Business

Wal-Mart scammed into selling PlayStation 4 for $90

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CNBC:

Customers have misused Wal-Mart’s price match promotion to obtain $400 PlayStation 4 consoles for less than a quarter of the retail price using third-party sellers on Amazon.

That’s a helluva scam.

Twitter lets you search through any tweet ever sent

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Twitter has long maintained a searchable index of recent tweets, about a week’s worth of tweets updated in real time. But they’ve now adopted that indexing technology to allow you to search from a database of every tweet ever sent.

Uber executive suggests digging up dirt on journalists

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Buzzfeed:

A senior executive at Uber suggested that the company should consider hiring a team of opposition researchers to dig up dirt on its critics in the media — and specifically to spread details of the personal life of a female journalist who has criticized the company.

DirecTV follows Netflix lead, offers 4K Ultra HD video

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It’s clear that 4K video is coming. The question is, will the tipping point be a business as usual delivery mechanism as it makes its way through the usual suspects, first DirecTV, then the cable providers?

BlackBerry and Samsung form alliance to challenge Apple-IBM

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PatentlyApple:

At a BlackBerry event held earlier today in San Francisco they announced a new management-services partnership with rival Samsung Electronics. This is the very first time that the two companies have teamed up for a major product. The new partnership is designed to compete head-on with the new Apple-IBM alliance.

Toshiba’s high-tech grow rooms are churning out lettuce that never needs washing

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Dan Frommer, writing for Quartz:

Why plant lettuce in a clean room? The obvious answer: Because it’s clean. Everything is tightly controlled, including air pressure, temperature, lighting, bacteria, and dust. The result is a crop that doesn’t need pesticides, doesn’t have bugs, and doesn’t need washing.

Google’s DoubleClick for Publishers ad server down

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This is the server that serves up ads for the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, BBC.com, The Guardian, lots of other big names. Big money at risk here, bad day for folks at DoubleClick.

MacBook Pro Retina cable dock

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Bracket is a Kickstarter for a cable dock, specific to the MacBook Pro Retina. I really like this concept, hope it succeeds. You had me at aluminium.

Amazon Echo, a Siri for the home

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Echo is always on, much like “Hey Siri” or “OK Google”, always listening for its name, a name that you get to choose. Like Siri, you can ask Echo questions or give it commands, as long as they fit into its knowledge domain. Watch the video below to get a sense of how broad that domain really is. And, I suspect, that domain will continue to grow over time.

I think Amazon will sell a ton of these.

NFC, credit card disruption, and the future of Apple Pay

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Interesting piece from Seeking Alpha (reg-wall):

Once paying for purchases at retail with a smartphone becomes commonplace, regardless of whether you believe Apple will roll out its own AppleCard, the credit card companies will fall one by one, starting with American Express. How can it possibly be prestigious to carry a Platinum or Black card when the card never leaves your wallet?

The king of Twitter

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ReCode:

John Shahidi is the king of Twitter.

Teenagers beg him for retweets, and he appears in Vine videos where friends Justin Bieber and boxer Floyd Mayweather spar in the ring. Everything that Shahidi tweets — and we mean practically everything — is retweeted and favorited thousands of times. If Shahidi mentions you in a tweet, you’ll spend the next two weeks slogging through dozens of notifications every time you open the app.

Apple replaces Samsung as top mobile brand in China

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CNET:

Samsung was replaced by the iPhone maker as No. 1 in China’s mobile sector this year, according to the China Brand Research Center’s 2014 China Brand Power Index ranking report released Tuesday.

CD-loving Japan resists move to online music

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New York Times:

Japan may be one of the world’s perennial early adopters of new technologies, but its continuing attachment to the CD puts it sharply at odds with the rest of the global music industry. While CD sales are falling worldwide, including in Japan, they still account for about 85 percent of sales here, compared with as little as 20 percent in some countries, like Sweden, where online streaming is dominant.

Buy a Disney movie in iTunes, watch it on Android device, and vice versa

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Back in February, Disney launched its Disney Movies Anywhere (DMA) service on iOS. In effect, Disney movies you buy via iTunes are available in your DMA locker for you to stream on your iOS devices. Now, Android has joined the fray, meaning you can watch all those iOS-purchased Disney movies on your Android device and, if you buy movies on an Android device, you can watch them on your iOS device.