Marc Cohen & Marsha Collier

Very cool winning screen!

Checking in on FourSquare is fun, but Whrrl has brought real world rewards into the check-in game.

Whrrl is launching Society Rewards- a first of its kind program that enables users to check in for the chance to win rewards from their retail and brand partners. Society Rewards is the first program that closes the gap between a brand’s online social media presence and real-world physical presence, and rewards customers for their positive word of mouth.

Their first partner is Murphy USA – a  gasoline and convenience store with over 1,000 locations throughout the US. Every Murphy USA gas pump has signage that readss “Check into Whrrl to win free gas right now!”  The prizes are serious: $50 worth of gas that you can redeem immediately.  Now that’s cool.

Looking forward to more rewards!

Hi all, since I’m just back from vacation I had to post a bit about Microsoft Bing, a highly intuitive search (decision) engine that just went public. I called into my show to give Marc the low down. I did a head to head comparision on a couple of searches and Bing won over Google both times.

Now, Microsoft Corp. announced a new search destination for travelers — Bing Travel — which will help us make smart travel decisions through a variety of innovative tools and features. Bing Travel combines many of the airfare and hotel tools from Microsoft’s 2008 acquisition of Farecast with rich news and editorial content from MSN Travel. Bing Travel is available for travelers today at http://www.bing.com/travel.

Microsoft research shows that 45 percent of people use a search engine to select a flight or hotel. Bing Travel provides new travel answers within the search experience. You can search on Bing for hotels in a given city with a search such as “Vegas hotels” which will get Bing Travel Instant Answers included directly in search results, featuring the Rate Indicator, which help you choose the right hotel.

Here’s a few of my favorite Bing Travel features:

• Price Predictor. Bing Travel uses Farecast technology to analyze more than 175 billion airfare observations and predict whether the price of a flight is going up or down. It offers a recommendation of “Buy Now” or “Wait,” including a confidence level and expected price increase or decrease over the next seven days.

• Rate Indicator. How do you know if the rate for a hotel is a deal or not? The Rate Indicator analyzes historical rate data from thousands of hotels to determine whether the current price is a good deal, or not a deal at all. You can view a city map with details for each hotel, color coded by Rate Indicator data.

• Comparison Flight & Hotel Search. Finding the right flight or hotel is made simple with tools that allow users to refine results: nonstop flights only, specific airlines, hotels within a mile of an address, and many more. After selecting the hotel or flight, Bing Travel makes booking directly with suppliers or agencies seamless.

• Fare Alerts. Most airfare price drops last less than 48 hours, so people need to be ready to jump when a fare falls. Fare Alerts will notify people if the fares for their trips drop, allowing them to catch lower fares.

• Original travel editorial content. They combine editorial content from MSN Travel and Farecast to create an in-house team of experts who write daily articles, features, slide shows and blog posts to inspire and educate travelers on destinations, travel news, tips and tricks. Bing Travel also licenses content from leading publications such as Travel + Leisure, Budget Travel Inc. and The Wall Street Journal.

See you on Saturday!
Marsha

Marsha Collier interviewed Esmee Williams, Vice President of AllRecipes.com and got the lowdown on how to decide “What’s for dinner tonight?” That’s always a terrifying question if you’ve been working like a mad-man all day!
Allrecipes.com, the world’s #1 food site,

All Recipes Dinner Spinner iPhone app

The Dinner Spinner includes thousands of top-rated recipes, which were selected based on the search behaviors, ratings and reviews of Allrecipes’ 10 million monthly visitors. Home cooks can quickly locate recipes to match their interests or needs by selecting a main ingredient, dish type and cook time to see matching recipes. Cooks who can’t decide can shake their iPhone to activate the Dinner Spinner’s slot-machine-style action for surprise dish ideas. Dinner Spinner recipes come with photos, ingredient lists,
step-by-step directions, nutrition and reviews featuring cooking shortcuts and variation ideas from Allrecipes members.

Allrecipes’ Dinner Spinner app, featured at the iTunes app store, promises to put convenience in hand for busy home cooks wherever and whenever the “what am I going to make for dinner tonight?” panic strikes. For those who prefer that others do the cooking, Allrecipes’ Dinner Spinner allows sharing recipes through email. The app is free and is available now at the iTunes App Store.

Nintendo pioneered hand-held entertainment in the ’80s and made it fully mobile with the Game Boy video game system. Now, Nintendo is transforming the way people access, experience, create and share content with the new Nintendo DSi system, the third iteration of the world’s best-selling portable video game system. Nintendo DSi launches in the United States on April 5, 2009, at an MSRP of $169.99. The colors available at launch will be Blue and Black.

Some features that will be built into the system and ready to enjoy include the Nintendo DSi Camera, Nintendo DSi Sound and Nintendo DSi Shop. The most noticeable feature of the slim Nintendo DSi system is its two cameras – one camera is on the external body, and the second one points at the user when the device is flipped open. As the first truly interactive digital camera in a video game system with 10 different interactive “lenses” that can manipulate your photos, the Nintendo DSi Camera offers an easy way to take and share your photos with family and friends. The cameras also present people with unprecedented ways to interact with their games while giving developers a new tool to devise creative games and experiences. If the touch screen gave Nintendo DS a sense of feel and the microphone allowed it to hear, the two cameras give Nintendo DSi the sense of sight.

Another enhanced feature is the Nintendo DSi Sound application, which serves as both an interactive voice recorder and music player that allows users to play with their music while they listen to it. Users can access different audio filters or control the pitch and speed of recorded voice or music files to alter voices or change the tempo of a song. The mic is located between the two screens when the device is flipped open, and there is also a stereo headphone output that lets users listen to music saved on an SD card, even with the screen shut.

In the world of software, Nintendo DSi will be the platform for the most relevant and fun on-the-go games and applications. The Nintendo DSiWare application will populate Nintendo DSi with software that can be downloaded using Nintendo DSi Points directly to the portable system, just as WiiWare has with Nintendo’s Wii console. Developers big and small are invited to create software that makes use of the properties and functions of the hardware. Nintendo DSiWare games and applications will be available at a range of values, starting at 200 points.

In addition to downloadable games, Nintendo DSi is able to play games made specifically for the system. The system can also play most Nintendo DS™ games, and will have access to a library of more than 850 titles originally made for that system.

If you’re in the market for an Internet radio you can plug into any home stereo, runs without a PC, comes with built-in wireless connectivity, and is so simple a child can use it, then have look at the Myine Ira. It’s now shipping from Amazon.com for $149.99 and provides users with over 11,000 Internet radio stations (filtered by Location, Genre) that can be easily setup in minutes.

Our California Governor, Arold Schwarzenegger  was in Germany for CEBIT and it seems he was mesmerized by the same slick piece of hardware that caught my eye at CES this year. Pictured at left is Thomas Jell, NETGEAR’s Managing Director for Central Europe, showing Arnold and German Chancellor Angela Merkel NETGEAR’s new Internet TV Player (ITV2000) under the watchful gaze of David Soares, NETGEAR’s Senior VP of Worldwide Sales (far right).

It’s NETGEAR’s Internet TV Player (ITV2000), a compact, easy-to-use, “plug in and go” Internet set-top device with a simple remote control that enables viewers to catch up on the world of Internet videos including YouTube™, live Internet TV, popular Internet video websites, premium video-on-demand and online video searches retrieving billions of Internet videos from a place it was previously unavailable — the TV in their living rooms. Rather than watching videos on PC screens in separate rooms, families can watch video from a variety of Internet sources on the TV together, in the comfort of their den or family room.

The Internet TV Player unlocks the value of new HDTVs as well as old analog TVs. It is ideal for the Internet families who enjoy online video, and for those who are geographically displaced from their preferred television content, such as international sporting events and Bollywood productions. It streams content from popular sites such as BBC.com, CNN.com, ESPN.com, EuroSport.com, NBC.com, PGATour and TMZ.com, as well as video powerhouses YouTube, Google Videos™, Yahoo Videos™ and MetaCafe™. NETGEAR’s Internet TV Player supports streaming of live TV broadcasts from Internet sites around the world, and premium, paid movies on demand such as CinemaNow.com, in addition to downloaded videos from sites such as BitTorrent®.  Its superior VTap™ video search capabilities enable the intelligent search of Internet videos, including targeting video sites by country, topic of interest, person or popular website. Consumers are also able to play video, music, and photos from a local USB flash drive as well as from the NETGEAR ReadyNAS® family of storage solutions.

Slightly larger than a deck of cards, the compact Internet TV Player connects to the home network and the Internet via Ethernet or wireless USB adapter. It does not require a PC to play Internet video, nor does it require installing any PC software or setting up file sharing or firewall settings.

I can’t wait to try it out, it looks like a piece of hardware that we all can use!

Marsha Collier

The NETGEAR Internet TV Player (ITV2000) is expected to be available in early Summer 2009 through leading retailers, e-commerce sites, and value-added resellers, at an MSRP in the U.S. of $199. More information can be found at (http://www.netgear.com/Products/Entertainment/DigitalMediaPlayers/itv2000.aspx).

We got a call from a listener who was having a problem upgrading her Adobe PDF Reader on Windows XP and can’t remove her old reader. Adobe gives the steps to take. Follow this link from Adobe.

Marsha

Sure you’ve done it, we all have. Maybe you’re not drunk, but you’re overtired and cranky and had a burning desire to state your feelings in an email? Once you click that send button, you know (accompanied by a sinking feeling) that you’ve made a terrible mistake.
Google has to our rescue. They’ve come up with a cool new tool for Gmail that may prevent us from emailing while drinking, Mail Goggles.

Once you hit the send button on that email you composed in the dark of night, Mail Goggles will present you with five math problems that must be solved in a limited amount of time. Only if you complete the computations in the given time will your message be sent. I’ve always felt that doing math (even simple math) is a sobering experience.

Mail Goggles, by default, is only active on weekends and nights, but of course you can adjust that to be more in balance with your personal ‘happy hour.’

Marsha

As you may know, N wireless is the fastest and newest flavor of WiFi networking. It features MIMO (multiple input, multiple output) technology and can send data at 10 times faster that the old 802.11g. Sadly, most of us have an older router that is in the g format. Plus, we have legacy (nice word for a coupla year old) computers and can’t take advantage of the latest technologies without shelling out beaucoup bucks for hardware upgrades. During last week’s show I learned that Netgear has a new upgrade kit that attaches to your existing router – to allow you to broadcast an additional n signal to those computers in your home that can accept it. Older computers wills till be able to access wi-fi from your old router, at the speed they are comfortable with. I say that’s progress. It’s nice to know we don’t have to change everything to be able to use the latest technology.

Marsha

From what we’ve heard, the boxes that are required for the television over the air (OTA) transmission of digital signal can be quite expensive – even with the $40 discount coupon from the government. After our interview this past week with Kevin Hutchinson from Dish Network, we find that Dish is offering affordable digital-to-analog converter boxes – and you don’t have to be a subscriber to Dish to use them. Their boxes also have the benefit of having an On-Screen Program Guide at no extra charge! Go to their DTVpal page and see their TR40 converter box which will only cost you about twenty bucks (along with your government coupon). Nice deal for smooth technology.

Marsha