As a lazy writer who is occasionally forced to interview an actual person, I still haven’t found the perfect solution to transcribing phone interviews without doing it myself. But a service called Cogi looks promising.
Netgear is launching their new GearHead service, which provides support and assistance in setting up any of your home networking gear—whether it’s made by Netgear or not. The brand independent service is a service in the same vein as Best Buy’s Geek Squad, except it’s focused soley on home networking (and they probably won’t steal your porn). It’s available 24/7, and comes in two different pricing plans: An annual subscription that offer’s unlimited support, or a one-off, pay-per-incident service.
We’ve bitched and moaned a lot about the “Australian Tax” that gadgets get placed on them when they’re released in Australia. Everything from the PS3 to anything from Apple – they all get marked up when they hit Australian shops. In many cases, it would be cheaper to buy online from an overseas store, but then you’re hit with astronomical shipping fees, or you need a US address to finalise the purchase…
Enter Bongo International. Their job, as they eloquently put it on their website, is to: “take in the goods, store them, repackage them when our customers advise us, and handle any custom related issues that may arise”. Which means you can not only get stuff you normally wouldn’t be able to get delivered to your door, but also have multiple deliveries consolidated into one package, saving on shipping costs.
There are two pricing options: Single use (which costs $5) or a subscription service for regular shoppers, which costs $15 a month. There are bigger savings on shipping with the subscription service (makes sense) and you need to subscribe to get that package consolidation service.
We haven’t used the service yet, but considering we’re not likely to see Rock Band 2 in Australia until they release Rock Band 3 overseas, I’m thinking that could be a pretty good test case. But what about you guys? Have any of you used Bongo, or would you?
We all know that Apple’s MobileMe had a difficult birth: but it’s quite another thing to be able to read the criticisms of the service from his Steveness himself. And over at Ars Technica they’ve got hold of an internal Apple email that Steve Jobs sent out to Apple employees detailing his displeasure that MobileMe was “not up to Apple’s Standards.” It needed both more time in testing, and a piece-by-piece launch, rather than attempting to launch it as a “monolithic service,” he thinks.
If only John Mayer’s dad lived in Australia and owned a Dell. Then all of John Mayer’s dad’s tech support questions could have been easily answered by the good folks at Gizmo.
You see, today Dell and Gizmo announced that they were going to get intimate, with Gizmo services like setting up your Dell PC or setting up a wireless network available as an optional extra when purchasing a new Dell machine.
While it’s highly unlikely that anybody reading this would need tech support to set up their own computer, this could be the kind of thing that you purchase for your own mum or dad when buying them a PC, so you can save yourself the 1,742 phone calls about how to get the computer working or, in John Mayer’s case, finding an application.
Pricing is a bit on the expensive side, but look at it this way: they have to put up with all of those inane questions from old people so you don’t have to. Isn’t that worth something?
Pricing is below:
It appears that the geniuses at the Defence Department have been asleep at the wheel of their new Joint Strike Fighter program, leading some to believe that its super valuable aviation and weapons technology may have been compromised. The crux of the problem involves the fact that the Pentagon’s Defence Security Service (DSS) has had a difficult time monitoring the contractors working on the aircraft. While no specific breaches have come to light regarding the classified information, an audit has uncovered that the DSS cut corners and the DoD suffered lapses in its controls designed to evaluate and protect the sensitive information from unauthorised access.
NASA will definitely beat the Mt. Everest phone calls when they launch mobile phone service on the moon around 2012. Their MoonLite system will link astronauts, the lunar base and Earth via satellite. Even though there is over four years until launch, the service will only have a speed of 3kbps down/2kbps up. One small call for man…ah forget it. [Silicon.com via Newlaunches]
Is there anything Google won’t do? They’ve just announced that you can now search for movie times straight from the Australian Google Homepage. All you need to do is type in a movie title and a location and the first search result back will give you a list of all the cinemas in the selected area playing that film, as well as session times.
If you’re not sure what movie you want to watch, simply typing in movies and the suburb will give you a list of what’s on in the area, as well as a star rating (gathered from online reviews of the film), plus a link to a map of the cinema.
It’s a handy tool for the big G to add to its arsenal of services, and will be especially useful on mobile devices, where you really don’t want to be accessing the content heavy cinema sites. The perverts among you will also be disappointed to learn that it only covers mainstream theatres, not those dingy back alley ones.
[Google]
