Wal-Mart, the biggest retail store in the U.S., has announced plans to attach RFID tags to certain articles of clothing, including jeans, underpants, and socks. Just the word alone—RFID—should set off your Spider Sense, but should you actually be afraid of shopping there from now on? I mean, there’s any number of things to be upset at Wal-Mart about, so where does the use of RFID fit in that anger matrix? → Read More
Pirates looking to illegally copy Android applications are about to face a new challenge: today, Google’s Android team announced that it is releasing a new application Licensing Service for Android. The service, which is meant to help developers secure their applications from piracy, forces apps to ping Google’s home server at regular intervals to verify that they were legitimately purchased. Fail that check, and the app can lock you out.
According to the Dev Guide, developers are free to decide how they want to deal with an application that is deemed to be pirated (a developer could disable the app entirely, or perhaps they could activate a trial mode prompting the user to purchase the real thing). → Read More
Hey you. Yeah, you Sony fanboi. You know who I’m talking to; you’re the guy that watching blogs for articles about the PS3, and defending everything Sony does with a rabid mindless worship that borders on fanaticism. You’ll be able to show your love of everything shiny, black, and Sony to the outside world now. Well, maybe not the “outside” world, since we all know you never leave your basement. → Read More
Beta 2 of iOS 4.1 has just hit the e-shelves of Apple’s developer center. You know the drill: developers, go get your download on. Everyone else, look on with a pinch of jealousy, and a heaping cup of gladness over the fact that you’ve got a few hundred thousand anxious developers beta testing the software so you don’t have to. We’re not hearing much in terms of new stuff — but if we do, we’ll let you know. → Read More
It’s hard to ignore the looming EV vehicle showdown between the Chevy Volt and the Nissan Leaf even though the vehicles are totally different in nature and target market. While the Nissan Leaf is simply a beautifully-packaged electric vehicle with around a 100 mile range, the Chevy Volt takes a different approach by having a somewhat limited 40 mile EV range but an on-board gas-powered generator that will power the electric motor as long as there’s gas in the tank. GM is clearly targeting the a higher-end market with a $41,000 MSRP while the Nissan Leaf is a bit more down-market with a starting price of $32,000. That’s fine. There’s more than enough room in the world for both of the vehicles. There doesn’t really have to be a winner here. In terms of sales numbers, the Nissan Leaf will enter more markets than the Volt (or its Opel Ampera counterpart) initially anyway. GM only expects to sell about 10,000 Volts during the first year where Nissan already 17,000 Leaf pre-orders, 5,000 more than the first year estimate. Clearly both vehicles are highly anticipated, though, so comparisons will no doubt be made around workplace watercoolers from now on. Here’s what we know so far. → Read More
Last August, we first wrote about Olark, a Y Combinator-funded startup that gave e-commerce site owners a simple way to interact with their customers: an IM widget. Now, Olark is expanding the functionality of these IMs to include detailed information about that shopper in realtime, and partnering with Shopify to make it easy to install.
For example, with this new Olark tool, dubbed Shopping Cart Saver, a site owner can get an IM every time someone hits the site. And you can see the referrer indicating how they got there. While they’re there, you can see what pages they’re visiting and most importantly, what items they’re putting in their shopping cart. If a user has a question, this same IM window serves as your way to interact with them. → Read More
A Kyle, Texas company that makes utility scale power storage systems, Xtreme Power, nabbed a $29.5 million, series C round of venture funding the company announced today. The investment was co-led by Bessemer Venture Partners, the venture capital arm of The Dow Chemical Company and clean tech investors SAIL Venture Partners.
Xtreme Power aims to alleviate problems associated with renewable energy sources with utility scale, dry cell batteries and other technology. → Read More
Chatroulette founder Andrey Ternovskiy recently posted this strange missive detailing Chatroulette’s commitment to cleaning up its act. In battling the porn plague, Ternovskiy has resorted to tracking offending IP addresses and turning them into the police, among other things (I’m assuming the hilariously named “penis recognition software” wasn’t enough):
“While many people understood the concept of roulette, where sometimes you can lose the game – due to randomness, over time it became a major bottleneck in further development of the service, because of a certain difficulties with raising venture capital, legally operating on the United States territory and having to deal with negative feedback.”
The 5-inch Dell Streak is a curious little device. It’s clearly not for everyone, but even John Biggs is starting to enjoy the 5-inch device – and he’s a grumpy, burned-out gadget blogger. Anyway, Dell just went live with the pricing deets and they are kind of what we imagined. It will run $299 with a two-year AT&T contract and $549 without. If you sign up for a pre-order slot by tonight, you’ll get first dibs on the phone when it goes on sale. Our full review should hit shortly. Also, the Dell Aero smartphone should hit AT&T August 9th for $99.99 on contract and $299 off. That’s just in case you need another Android phone to muck up your buying decision. → Read More
Canada is testing the water for modular river turbines. The project, led by Renewable Energy Research, received $5.5 million in funding from Sustainable Development Technology Canada and the government of Quebec. RER will install two turbines in the St. Lawrence River. → Read More
So I just went on the Battle.net site to buy myself a copy of Blizzard’s latest game, Starcraft II. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that it’s going to take 68 years before I’ll be able to buy and activate the incredibly popular new title. Apparently “It’s about time” meant it’s about how much time it’ll take before you can activate your new game. Update: Ok, the queue was grossly miscalculating. I was able to get the game after about 30 minutes. A reasonable amount of time, and I didn’t have to leave the house. → Read More
John C. Dvorak rails against the LAPD’s $7 million dollar email deal with Google. I agree that $7 million is a lot of money to spend on email, but I don’t know all the details of the deal, so I’m not going to cast too many aspersions there. I will, however, take Dvorak to task for his knee-jerk reaction to “hire three programmers and an IT guy”. End users expect email to just work, and have been blissfully shielded from the technical complexities that make running a robust email platform quite challenging. → Read More
Disney has acquired social gaming startup Playdom, confirming our story from last week. The price – $563.2 million plus an earn-out of up to $200 million.
Playdom’s last round of financing valued the company at $345 million, and the company has raised a total of around $76 million.
Press release is below: → Read More
The Dell Precision M6500 AKA “the fastest laptop in the world” apparently just got faster. These laptops now support up to 32GB of RAM along with up to three concurrent displays thanks to the ATI FirePro M7820 Mobility Professional Graphics from AMD. It has a 1GB of graphics memory and supports ATI Eyefinity. → Read More
Today saw T-Mobile finally retiring the venerable G1, forerunner to the ongoing Android revolution. I’ve been using a G1 since launch, so this is an emotional moment for me. Let’s just take a quick trip down memory lane out of respect for a solid phone. → Read More
It appears that Amazon has rolled out a new social feature integrating Facebook into your recommendations. If you go your recommendations, Using Facebook Connect, Amazon will now serve you social recommendations based on information in your Facebook profile. Facebook’s Platform account was just updated with a message that seems to confirm the rollout of this new feature.
So when you activate the feature, you’ll see a dedicated Amazon Facebook page within the recommendations section of your account. For example, you’ll see the most popular books, DVDs, and more that are listed in your Friend’s Facebook profile. So if you like Radiohead, you can see which one of your friends also likes the band. You’ll also see upcoming birthdays and find your Facebook friends’ Amazon Wish Lists more easily. And you’ll get gift suggestions for your friends based on their Facebook profiles. → Read More
Its been over three months since we first heard AT&T and Dell piping up about their Android phone, the Aero — and, unfortunately, three months in the mobile world is a really, really long time. 90 days later, this once nearly-top-shelf handset has devolved into something a little more mediocre in comparison to the freakishly powerful monster-phones that lead the way today. Fortunately, there’s plenty of room on the mid-range shelves. Today, Dell has finally revealed the Aero’s long-awaited availability details, along with all of the important info about their Android-powered tablet, the Streak. → Read More
The Chevy Volt will cost $41,000. GM finally went live with the second to last piece of the Chevy Volt puzzle and select dealers are ready to take orders with delivery expected “later this year.” After the available $7,500 tax credit, the effective price drops down to a much more reasonable $33,500. A tad pricey, yes, but GM is fully prepared to counter that higher price with an affordable leasing program that gets drivers into the Volt for only $350 per month with $2,500 due at signing.
The Volt will slowly roll out nationwide starting with California, New York, Michigan, Connecticut, Texas, New Jersey, and the Washington D.C. area. GetMyVolt.com will locate your nearest dealership who should be able to start processing orders as soon as today. Customers will then receive a phone call from a dedicated Volt advisor who will be able to answer any further questions.
But will GM have any issue moving the $41k Volt off of dealer’s lots? Probably not. → Read More
Who can forget the nonsense surrounding Real ID? Nobody, that’s who. To its credit, Blizzard quickly changed its mind after its initial decision to force people to use their real names on the official forums. Thanks to Eurogamer, we have a little bit more insight as to how Blizzard digested community feedback. → Read More
This guy, Fred Merle got arrested for selling Polka DVDs that he did not own the rights to. Apparently he was set up to make a deal with a tall guy dressed as a polka-fiend and now he can’t sell Polka DVDs anymore. Like forever. There is the wife, the lawyer and the tall guy with the mustache. Click to see the videos → Read More
