RSS Feeds
Online
Who's The Real April Fool? Whirlpool, NineMSN or Google?
Posted by Nick Broughall at 9:14 AM on April 1, 2008
It's April 1st, which means half of the stories you see here could be nothing more than an elaborate hoax. They're not, but they could be.
A couple of tech companies have actually put in a heap of effort to come up with some fairly elaborate April Fool's jokes. Google sent out a press release this morning about their new gDay technology, which allows users to Google search into the future.
Meanwhile, Whirlpool posted a press release on their site this morning announcing that they had been purchased by nineMSN for an undisclosed sum and would be integrated into the nineMSN family.
Of the two, the Whirlpool announcement was a lot more convincing (although some commenters on the news.com.au Google story were taken in by the joke). Hit the jump for the full April Fool's releases, if that kind of thing interests you...
A couple of tech companies have actually put in a heap of effort to come up with some fairly elaborate April Fool's jokes. Google sent out a press release this morning about their new gDay technology, which allows users to Google search into the future.
Meanwhile, Whirlpool posted a press release on their site this morning announcing that they had been purchased by nineMSN for an undisclosed sum and would be integrated into the nineMSN family.
Of the two, the Whirlpool announcement was a lot more convincing (although some commenters on the news.com.au Google story were taken in by the joke). Hit the jump for the full April Fool's releases, if that kind of thing interests you...
Whirlpool's latest tech for their refrigerator line is based on their "centralpark" feature, which is a essentially dock that lets you plug in a bunch of different gadgets into the big gadget that holds your food. Among the things that you can dock are the Brandmotion iPod Speaker system, which withstands "the frequent opening and closing of the freezer door" without dropping your iPod onto the ground.
It may be a bit too early for 
Digital-picture frame pioneer Ceiva is jumping the gun on Whirlpool's latest refrigerator announcement, called "centralpark" I believe. The concept has been shown off before, but this is its first production application: it's got a modular interface at the top, and Ceiva (and presumably others) have built something to fit the module. Why did Whirlpool go with a Wi-Fi-enabled LCD frame first? Because the #1 complaint is that magnets no longer stick to modern fridges, and people want to look at their damn baby pics! [
Simon Wright, founder of broadband news website 
