Hey, guys, guess what just came in the mail? The JimmyJane.com Form 6 massager with dual-action for those heard to reach places. I’ll do a full review shortly – WITH PICS! – but here’s a quick unboxing for you all. Note: This is for external use only. → Read More
Garmin makes great fitness watches – the GPS line is just incredible. Now they’re moving towards less GPS oriented models with the FR60, a sports watch that uses external devices like foot pods and heartrate monitors rather than bulky internal sensors. A GPS unit is also available An ANT+ dongle will automatically connect the watch to your PC. → Read More
Travelzoo, a publicly traded travel site launched in 1998, has annouced that it purchased the domain “Fly.com” for $1.8 million. According to Travelzoo’s announcement, Fly.com will be the home of “a new information web site to be launched in Feburary”. A visit to the site itself offers a slightly less vague description:
“Fly.com will launch a new travel search engine within the next few weeks that will help you find the best travel options. Please visit us again soon.”
The $1.8 million price tag might sound like a lot (and it is), but pricey domains are nothing new, even in the down economy: Vibrators.com sold for $1 million a few months ago and A&T’s YellowPages.com paid a whopping $3.85 million for YP.com in December. Of course, good domain names are no guarantee for success – let’s hope Fly.com has more behind it than yet another generic travel search engine. → Read More
We heard that some MySpace insiders weren’t exactly pleased when new Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz made a subtle jab at MySpace during the Yahoo earnings call earlier this week.
When asked if Yahoo would start to focus on the younger demographic, Bartz responded “So one thing I would say, I want to make sure that we serve the demographic that we have now very, very well. Also what I would tell you, the good news is, that crowd is very finicky. And just as MySpace was extremely hot and then moved over to Facebook, who knows what’s going to come next and who knows whether Yahoo! can grab that property and be successful.”
The press took that quote and ran with it, writing headlines like this one from Reuters: Facebook hotter than MySpace: Yahoo CEO Bartz. → Read More
It’s pretty obvious that our fascination with crazy designs and fancy renders has recently returned. Today’s example, a scooter—oh how European—that solves the problem of, “Gee, where do I stash my bread and cheese?” Why, in the large space underneath the seat, silly! → Read More
An unknown company that makes “jet parts” in England, IA Technology, is pretending to release some vaporware cellphone that accepts only voice input and, through the magic of “Internet portals” will make calls and send texts without typing. The phone itself, as it appears in this BBC footage, is just a plastic mock-up that the anchor uses as if it were the real thing. Most interestingly, however, is the B-roll which shows that the company apparently still does all of it’s “ejector seat” soldering by hand because using a bunch of women using some acid core and wood burners to add components to a board. Best of all? It’s called the ZumbaLumba. → Read More
As we enter the final year of the aughts, we need something new to show off how retro we can be. Duct tape wallets are so 2008. Hello Kitty is tired. How about something really ironic. Like a cassette tape wallet! → Read More
Digital Britain. Broadband everywhere. You’re going down with a billion in the bank. All popular phrases coming out of the UK today, some of which the Government is working toward making a reality. Up first, making broadband as ubiquitous as television. Oh, and eliminating music piracy. Like that’ll ever happen. → Read More
We really could have guessed as much at this point, but T-Mobile’s Senior Vice President of Engineering Neville Ray has put it on the record that G1 followups are on the way in 2009: As the year progresses there will be a significant number of HSPA-capable smart phones. We will be launching more G series phones and other products. We’ve heard from at least one source at HTC that the G-series isn’t necessarily an HTC only gig – if more than one does indeed hit the shelves in 2009, we’d expect at least one of them to be outside of HTC’s doing. [Via AndroidGuys] → Read More
When Hublot first launched the Big Bang I was totally down with the watch. It had a unique style and size as well as a nice pedigree and cost about $15K, not horrible for a watch of this caliber. Now they’re just getting greedy.
The King Power is just a fat watch with a weird, all-black face that almost renders it useless. This model has a ceramic bracelet, which is unusual, and is water resistant to 10 ATM. It’s basically using a standard jumping hands split-second movement from La Joux-Perret. How much is all of this pleasure? $22,000, not counting the gazelle-like Russian models you have to hire to walk into the shop so you can look sufficiently douchey when you pick this up. → Read More
While companies have been toiling away at breaking the sub-$100 notebook price point for ages now, an Indian company is ready to show off a notebook that costs – ready? – only $10. Actually, right now, it would cost $20 but mass production should drive it down they say. The notebook apparently still comes equipped with 2GB of memory, WiFi, Ethernet, and expendable memory. No word on anything else technical though like CPU or screen size. Who are we to call this product vaporware so early. It might turn out to be true and surprise us all on February 3rd. Or we could all just enjoy a collective chuckle. → Read More
Jump on the netbook bandwagon on the cheap side with this Dell Mini 9 refurbished netbook. It’s the low end Ubuntu model with only a 1.6GHz Atom, 512MB of RAM, and 4GB SSD but it’s only $179. Because it’s right from Dell, however, buyers still get a 1 year warranty and 24/7 tech support. Just use coupon code $C$TXXP1CT3BLC (via) to bring the advertised price of $209 down to a tad more affordable $177. Not bad, eh? → Read More
When FlyCast announced during CES that an Android port of their streaming radio application was on the way, hopeful listeners were left waiting with little more than a passive “Coming Soon.” Well, wait no longer – just a day over 3 weeks after the announcement, the beta release of FlyCast for Android is now available in the Android Market. Of course, that beta flag means rocky roads might lay ahead for early adopters. If you have any issues, FlyCast has set up a special support forum just for you. → Read More
Saying goodbye to that “special someone” is never an easy thing to do, especially after many years have passed. But, when the time comes, it’s best just to try and move on. Take today’s NTT DoCoMo announcement that it will be shutting down its 2G cellular network by March 31, 2012, for example. By the end of 2008, only 12% of its users were still rocking second-gen mobile phones, leaving a whopping 88% having already jumped on the 3G bandwagon. Clearly NTT DoCoMo understands the circumstances and has decided to break things off before it gets any worse. The Japanese mobile giant will offer the last few 2G stragglers incentives to get out of the stone age upgrade before the old service is shut off in 2012. [via PhoneScoop] → Read More
We learned, not too long after the NXE‘s release last fall, that it had gone through several iterations before Microsoft, “There, that’s it!” Grid/plane, a design studio that helped Microsoft develop the NXE, has released a few screenshots of an early version of the NXE, some of which I’ve put here. → Read More
Zazzle, the online shop that lets you order custom-decorated clothing, mugs, and a variety of other items, has laid off nearly 40% 25% of its corporate staff and 15% of the overall company, which includes workers in its manufacturing factory. The corporate office was hit hard, with over 30 28 of 110 employees cut, primarily in business development, marketing, and engineering. Cuts were also made in the company’s factories, which houses 140 workers (some of which are working under contract).
In an official blog post, the company’s founders write that the site has seen strong growth over the past year, but that the sluggish economy forced them to make cuts in order to ensure the company’s continued profitability. The company says it will continue to sell products currently available on the site, but has cut some projects that have yet to appear and will continue to drop products that aren’t performing well.
Update: Chief Product Officer Jeff Beaver says that the Zazzle representative I spoke to earlier was misinformed, and that 28 out of 110 corporate employees were laid off, representing around 25% of the corporate office. He confirmed that 15% of the staff overall had been laid off. → Read More
It is early days for HD video on the Web, but already we are starting to see jostling for position in this nascent part of the Web video market. Less than two months after YouTube started streaming high-definition videos in a major way, CEO Chad Hurley is now claiming bragging rights as the biggest HD video site on the Web. At a panel today at Davos, he said:
We feel we have the largest library of HD video on the Internet.
If you look at YouTube’s HD category, five pages with about 100 HD videos come up. Hulu’s HD gallery, in contrast, only has six videos. Vimeo’s HD gallery has 178 videos. But CBS has at least 1,000 (and it is not clear how many of those are on YouTube in HD quality). → Read More
Don’t worry – besides the bits in the headline, absolutely nothing about this story is weird. Okay, I lied. It’s all kind of weird. The BBC is running a piece on something called the “Zumbafone” by IA Technology. Never heard of’em? That’s because you haven’t been studying your “military ejector seat electronics” manufacturers well enough. → Read More
Bad news for treehugging gearheads this morning. Tesla had originally planned on opening a new facility in San Jose to build the Model S electric sports sedan, but the financing fell through. (Welcome to America, Tesla) So as it stands now, the company is going to redirect a $450 million government loan that was originally going to help build the facility into the general budget which will help with the Roadster development. → Read More
