Best Buy complains about Wal-Mart iPhone 5 ads

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Best Buy said some of Wal-Mart’s promotions, including a deal on the iPhone 5, had a measurable effect on its profits due to a price-match guarantee that requires the retailer to match the price of competitor’s ads. Best Buy said it lost about $65,000 in profit the day Wal-Mart’s promotion first ran on Facebook, because it was compelled to match Wal-Mart’s advertised $150 price, even though it concluded that Wal-Mart didn’t actually have a sufficient number of iPhones available.

Here is a cached version of the article.

Google+ relevance

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Marco Arment:

But Google’s increasingly desperate push to cram Google+ down everyone’s throats hasn’t made Google+ any more relevant. It has only resulted in a lot of confused Google-account owners who inadvertently “upgraded” to Google+…

Bingo!

H.E.A.R. at NAMM 2013

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H.E.A.R. (Hearing Education and Awareness for Rockers) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to raising awareness of the dangers of noise exposure that can lead to permanent hearing loss and tinnitus. Damage to hearing is typically cumulative and irreversible, not immediately detectable, and it can occur from almost any contemporary music source or event.

I have a lot of respect for the work Kathy Peck does to raise awareness for musicians and music lovers everywhere.

Google settles FTC antitrust suit

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Google has settled with the FTC, avoiding antitrust penalties by agreeing to license standard-essential patents to rivals without threat of injunctions, and to remove restrictions on online advertising, though the concessions aren’t enough to placate activists. As part of the agreement, Google will be forced to license the standard-essential Motorola Mobility patents on FRAND (fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory) terms to any rival that requests them, after fears that the search giant might use its acquired IP to bludgeon competitors with extortionate licensing fees else run the risk of expensive and limiting injunction proceedings.

Street art

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This is brilliant. I love the Spider-Man art.

Nook revenue falls 12.6 percent

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The bookseller, which also saw fewer shoppers come in to its bookstores, has bet heavily on its Nook business, which includes e-readers and tablets as well as digital books, as a source of growth.

But the Nook segment saw revenue fall 12.6 percent from a year earlier during the nine weeks ended December 29 as it cut prices to compete with Amazon.com Inc’s Kindle and Apple Inc’s iPad.

Amazon will eat you alive if you try to compete with them like this.

Creepy Google

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Google has to be the creepiest company around.

Pay it forward at Tim Hortons

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At about 10 a.m. on Dec. 21, a Tim Hortons customer at the Beaverhill Boulevard location decided to pay for the order of the next vehicle in the drive-through line.

That began a chain of random acts of kindness that lasted for three hours — and 228 orders.

Canadians love their Tim Hortons coffee… and being nice to others.

Patent troll targets small businesses

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Ars Technica:

When Steven Vicinanza got a letter in the mail earlier this year informing him that he needed to pay $1,000 per employee for a license to some “distributed computer architecture” patents, he didn’t quite believe it at first. The letter seemed to be saying anyone using a modern office scanner to scan documents to e-mail would have to pay—which is to say, just about any business, period.

This is just ridiculous. Someone has to do stop these trolls from doing this.

“Do Not Disturb” will fix itself

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Do Not Disturb scheduling feature will resume normal functionality after January 7, 2013. Before this date, you should manually turn the Do Not Disturb feature on or off.

The design lesson

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In graphic design, nothing is what it actually is. Everything other than content is representative of something else. Additionally, much of the content is also merely representative of something other than what it actually is.

Stealing from developers

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Both of these services are dangerous for app developers because they offer simple, one-tap installs of pirated apps and do not require that devices have been jailbroken in order to do so. This is an enormous problem, as it opens up the arena for their use from the relatively small fraction of users with jailbroken devices — as was the case with Installous — to any unscrupulous users of iPhones and iPads.

Don’t steal from developers people. Bad karma shit will come back on you.

Creating a multi-item slider

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This isn’t something I’d use for The Loop, but there are plenty of Web sites that this type of slider would work very well. I like these when done right.

Apple store heist

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Armed robbers broke into a central Paris Apple store on New Year’s Eve, stealing goods with an estimated value of one million euros.

That’s a lot of product.

The State of The Loop, and some changes

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I wanted to take a minute and thank all the readers of The Loop in 2012. You are the most incredible group of people and I really appreciate the fact that you take the time to read the site and offer your feedback. […]

EZPR [Sponsor]

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Want great press for your startup, app or company? EZPR specializes in getting great stories written about what you’re working on.

Goodbye Facebook

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Joe Caiati outlines his reasons for pulling the plug on Facebook, including the ability to use Twitter to keep up-to-date. If I had to choose between Twitter and Facebook, I’d probably make the same choice, but there are plenty of people that still get a lot out of Facebook. I think it’s the people that use it as a small personal network of friends instead of trying to build a massive network of people they don’t know.

20 iconic guitars

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Rolling Stone’s list is good, but clearly missing some iconic models. I think everyone’s list would be a little bit different.

iExplorer – Transfer Music from iPhone and iPad to iTunes

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Thanks to Macroplant for sponsoring this week’s RSS feed on The Loop with iExplorer.

iExplorer makes a great gift this holiday season for any iPhone or iPad owner. The app’s one-touch music transfer seamlessly copies all your music and playlists from your device back into iTunes. Its messages feature allows you to search and export all your messages to PDF files or other formats. The app also offers access to your device’s voicemails, photos, and much more.

Ozzy Osbourne airport

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For while Liverpool has John Lennon Airport and New York JFK, the record company boss who discovered Black Sabbath is calling for Birmingham Airport to be named after Sabbath front man Ozzy Osbourne.

This has to happen.