The mobile check-in is not just a way to tell your friends where you are via FourSquare or Facebook Places, it is a marketing opportunity. Southwest Airlines is combining Facebook Places and charitable giving to the Make-A-Wish Foundation to encourage travelers to check into Southwest when they get to the airport.
From now through Christmas, Southwest Airlines will make a $1 donation in the form of free travel credit to the Make-A-Wish Foundation, which grants wishes to children with life-threatening medical conditions. Often these wishes involve travel, an Southwest will donate up to $300,000 in travel credit through this promotion. → Read More
It wasn’t easy accumulating the research data displayed in the following guide. I saw horrific sights working retail for seven long years in both a big box electronic store and a major shopping center. I saw things that will haunt me the rest of my days. I watched two kids get trampled by what I call Double-Wides because Circuit City clearanced-out Dreamcasts for $80 on Black Friday. I once hid behind a massive video display just for a few moments to myself during the chaos. I’ve seen people fight, bite, and trample other members of our human race just to save a few dollars. → Read More
To quote Dwight Hansen, I do know a thing or two about a thing or two and as such I’m allowed, sometimes, to prognosticate. Even as we thrust our fists into the air triumphantly when we snag the last tattered box containing a Kung Zhu hamster value bundle, the IT industry never sleeps and, like a shark, it must keep moving to survive. Based on what we’ve seen this year, let’s take a look at what we can expect to see next year when we once again fall into the Black Friday Breech. → Read More
Sony yesterday announced [JP] it’s ready to re-enter the Japanese market for e-books with the launch of two new e-readers – after having failed miserably between 2004 and 2007. In 2007, Sony pulled out of Japan and focused solely on markets outside Japan, especially the US. But according to the company, e-books will soon be the fourth pillar of its entertainment segment, next to music, movies, and video games. → Read More
A recurring refrain in my Twitter feed is the coded question, “11 or 13?” Despite it’s religious overtones, this is not a reference to passages in the Bible. It is a question familiar to any Apple-obsessed consumer: Should I get the 11-inch MacBook Air or the 13-inch?
If you’ve been asking yourself the same question, today the price difference will not be the deciding factor. Although the cheapest 11″ MacBook Air is still $999, a Black Friday deal on the the 13″ models makes the lower-end one with a 128 GB flash drive the same price as the higher-end 11″ model with the 128 GB flash drive. It is actually a dollar cheaper, $1,198 versus $1,199, and the battery lasts longer. → Read More
This is just getting silly. Yesterday, we reported on a new Chrome extension created by a developer that allowed you to scrape your Facebook contact information. Called “Facebook Doesn’t Own My Friends,” the extension provided a work around to import your friends contact information on Facebook into Gmail and CSV files. As we noted in our post, it appears that the extension has been taken down. It’s unclear who has actually taken the exporter down, but the implications are clear. The only companies that will provide these technologies are Facebook and Google, and this will probably involve a peace treaty of some sort.
So what got us to this dark place where ten minutes after the workaround was posted on TechCrunch, it was taken down? Nearly a month ago, Google began blocking Facebook API access to download Google contacts. Facebook hacked its way around that, and Google subsequently issued a statement that they were “disappointed”. Facebook Platform engineer Mike Vernal then responded in the comments of one of our blog posts about the slap fight, defending Facebook’s policy and calling it “consistent”. → Read More
Back in April, Japan’s largest cell phone carrier, NTT DoComo, began running a bizarre promotion campaign in Tokyo (which prompted me to go out and post this photo report on MobileCrunch). Docomo used Darth Vader in a number of weird posters and viral video clips, without saying why and what Vader was supposed to promote. → Read More
Last year, Google Checkout debuted a holiday savings promotion in time for Cyber Monday, the monday after Thanksgiving and Black Friday. It looks like Google has gotten a slight head start this year, and is now offering Black Friday promotions for Google Checkout promotions.
According an email sent to consumers from Google Checkout, Google will offer exclusive discounts of $5, $10, or $20 when you use the payments system for purchases on Buy.com, BlueNile, and others. You can find participating e-retailers on the deals homepage here. → Read More
A lot of people out there still seem to think that all blogs do is riff off of major media content. Reblog it, or just plain plagiarism. Most people know that most major news is now broken by blogs, but the prejudice is still out there.
One thing we abhor is “the unattributed rewrite,” When some publication takes a story that was broken by someone else and simply rewrites the same story in their own words without any attribution to the source of the story. It’s just not done by reputable sites, whether they’re blogs or mainstream media. A simple “the story was first broken by the Associated Press,” or whoever, is the honorable thing to do.
Speaking of the Associated Press, they’ve stepped in it again. → Read More
So, it appears that the first Chrome OS netbooks are set to launch in the next few weeks. And it now appears that the first ones will be Google-branded versions, built by a third-party manufacturer. And you can be sure that Google is already testing these internally, as they do this for basically all of their products leading up to launch. And a few more hints about them may reside in the Chromium issue tracker.
For several months, Google has been internally testing Chrome OS on a wide variety of netbooks. These have included Asus Eee machines, Lenovo machines, Dell machines, and a few others. How do I know? Because they’re often listed under “Type of computer” in bug reports. But more interesting has been the numerous references to “dogfood” machines. “Dogfooding” is the name given to the process of internally testing your own product. Again, Google has been doing this for months. → Read More
The move to 4G is certainly happening, with Verizon, T-mobile, AT&T, and even MetroPCS all having rolled out (or at least having announced a timeframe to roll out) some variant of a 4G network.
And, whaddayaknow, Cellular South have also joined the 4G club, announcing last week their partnership with Samsung that will bring 700MHz LTE waves out to their part of the world, as well as two handsets in 2011. → Read More
Those of our readers who are in the US will be joining us today in celebrating no historical event in particular by cooking up a huge turkey, sharing it with our family and friends, and generally taking our minds off things for a day. Yes, it’s Thanksgiving. We’re going to be taking it easy today, but we’ll leave you with a few of the things the crew here is thankful for. It was supposed to be gadgets we’re thankful for, but nobody followed my instructions so it’s just plain things. I’ll kick it off. → Read More
Last time we checked in on the Facebook/Google slapfight, Facebook had removed the option to import your contacts from Gmail and was still holding strong on the whole “denying contact info access to Google” rigamarole that started the fight in the first place. Up until now many had no other choice but to use Yahoo Mail if they wanted to mass export their Friends data from Facebook into Google.
Well Happy Thanksgiving data reciprocity fans! A third party developer has decided to build “Facebook Doesn’t Own My Friends,” a Chrome extension that lets you easily export your Facebook Friends’ contact information. → Read More
Beat me with a stick! I just had to plod through Manufacture Royale’s nine page long bloody press release – only to have reasserted what they mention in the first few lines; that they are “unashamedly elitist.” Wipe my brow and hand me an ol’ timey hallucinogenic absinthe, because I need to lay back in a hammock on a steamship and read some Jules Verne to appreciate this steampunk mechanaut. → Read More
Chrome OS draws near. Last night brought perhaps the more surefire sign yet: Google is openly talking to The New York Times about it. Perhaps that is in response to rumors that it was being delayed into next year. While details are still scant, NYT reports that before the end of the year, Google will release a lightweight netbook running Chrome OS. It will likely be branded as a Google product, but built by a third-party, similar to what the search giant did with their Nexus One phone, says the report.
This is in line with what we’ve heard and were told recently. While a full-scale roll out of Chrome OS has likely been pushed into 2011, Google is still saying that they will release something before the end of the year. Based on messages in the open source Chromium forums, it would seem that this will be a beta version of the OS. One that yes, will be running on their own device that they’re currently dogfood testing (testing within the company). → Read More
The Cleantech Open— a prestigious annual competition for U.S. tech startups that protect, restore, and reduce the negative impact of humans on the environment— announced its 2010 winners this week. Puralytics, a clean water startup from Beaverton, Oregon, took first prize.
The Puralytics team invented and sells a nanotechnology-based, photochemical water purification system that, in comparison to other available systems, can purify water more quickly, remove more impurities from it, and requires less electricity to do so. With 15 percent of the world’s total estimated 6.5 billion population lacking freshwater enough to live a healthy life today, companies with promising water technology are in demand, and could help abate a global water and humanitarian crisis. → Read More
So. Facebook. $35 billion valuation; 600 million users; 25% of all US Web traffic — and all that with fewer employees than Google has job openings. The inventor of the World Wide Web recently warned that the web may be endangered by Facebook’s colossal walled garden. A Google engineer was recently paid $3.5 million to not jump ship to work there. Facebook seems an unstoppable juggernaut. And I kind of want them to die.
Not because of their policies. They’ve been reasonably sensitive to their users’ wants, and willing to admit when they were wrong (remember Facebook Beacon?) There have been worrying signs of late, for example, their two-faced attitude towards data portability and their trademarking of the word “Face”, but I don’t (yet) object to what they do.
I dislike Facebook because they’re mediocre. They have a platform and opportunity unlike anyone else, ever—and what have they done with it? Nothing. None of their so-called innovations are actually even remotely so. Copying Twitter was smart, but hardly new; ditto Foursquare. They called Facebook Groups an innovation; it’s a basic feature they should have implemented years ago. Now they’re laughably trying to claim that integrating email into their messaging system is a world-shaking revolution. → Read More
I’m actually not here right now. I wrote this yesterday while listening to Kanye West’s new album, which I’m still deciding if I like or not. I think my opinion right now is, “Meh, I can take it or leave it.” (I think Big Boi’s album is better, and I’ll never say a bad word about The Roots.) Nicki Minaj’s verse on “Monster” is pretty dope, but beyond that? Whatever. Maybe Kanye can go back in time and ask Eric B. and Rakim to teach him how to rap. That would be cool. → Read More
As everyone is getting their turkeys into the oven and putting the finishing touches on Thanksgiving Day meals, a lot of questions come up. What should the internal temperature of a turkey be to know it is done? How many mashed sweet potatoes would make 3 cups? How do I soften hardened brown sugar? The answers (165 degrees, 3, and microwave it) can be found on Foodpickle, a crowdsourced Q&A section of the foodie site Food52.
You can ask a question on Foodpickle itself, or tweet it to @foodpickle. Answers are tweeted back at you. Foodpickle also accepts text messages to 803-380-FOOD (3663). And if you are lucky, your question might even be answered by food writer Amanda Hesser. → Read More
So I guess the guy in the video above is going to swallow a little wireless receiver/speaker/cancer pill on Friday, November 26th. Why? He wants to. Of course the whole stunt will be livestreamed and there’s a handy countdown timer on the official site. → Read More
