Loaded: Twitter trading Video
Loaded: Twitter trading Video Transcript
>> Best Buy gets permission to sell the iPhone, eBay gets out of yet another copyright infringement case, and Colvester [assumed spelling] lets you trade stocks over Twitter. It's Wednesday, August thirteenth, I'm Natalie Del Conte, and it's time to get Loaded. Best Buy is now the third place that you can go to buy an iPhone. The retailer now has the rights to sell the iPhone through Christmas starting on September seventh. All the regular rules and restrictions of buying an iPhone apply, you have to activate in store, pay with a credit card, etcetera. Because of this, I doubt we'll see the iPhone in Best Buy's airport kiosks any time soon. Yahoo location based technology launched on Tuesday. Fire Eagle is the program that lets users store their location information in one place, and then share it with various programs. Developers can write programs that use Fire Eagle information, and this can be used to either advertise or locate various places and things. Right now there are not too many applications that use Fire Eagle, and Yahoo seems a little late to the location based game, but we'll watch closely to see what becomes of this. I would like to see it come to the iPhone, because Yahoo has been suspiciously absent from the app store since it launched last month. Seriously, where are all the Yahoo apps? Dell launched a slew of laptops this week, including the ultra portable E series that we've been expecting. This is the model that competes with the Asus EPC and HP Mini Note. There are also new offerings in the Latitude line, including a semi rugged model. All of these will be available in the upcoming weeks, and of course you can expect thorough reviews here on CNET. While Dell aimed smaller, Lenovo has aimed bigger. The company released a doozy of a laptop. The W700 Think Pad is seventeen inches, runs an Intel quad core, has a Blueray player and Blueray burner, nine hundred and sixty gigs of storage, and up to eight gigs of RAM. It isn't cheap though, it'll ring in at three thousand five hundred dollars. Text free digital music downloads may soon be a thing of the past. This is a hundred billion dollar industry, and tax collectors and state politicians want a piece of it. This is a gray area that debates how to tax an online vendor's physical place of business, versus taxing where the actual online purchases take place. But the executive director of Net Choice, Steve Delbiano [assumed spelling], makes a good point. He says the last thing governments should do is add taxes on something that uses no oil, and produces no carbon. A digital download is the greenest way to buy movies, music, and software. I couldn't agree more. With eCommerce accounting for 30% of US revenues in the music market, we can expect to see a fight between advocates of mandatory sales taxation and the music industry on this one. eBay has gotten out of yet another copyright infringement case. This one was brought on by L'Oreal, the cosmetics company. This was a case in Belgium where L'Oreal had accused eBay of profiting from the sale of Lancome perfumes. The court found that eBay is not responsible for filtering out imitation items, because it is a passive host, which is basically the same ruling that Tiffanies has been handed repeatedly for the past four years. So that's two wins for eBay, and just one loss in [inaudible]. Microsoft is running a back to school special for Mac users. If you buy a Mac, you're eligible to buy Office 2008 for Mac at a 30% discount. The new suite has a few features that students should appreciate. There is audio recording in Word, so you don't have to take notes in class like a madman. There's also one click citation help in Word, in both MLA and AP style, so you don't have to worry so much about your bibliography. And the program works well between PC and Mac versions of all applications. There are also study tools for iPod and iPhone, which I'm sure it kills Microsoft to enable, but they have no choice. Google is moving YouTube into their single login system. You may notice that now when you log into YouTube, you can also use your Google login instead of a separate name and password. If you fuse your accounts, you can keep all of your contacts, favorites, and videos. It's nice that they're trying to look like one company nearly two years after the acquisition. Did you know that there's a limit to how many people you can follow on Twitter? Apparently there is. You cannot follow more than two thousand people. If you want two thousand and one, you're out of luck. Who can follow that many people anyway? When I first started using Twitter, I accepted all requests by people to follow them, and then I got myself in the weeds with nearly five hundred follows. Recently I had to pare down to less than seventy people, which still barely seems manageable. How many people is too many to follow before you start losing track of your real life? Let me know what you think at loaded.cnet.com. speaking of Twitter, Colvester, a financial trading service, is letting its members make stock trades with their Twitter account. Alerts will appear automatically for each trade in your feed, and will say things like bought Google at five hundred dollars. This makes me a little nervous. First, I don't want my stock trades public, and second I would be scared of an errant keystroke where I'd lose all my money. But investing takes risk and guts anyway, so maybe Twitter is an acceptable trading risk for some people. Those are all your headlines for today, but I will be back tomorrow with more. Thank you for watching. I'm Natalie Del Conte with CNET TV, and you've just been Loaded. ^M00:04:49 [ music ]
Best Buy gets permission to sell the iPhone, eBay gets out of yet another copyright infringement case, and Covestor lets you trade stocks over Twitter.
