It’s probably tricky to time these things to perfection, since Apple pulls the strings.
The UK Spotify competitor, We7, has had its iPhone app approved and is now available to download from the iTunes App Store. The problem is that the associated premium music subscription service, needed to run the app, doesn’t seemed to have launched yet.
Or at least that’s how it looks.
Judging by the site’s subscription page and reviews published in the App Store, whilst you can download the app, since you can’t yet subscribe to the mobile version of We7′s music subscription service, it’s currently useless. → Read More
When it was announced that retailer Walmart would buy streaming movie startup Vudu a couple days ago, a number of sites wondered what it would mean for Vudu’s adult content. Here’s what it means: bye bye.
An email is currently being sent out by Vudu letting its After Dark (the adult portion of its service run with adult publication AVN) partners that the section will be discontinued in the “coming days.” Find the full email at the bottom of this post. → Read More
“Look, honey! There’s a cyborg up on the telephone pole outside. Should we invite it in for some motor oil and finger sandwiches or do you think it’d try to kill us? Whup. Wait. It’s a repair man. Cyborgs don’t have butt cracks. That’s how you can tell. False alarm. Should we invite him in for some coffee and finger sandwiches or do you think he’d try to kill us?” → Read More
Dagnabbit! Our secret blogging weapon has been revealed to the public. Now, you too, can run a successful gadget blog from the comfort of your own chair! → Read More
1234. 1111. 0000. When it comes to 4-digit unlock codes, most people fall back on the same patterns/ideas that everyone else uses. “Boy! I sure hope the big bad hacker folks don’t think to punch in my Birthday!” Alpha-numeric passwords (that is, passwords with both letters and numbers) are inherently more secure. More possibilities means more security, right? Alas, the iPhone only supports 4-digit codes — out of the box, at least. A few clever gents have figured out an incredibly simple modification that gives you access to the full keyboard for your lockdown duties, no jailbreak required. → Read More
Wow. This young lady is amazingly excited about Wonder Boy and Adventure Island, two crazy games for the Sega Master System and the NES. While I don’t think I’ve ever played Adventure Island or Wonder Boy, I did enjoy Wonder Boys and suspect that Lucky Wander Boy was based on the SMS version. So there’s that. → Read More
Investment giant Fidelity is getting into the mobile game with a new iPhone app. Fidelity’s free app allows you to monitor your portfolio, trades, research investments, and follow daily market news on the go.
With the app, you can track your portfolio and monitor positions, balances, and intraday valuations of accounts. The app also lets you trade stocks, mutual funds, ETFs and options from within the app and lets you check the status of your orders. → Read More
Interesting. For $80, Hammacher Schlemmer will sell you something that you plug into your car’s cigarette lighter to improve your gas mileage “by up to 18%.” → Read More
Another fire erupted amongst developers and consumers when Apple decided to pull the plug on apps that contained content of questionable nature. This isn’t the first time Apple has done this, but with the pulling of Wobble iBoobs from the app store came a surge of app killings and everyone said they’d had enough. → Read More
Our best buddy, Scott, he of ScottEVest, just started its massive 40%-off sale. They have plenty of great stuff including the Quantum and Evolution jackets and my favorite, the cotton hoodie. → Read More
We’ve been getting a number of tips about the Google App Engine API being down hard, causing a good number of third-party services who depend on it to fail or be downright inaccessible. A quick check on API-status, which tracks that sort of thing, confirmed the service disruption.
The outage was also confirmed by the App Engine team in a Google Groups discussion, making it clear this wasn’t a scheduled event. → Read More
This may very well be the first time I’ve ever seen Brando sell a product from a big name manufacturer. Normally known for whimsical crap gadgets from faraway lands (and I mean that in the best way possible), the web store is now selling the HTPC-friendly Lenovo Mini Wireless Keyboard for $64. → Read More
Looking at blogs and news sites across the web, it’s clear that many have robust communities with eager, intelligent people looking to contribute. But up until recently, the only way most sites (particularly blogs) allow users to share their thoughts is through comments, which work well enough, but certainly aren’t always perfect. Grogger is a new service that looks to help sites tap into this community knowledge, allowing you to build a site that includes posts written by both you and your audience.
At its core, Grogger is an easy-to-use blogging platform, but rather than only exposing its editing tools to a handful of site administrators, they’re shown to everyone. When a user comes to your Grogger site and writes an entry (called a Grog), you can have it directly posted to your blog, or added to a moderation queue, where your site administrators can approve it. → Read More
JVC in Japan today announced [JP] the NC-SP1, an ultra-slim active speaker that’s just 34mm thick and can be connected to your computer via USB. Marketed as a device that’s particularly suitable for presentations, it supports Windows XP/Vista/7 and Mac OS X 10.4 machines and requires just one USB port. → Read More
Two law firms, Beck & Lee from Miami and The Weston Firm in San Diego, have filed a class action lawsuit in Los Angeles federal court alleging unfair business practices by local business review and rating website operator Yelp.
The plaintiff in the suit, a veterinary hospital in Long Beach, CA, is said to have requested that Yelp remove a negative review from the website, which was allegedly refused by the San Francisco startup, after which its sales representatives repeatedly contacted the hospital demanding payments of roughly $300 per month in exchange for hiding or deleting the review. → Read More
Every entrepreneur is familiar with the moment. The moment when you stumble across an annoying problem – a problem that you’d pay money to solve – and suddenly a synapse fires in your brain.
“Holy crap, if I’d pay money to solve this, so would other people. There’s a business here!”.
It’s the moment that has kick started a million businesses and generated billions of dollars over the decades. And on Sunday evening, not for the first time in what I laughingly call my career, I experienced it. → Read More
9to5Mac found these delightful buttons. What the deuce? It seems that the new iPad SDK 3.2 Beta 3 has some very interesting bits of code and UI components that point to a front facing camera – a boolean called hasFrontCamera – and a boolean for a flash LED (not Adobe Flash) called hasFlash. There are also two buttons in the interface for accepting and declining video chats. → Read More
Get thee to the Wootery! There’s a Woot-Off going on right now (I think it’s a slicer they’re selling now) so get over there ASAP! → Read More
Social sharing is becoming a big contributor to traffic for many sites. While Facebook and Twitter drive more sharing than any other services, Google is trying to compete with Buzz, which is now part of Gmail but shares links to article and blog posts through Google Reader. Over the past month, according to AddThis, sharing through Google Reader is up 35 percent, with a big jump on February 9, the day Buzz launched. This number only measures sharing through the AddThis button, which is on more than 600,000 Websites and gives you the option to share content through more than 200 services. So it is only a proxy for total sharing on Google Reader, but a decent one.
Google Reader still barely registers when compared to Twitter and Facebook, which account for 31 percent and 8 percent of all sharing via AddThis, respectively. But Buzz is definitely giving it a boost. → Read More
Computer equipment maker Buffalo is pretty bullish about USB 3.0. The company today announced a total of five new USB 3.0 HDDs for the Japanese market, namely two “compact models” [JP] (81×130×16mm) and three bigger (45×175×156mm) devices [JP]. The HD-PEU3-BK (pictured above), the compact type, will be available in a version that holds 500 GB (price: $200) and another one with 640GB ($250). → Read More
