How can you tell a 1973 Batard Montrachet from a bottle of Boone's Farm Strawberry Hill? Or a '45 Mouton-Rothschild from a box of Franzia? Well, you could taste the difference, presumably. But what if you had to discern between the '45 and one of the top years of the Eighties? Few could. And while the difference might be taste, it certainly is money.
People collect wines for a number of reasons, but one of the top ones is the fact that a good wine appreciates. If a counterfeiter is good at selling one similar wine as another it can make the difference between $2000 and $200,000. Now some wineries are using RFID to hold the counterfeiters at bay.
The new version of Tweetie, the iPhone Twitter application acquired this month by Twitter Inc., says it contains a surprise. What's the surprise? When you pull down the stream of Tweets to refresh, a slot machine appears.
The slot machine's wheels spin, then stop. Some percentage of the time you're rewarded with a little graphic telling you that Tweetie will soon be known as Twitter for iPhone (congrats to you!). This sure looks like the future home of advertising on Twitter for iPhone, doesn't it? Twitter's Sean Garrett says that's not the case, "The slot machine thing is just a fun way to get the word out about the upcoming change from Tweetie to Twitter." It sure looks like prime real estate, though.
Do you remember Google Wave? After a lot of hype around the initial launch of Wave - which some pundits billed as an "email killer" at the time - things have been rather quiet around the service. The latest update to Wave, however, could push the service back into the public eye. Publishers can now easily embed waves on their sites and readers can see them without having to be logged in to Wave, which makes Wave a great live blogging platform.
I said last week that "When the level of evil plummets...I wonder, for instance, if Tinhorns the world over aren't taking the week off to apply neat's foot oil to their collection of rubber hoses." I had no idea how right I'd be.
Cuba arrests blogger Diana Virgen GarcĂa. Garcia, who covers issues of free speech in Cuba, and supports the Ladies in White movement, was arrested on April 22. The next day she was "sentenced" to a year and eight months in prison for unannounced "charges."
Apple plans to shut down Lala, the cloud-based streaming music service it bought in December 2009. Lala stopped accepting new users today and will close on May 31. Thanks to its unlimited music locker and innovative pricing scheme, Lala had long been a favorite of ours. Rumor is that Apple will revive the service is some form under the iTunes.com label, but as with all things Apple, this is just a rumor until Steve Jobs walks on stage and announces it.
There's only one week left until the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit 2010, so we invite you to register now. Be a part of high-value, intimate conversations with people working throughout the world of mobile, from garage developers to industry luminaries.
The summit will take place May 7, 2010, in Mountain View, California and will be an exploration of the latest mobile development trends, both the technology and the emerging business applications. We are looking forward to some amazing discussion and debate about mobile with participants like:
In Reddit's continuing effort to weed out spammers, it has taken another not-quite-traditional step: email verification.
Okay, so it sounds perfectly traditional, but the site has gone and taken it one step further - email verification that is completely voluntary.
If you thought a puzzle of a Jackson Pollock painting was bad, wait until you try out the next step - reality.
XMG Studios, a gaming company that won a "Best App Ever" award for its last augmented reality game Pandemica, released yesterday its next entry into the AR gaming field, Jigsaw Live.
The tech world is still reeling from the impact of Facebook's radical changes, announced last week a the F8 developer's conference, and their implications for privacy, the open Web and the future of social networking. However, these newly introduced features, such as the "like" button for websites, social plugins and Facebook's Open Graph API, have spurred some early-adopting developers to create tools for end users that include everything from bookmarklets to search engines. Over the course of the past week or so, a number of these tools have been covered by leading tech blogs (including us, of course), but we wanted to create a resource that lists all of them in one place.
It appears that Opera is looking to increase its cross-platform and cross-device stickiness. The Norway-based browser company announced this morning that it has acquired webmail service FastMail.fm.
Opera, which is now available not only for Mac and PC, but also a number of mobile devices and platforms, now including the iPhone.