago

PANAMA CITY, Panama (AP) — The bodies of a California businessman,

his teenage daughter and the Panamanian pilot of a plane that crashed

over the weekend were found Tuesday in Panama's mountains, officials

said. A 12-year-old American girl survived. Klein, 37, Talia Klein, 13, and pilot Edwin Lasso were found dead, Panama's civil protection agency said.Talia's friend Francesca survived the crash and was hospitalized with multiple traumas, it said without elaborating.The plane carrying the four had been missing since Sunday when it lost contact with controllers.o

Rolando , a spokesman for Panama's air security agency, said

dense tropical foliage, mountainous terrain and heavy rains had made

the air and land searches in the Chiriqui province extremely difficult.Klein,

a 37-year-old hedge fund manager, was on vacation with the two girls at

an eco-resort he owns in the Central American nation, said ex-wife Kim

Klein in a telephone interview with The Associated Press from Boquete,

Panama. The three had been scheduled to return to Santa Barbara,

Calif., on Monday, she said.The group's plane disappeared after

taking off Sunday morning from Islas Secas off Panama's Pacific coast,

heading for the Chiriqui volcano, about 285 miles west of the capital.Kim

Klein traveled to Panama Monday morning and spoke with authorities

about the possible wherabouts of the aircraft. She had offered $25,000

to anyone who could locate it."We really need anyone we can find

to give us some ground help, any assistance to find them," Klein said

prior to the discovery of the wreckage. Klein was the

chief executive officer of Pacificore LLC, a Santa Barbara-based

company that manages several hedge funds and founded two companies in

the 1990s before becoming president and CEO of eGroups Inc., which was

the world's largest group e-mail communication service.Yahoo Inc. purchased eGroups for $450 million in August 2000 and is now known as Yahoo Groups.

Associated Press writers Greg Risling in Los Angeles and Bernstein-Wax in Mexico City contributed to this report.