Online holiday sales deflated 3 percent this year. ComScore estimates that holiday sales in the U.S. totaled $25.5 billion between November 1 and December 23, the last day orders could be delivered in time for Christmas. The comparable total in 2007 was $26.3 billion.
Sales were struggling to keep up with last year’s totals all holiday season. In the end, they fell short. (Hitwise comes to the same conclusion). → Read More
So Giz posted earlier saying that the real reason for the MacWorld pullout was that Steve’s health is declining. We didn’t report it because we’re not rumor-mongering, bloodthirsty vultures, but it made a splash anyway. Now CNBC columnist Jim Goldman is calling the post “unsourced garbage” and a “fiasco” that is “nuking” Apple’s shares to the tune of about 32 cents as of this writing. Am I the only one who thinks this should be settled with a slapfight? → Read More
Dell has announced a new approach to computer packaging that will save the company an estimated $8 million or more while eliminating around 20 million pounds of packaging materials over the next four years. And this isn’t the first green move we’ve seen from the PC giant. → Read More
We might not have believed it 5 years ago, but “netbooks” are proving that there is a real market for tiny, affordable laptops. They are selling like hotcakes, but what does that mean for us in the future? → Read More
Remember those awful movies where a 3D effect was effected by having two images, one red and one blue or green, and then you wore those dorky glasses to see the magic? Sure, nostalgia’s great, but let’s be honest, they were also terrible and made your brain hurt. Now you can have that special kind of headache in your very own home with this interesting but doomed device. → Read More
The folks behind the iPhone 3G unlock – which will be hitting the Internets tomorrow night at midnight – gave a presentation on their project at CCC in Berlin last week. Rather than sound like a bunch mewling nerds, they have excellent speaking voices and seem very intelligent and sassy. → Read More
With the iPhone 3G software unlock being set loose tomorrow, we were hoping to sit down and have a chat with the ones behind the handy work. We got into contact with the Dev Team and, sure enough, they were down to spare a bit of time on the eve of their big release. We’ve only got a few hours before we’ve gotta finalize our questions, but we figured our readers might have a few inquiries of their own. Post’em down in the comments below – we’ll pick a handful from that lot and do our damnedest to make sure they get asked. Remember, these are the guys behind QuickPwn (for jailbreaking), the first-gen iPhone unlock, and now, the iPhone 3G unlock – if it’s an unofficial means of making your iPhone better, they probably had a hand in it. → Read More
Even though I don’t have an iPhone, I’ve been looking forward to the release of Crayon Physics for the platform just so I can reap the secondary benefits: telling people about it, trying it out, and seeing another independent developer make good. I’ve been following it since its prototype release and it’s nice to see it bloom into a full-fledged product, not unlike World of Goo. → Read More
We’ve got this from three independent sources close to Apple: expect a large screen iPod touch device to be released in the Fall of ’09, with a 7 or 9 inch screen. Prototypes have been seen and handled by one of our sources, and Apple is talking to OEMs in Asia now about mass production.
Apple has been experimenting internally with large form tablet devices for years, one source says, but there was concern that users wouldn’t like the device. The difference now is the iTunes app store, which has thousands of games and other applications that are perfect for a touch screen device with an accelerometer. Apple says more than 300 million applications have been downloaded since the App Store launched in July 2008. Combine the App Store, iTunes and a browser and you have one heck of a device.
We don’t have any information on pricing. The current iPod touch, with a 3.5 inch screen, starts at $229. The 32 GB model is $399. We expect the price on the larger iPod touch to be significantly higher.
Apple rumors, particularly Apple tablet rumors, tend to come and go. I’m not saying Apple is definitely launching a large form iPod Touch. But sources I trust are saying they are currently planning to, and one source has actually held the device. → Read More
I’m a fan of retro gaming, but not quite enough to completely permeate my life with it (close, though). If you’re different, however, this collection of most of the Space Invaders junk that’s available on the web should suit your purposes. → Read More
Quick, name three significant web sites that have domain extensions that end in .me or .tv. Having trouble? Sure, there are a few of them out there (kyte.tv and Buddy.tv come to mind, but I can’t think of any major .me’s). For all of the hype surrounding these extensions at launch, they’ve largely failed to deliver.
Earlier today Chris Dannen at FastCompany wrote a post titled “How 2009 Will Spur The Rebirth Of Cyber Squatting“. In it, Dannen writes about the beginning of a new age of domain squatting, as ICANN (the organization that handles domain name registrations) begins accepting applications for new domain name suffixes. He posits that with the emergence of new extensions like “.nyc” or “.law” these squatters will be given a new lease on life, with a nearly endless number of possible domains to plunder. Legitimate companies, likewise, will have to register as many domains as they can in the hopes of fending off sites like “Microsoft.sux”.
Fortunately, Dannen is wrong. Some overzealous companies may still go to the trouble of snatching up as many domains as they can, but it will be for naught. → Read More
Hitwise has just released a brief report examining the spending habits for web users over the holiday season. Using traffic data from its Retail 500 index, the site found that traffic in 2008 was lower than it was last year, but was (perhaps surprisingly) higher than it was back in 2006.
The study also found that the biggest drop off in traffic was among shoppers that fell under the ‘high-income’ demographic, which is classified as households earning more than $150,000 per year. Traffic from these upper-class buyers dropped 12.33% comparing December 2007 to December 2008, versus a drop of around 1% for those making less than $30,000 a year and an increase in traffic from everyone else. The report doesn’t make any guesses as to why this happened (perhaps the more wealthy users were losing more money in the stock market?), but it’s an interesting trend nonetheless. → Read More
Techmeme, a popular partially-automated tech news site, has released a list of its top 10 stories from 2008. Megan McCarthy, the site’s recently appointed human editor, has published the list on the Techmeme blog. McCarthy writes that headlines were determined using Techmeme’s internal data, which allows it to generate what is at least a somewhat-objective list of the year’s most widely read (and written about) stories.
The year’s top story was Microsoft’s proposed takeover of Yahoo (in classic Techmeme fashion, McCarthy includes two ‘sub-headlines’ under this one, one from the Wall Street Journal, another from Google). → Read More
At the 25th Chaos Communication Congress (CCC) today, researchers will reveal how they utilized a collision attack against the MD5 algorithm to create a rogue certificate authority. This is pretty big news, so read on. → Read More
MSI revealed the U115 Hybrid Netbook on Monday, which uses a solid-state disk jointly with a hard-disk drive for extra storage. → Read More
It’s been 1.5 years since the iPhone began to take over hit the market, causing major tremors throughout the mobile world. The promise/combination of a worthwhile touch screen and accompanying UI have proven to be an incredible success, with iPhones quickly reaching the top of the smartphone charts. It follows then, that most other mobile manufacturers (and now computer makers have joined the fray) have scrambled to get their own respective touch screen-centric devices out into the wild. What doesn’t necessarily add up is…why? → Read More
iSkoot is moving beyond Skype for mobile phones with the release of a more general mobile application called Notifier on AT&T’s Media Mall. Notifier lets users read RSS feeds and interact with Facebook, email (Gmail and AOL mail) and IM (AIM and Google Talk).
This isn’t an iPhone/Android application, it’s made for users who don’t have those kinds of fancy phones. It currently works with a variety of LG, Sony, Samsung and Motorola handsets, and it costs $2.99/month.
Why this is interesting: this is the productization of the technology they acquired with Social.IM, one of the first chat applications for Facebook. It also makes iSkoot less reliant on the whims of Skype – today their primary product is a technology and application that lets people use Skype from mobile phones.
Diversifying their business is probably one of the arguments they made in justifying their recent $19 million funding. Perhaps they can spend some of that money and invest in a new logo. → Read More
This crazy looking thing could be hunting/killing you this year if iRobot has their say. It’s essentially a periscope attached to an iRobot Packbot that, as you can plainly see, can push a camera eight feet into the air. Called the Zipper Mast or the Situational Awareness Mast, it’s a pretty freaky looking device. → Read More
This $89.99 mirror promises more than just the ability see myself while I record webcam video – it promises the ability to see what a horribly vain and truculent person I really am. By enabling me to see my face in full resolution as I emote, I can see how others perceive me and understand the horror they must feel upon meeting me for the first time. That first glance (“Well met, my hale fellow!”) is quickly followed by a pursing of the lips as my gimlet eyes race up and down their body and then settle somewhere north of their forehead, avoiding all eye contact. I will then see the pimples and warts that dot my face in profusion and expose my general failure to shave in any way resembling the work of a sane and mature man. → Read More
Demotix, a new startup coming out of London, is taking a pretty interesting approach to reinventing the newswire and with the wave of news coming out of the Israel/Palestinian conflict right now it is coming into its own. If you ever wanted to know what life and death was like on the ground in the middle of a war, this is it. The idea is simple: anyone can shoot video or photos at a news event like a protest and upload the content to the site. The site only takes photos right now but text and video are due soon. Everyone who uses Demotix will keep the copyright and the right to remove the images from the website. The non-exclusive images will be sold for anywhere from between $150- $3,000, and videos will be sold by $500-$1,000/minute. Demotix shares 50 percent of the revenue from each sale with the person who contributed the content. Demotix has six-full time staff members and six full-time interns. The site has launched in Beta but in the next fortnight launches a full version, along with an Arabic version. Founded by Jonathan Tepper and CEO Turi Munthe, the latter is a former journalist who realised that with old media declining in revenues the consequent impact on on-the-spot reporting and investigative journalism is huge. In its place has come what he calls Churnism – re-publishing AP or Reuters-like wire stories and pulling journalists out of the world’s hot-spots because they are just too expensive to run. In 2007, there were only 141 U.S. foreign correspondents in print and broadcast media, and there are currently only four newspapers that maintain foreign bureaus (The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the LA Times). In the UK, The Independent is in the process of cutting more than 60% of its staff, including 60 reporters. Demotix doesn’t need to maintain a global network of staff reporters and its contributors get paid when it does. However, with many potential contributors living under repressive regimes, Demotix goes to some lengths to protect identities. Metadata inside photographs about the time of day or event or the owner are removed before the image is uploaded to the site. And the site uses a Tor system to scramble IP addresses from where photos are uploaded. But the history of “UGC photo agencies” is patchy. Kyle MacRae founded a similar UGC → Read More
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