Archive for March, 2008
Amazon To Enter Wine Business
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Amazon is starting to sell wine to US customers and according to FT.com, is currently trying to recruit a senior wine buyer who will be responsible for “the acquisition of the new massive product selection”.
In the US, online alcohol sales is a difficult market since there are a multitude of laws in different states. But maybe now is a time to jump on the train for a lot of wine retailers since the US Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that state governments are not able to prohibit residents from ordering from out-of-state wineries.
The Amazon giant invested $30 million into Wine Shopper ( 1999 ) - but the site only lasted one year ( autsch ). The current Wine Sales for 2007 totaled $30 billion in the US - I wonder how the gallon of gas compares to wine.
Yahoo Maps with more data at the neighborhood level
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Yahoo released an update today for Yahoo Maps that adds more data to the neighborhood level.
They added 12,000 new neighborhoods in 300 cities and denote their boundaries with subtle changes in the background color, also points like school & subway stops are marked on the map.
iPhone SDK - June 08
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The "Jailbreak" driving force is: Information seeks freedom!
And since Apple announced today that they are going to deny unlocked iPhones to access the SDK / iTunes Store it is clear that this dark cloud will gain more strength in the future.
Based on what I read on the net this morning it looks as though no applications will be released to the users until June 08, but the developers can stard building them now - nice way of buying more time.The developer is able to join the program at developer.apple.com for $99. The application limits are: No Porn, Nothing illegal, No bandwidth hogs!
The business deal is that the developer sets the sell price and gets 70% revenue share on each sale. No credit card fees and payout is monthly.The App Store is the exclusive way to distribute your iPhone applications. Users will be able to browse applications, search or then download any App wireless to the phone.
Mind-reading Machine? Reality!
Scary or Sensational? A Machine that can look into the mind.
Scientists have developed a computerised mind-reading technique which lets them accurately predict the images that people are looking at by using scanners to study brain activity.
The breakthrough by American scientists took MRI scanning equipment normally used in hospital diagnosis to observe patterns of brain activity when a subject examined a range of black and white photographs. Then a computer was able to correctly predict in nine out of 10 cases which image people were focused on. Guesswork would have been accurate only eight times in every 1,000 attempts.
The study raises the possibility in the future of the technology being harnessed to visualise scenes from a person’s dreams or memory. ( Continue Article )
No Flash for iPhone
It would be great to finally get Flash on the iPhone, but that is still going to be a wishlist item for Santa. Steve Jobs commented that the iPhone and the current Flash options ( Flash Lite / Flash 9.0… ) are not compatible.
Maybe it is the fact that Flash now allows to playback h.264 videos and the capturing method would bring video mail / video chat and video posting easily to the iPhone user. But "duh" Steve ain’t going to share that story with us! Lets see what happens tomorrow - if this long awaited SDK is any buzz worth or if the Apple Stock prices are going to react again to a low blow?