I’d love to see this integrated into the US units. As in the UK, keep the back-dated guide data going back a week or so. While we don’t have the dedicated catch up services like they have in the UK, we do have Netflix, Hulu Plus, Amazon Instant Video, and MSO On Demand services where supported. So the guide could link directly to the available service(s).
On Friday I posted about a marketing stunt outside an Apple Store in Sydney, Australia that pretty much the entire net believed was staged by, or on behalf of, Samsung. The general reaction, including my own, was that it was a pretty dickish stunt – rude, annoying, and disruptive, and that Samsung was better than that.
Well, actually, Samsung is better than that, since they had nothing to do with it. It turns out the stunt was staged by, of all companies, RIM – as uncovered by Macworld. And RIM fessed up once it was uncovered:
UPDATE: RIM Australia issued a statement this morning, May 1 9:20 AM AEST, with Richelle Gillett, Account Director from Spectrum Communications for Blackberry confirming:
“We can confirm that the Australian ‘Wake Up’ campaign, which involves a series of experiential activities taking place across Sydney and Melbourne, was created by RIM Australia. A reveal will take place on May 7th that will aim to provoke conversation on what ‘being in business’ means to Australians.”
I don’t know what is sadder – the idiotic stunt itself, all of the free publicity RIM effectively bought for Samsung (with more to come as updates, like this one, get posted), or that it seems RIM wasn’t even considered as a possible culprit in the PR stunt. When you think of companies staging social media stunts, RIM just isn’t the company that comes to mind. They just aren’t considered ‘cool’.
It reminds me of the old OS/2 Warp ads in which IBM tried so desperately to seem cool. As my best friend once put it some years ago: “It’s like watching your grandfather breakdance, seeing a company like Honda or IBM try to Get Down Verbally. You don’t know whether to be mortified or just afraid he’ll break a hip.”
Way to go RIM.
Good work by Macworld and MacTalk in finding the real culprit behind the idiotic stunt.
The MSRP is $359.99 and Amazon sells these new for $217.95, so this more than half off Amazon’s price, and less than a third of MSRP. It is still a little pricey for a table fan – but it is the world’s coolest table fan! And how many table fans can do this?
We’ve seen a previous video on the evolution of the J-2X rocket engine. As I posted before, the original J-2 was used on the second (S-II) and third (S-IVB) stages of the mighty Saturn V moon rocket. The J-2X update work was begun as part of the now-defunct Constellation project, and it is being continued under the new Space Launch System project that replaced Constellation.
Now NASA has begun a second round of testing on the J-2X on the revised A-2 Test Stand at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi.
They also released a time lapse video of the J-2X being installed in the test stand:
The first two Lockheed Martin F-35C carrier variant aircraft, CF-1 & CF-2, recently conducted their first formation flight. The F-35C is the largest of the three Lightning II variants with larger wings and horizontal tail surfaces, a strengthened tailhook for arrested landings, and a twin-wheel nose gear. Currently the US Navy and Marine Corps are the only definite operators of the F-35C. The UK switched their planned F-35B buy to the F-35C, but now it seems like they’ll be switching back to the F-35B STOVL model. Lockheed Martin released the following video of the formation flight:
Along with the launch of their new ‘Collections’, Virgin Media also adopted a new pitchman – David Tennant. They’d already released several videos, and now there’s another one. This one highlights the ‘Catch Up TV’ feature.
