When your stuff gets stolen, FILL OUT A POLICE REPORT. Consumerist reader Alisa is figuring this out the hard way after Apple received her stolen phone for repair. Even though it’s clearly hers, they…
The U.S. Department of Energy has finally made good on its threat to take its label off of certain refrigerators made by Korean giant LG Electronics. The move is indicative of the DOE’s new, tougher approach to energy efficiency standards and certification.
In the last few years, the Energy Star name seemed to mean less and less. Apparently after certifying certain products, the department failed to follow up with appliance makers to make sure that models bearing the label actually met efficiency specifications. A lot of unqualified products ended up being shipped with the Energy Star blessing — negating its ability to help consumers make eco-friendly choices.
The program, managed jointly by the DOE and the Environmental Protection Agency, finally audited its activities in October — probably leading to its decision to purge the LG refrigerators. As it turns out, makers of most household appliances, like fridges, washing machines, dishwashers and air conditioners, are able to present their results directly to the DOE to earn Energy Star certification. Whereas makers of eco-friendly windows and light emitting-diode systems have to have their data verified by independent bodies.
At this point, it wouldn’t be surprising if the DOE started giving every application this level of scrutiny.
On closer inspection, LG’s fridges fall short of the money and energy savings that they had promised when they first earned the Energy Star brand, the department says. By no small measure either. Apparently the fridges use about twice the power that the company said.
LG hasn’t exactly accepted fault. Quite the opposite, it has turned around and sued the DOE, claiming that the department switched up the test it uses to qualify appliances for Energy Star. Regardless of the outcome, it’s nice to see the DOE and EPA taking a stand and using the recognizable Energy Star brand to truly reinforce its energy efficiency goals.
Willow Garage’s PR2 robot already knew how to find its own electrical outlet. Now that it’s also learning how to generalize actions, it’s only a matter of time before it’s mixing me the perfect…
Video game sales are hurting because of the recession, but gamers are still consuming an awful lot of news about video games.
Traffic at the top 50 gaming sites grew to 20.2 million unique visitors, up 23 percent year over year in November, according to Kantar Media’s Compete.com traffic measurement subsidiary. By comparision, the category including games, music and movies grew 9 percent to 40.2 million unique visitors in November. Overall, game news sites have been hurt by the recession during 2009, but November traffic could be an indicator that
The top site for game information, hints or cheats was IGN.com, with 6.1 million unique visitors, down 4.6 percent from a year ago. It was followed by Gamespot.com with5.7 million, Gamefaqs.com with 3.2 million. Big gainers among the top 25 were Gametrailers.com, Battle.net and Gameahead.com.
There are of course a lot more people visiting 
sites to play games than to read news about them. The online game sites that host games which visitors can play grew to 53 million unique visitors in November, up 16.5 percent compared to a year ago (second chart). Pogo.com, the casual game site owned by Electronic Arts, grew 9 percent from a year ago to 9.7 million unique visitors in November. Other top online game sites included games.yahoo.com (6.2 million UVs), addictinggames.com (5.2 million UVs) and popcap.com (5.2 million UVs). The numbers don’t include Facebook-related online game sites.
The game sites run by game publishers (mainly as promotional or shopping sites, third chart) also saw spikes, largely due to the release of big games. Activision Blizzard’s CallofDuty.com saw a 71 percent month-over-month traffic increase in November to 215,000 unique visitors, thanks to the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. Other sites related to the game — ModernWarfare2.com and InfinityWard.com — more than doubled in size. EA.com led traffic with 1.99 million unique visitors, but Ubi.com moved to second place with 900,400 unique visitors due to the launch of the hit game Assassins Creed 2.
Laura Northrup / The Consumerist:
AT&T Customer Service: “New York City Is Not Ready For The iPhone” — AT&T has apparently found a workable solution to the reported data congestion in New York City. They’ve quietly stopped selling the iPhone to customers in the New York metropolitan area, at least from their web site.
First there was the shoe bomb. Now Al Qaeda has taken it to the next level: Yesterday’s failed terrorist attack was supposed to be delivered by a suicide bomber with the payload sewn into his…
It’s not the first with Wi-Fi, nor the first with an AMOLED screen. But the CL80’s 3.7″ AMOLED, 14MP sensor, and Wi-Fi for a good-lookin’ camera (on paper, at least). Nada on price or release date….
Here’s the latest from VentureBeat’s Entrepreneur Corner.
3 key legal tips for securing angel financing – Securing angel investing can be a confusing process for the start-up owner. Scott Edward Walker, the founder and CEO of Walker Corporate Law Group, gives three legal tips to help you ensured you’re not taken advantage of.
Can a single bottle of soda decimate your company? Absolutely. – Sometimes financial decisions that are seemingly rational on their face can be disastrous – and lead to major problems for a start-up. Serial entrepreneur Steve Blank describes an effect he has witnessed several times when a seemingly small perk is removed.
Three ways to avoid dog whistle marketing – It’s hard to make an impression as a start-up –but the reason no one’s hearing you might be avoidable. Jim Nichols, senior partner at Catalyst:SF, gives a few ways to make your message stand out.
The start-up chronicles: Experiments with Twitter – Serial entrepreneur has never been a big fan of Twitter. So as he rolls out his latest venture, he hasn’t been real optimistic about its traffic-generating prospects. But a little trial and error has shown him there might be promise after all. Here, he runs down what he did to gain followers – and how the results have been.
Your most important support staff - Good employees are important, but if your family isn’t behind you in a start-up, it’s going to be a much harder road. Frank Levinson, founder of Finisar tells of a particular Christmas that his family postponed opening gifts to help with some critical company functions.
As a follow up to a recent article we ran on how press releases can be great for search, a representative for PRWeb, a press release distribution company, contacted us with another interesting example. This one looks at the shelf-life press releases can have, with regards to search traffic.
"A small business called Leatherup.com, which sells peripheral gear for motorcycle riders issued a news release on November 6, 2008, titled, ‘LeatherUp.com 2008 Sales Explode to over $20 Million,’" the representative tells WebProNews. "This year alone, this release has received more than 11,000 unique page views excluding advertising (I can see that Leatherup.com used this release as a landing page for some Doubleclick ads which boosted the total unique views to more than 20,000, so have excluded them)."
"Once I had the 11,000 number, with the exclusion, I looked at the entrance sources," he says. Among the top ten, these include (all numbers are unique views):
Google: 2,832
Direct: 1,551
AOL: 696
search.rr.com 247
"Moreover, peak views included December 11, 2009 – more than a year after the release was published," he continues. "The flat periods before April 7, 2009 are due to the fact that we had not yet implemented Google Analytics at that time, and the flat period in June 2009, is when PRWeb.com migrated over to a new Web site – the point being these search results could well be higher."
There are a number of reasons that press releases can be great for search. They’re great for spreading word to the media (journalists/bloggers), they can contain links, when used with credible news wire services, they are often looked upon with some authority, and as discussed above, their shelf-life can be significant.
Related Articles:
> Search Engine and Social Traffic from Press Releases
> Press Releases New SEO Back Door to Top Rankings
> Getting the Media to Cover Your Business
There’s practically zero doubt remaining that RIM has a next-generation Tour in the works, but if you’re one of those tin foil hat wearers, you’ll be glad to know that at least one of these things really, truly exists. Boy Genius just got his paws around the Tour2 9650 (shown left), and aside from the optical trackpad replacing the trackball (and the addition of a WiFi module), there’s not much new here. Oh, except that presumably quicker CPU — we’re guessing to-be owners will dig that. We’re told that the physical size is practically identical to the original Tour, and the keyboard is still phenomenal. Care to take a look? Sure you do — hit the source link for a full hands-on gallery.
RIM’s BlackBerry Tour2 9650 gets the hands-on treatment originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 26 Dec 2009 07:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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As any diligent weekend reader knows, we don’t just find and explain the news around here, we like to do stuff; hack things; make gadgets better. Here’s the cream of this year’s how to guide crop:…
As any diligent weekend reader knows, we don’t just find and explain the news around here, we like to do stuff; hack things; make gadgets better. Here’s the cream of this year’s how to guide crop:…
iago-vL writes “Security researchers at SkullSecurity have demonstrated how the NetBIOS protocol allows trivial hijacking due to its design, through the use of a tool called ‘nbpoison’ (in the package ‘nbtool’). If a DNS lookup fails on Windows, the operating system will broadcast a NetBIOS lookup request that anybody can respond to. One vector of attack is against business workstations on an untrusted network, like a hotel; all DNS requests for internal resources can be redirected (Exchange, proxy, WPAD, etc). Other attack vectors are discussed in a related blog post. Although similar attacks exist against DHCP, ARP and many other LAN-based protocols, we all know that untrusted systems on a LAN means game over. NetBIOS poisoning is much quieter and less likely to break other things.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Giz reader BushmanLA sent in a video of his kids trying to shoot down his flying R/C drone with fireworks. From the perspective of the UAV.
Some of the shots look like they’re close, but all I can…
Comcast, the largest ISP in the US, settled their $16m data discrimination lawsuit Wednesday. They didn’t admit wrongdoing and customers are only eligible for a $16 award. But, importantly, they set…