Wal-Mart Worker Dies in Black Friday Stampede
2008-11-28 17:10:53
Saving a few bucks for something you don't really need drives a lot of people crazy. Moreover, it's tragic when somebody gets killed all because of a sale.
A 34-year old temporary worker at Wal-Mart was killed this morning at a Long Island branch when hundred of people stampeded into the store at 5AM. The deceased tried to hold back unruly crowds trying to get into the Valley Stream branch of Wal-Mart during the store's opening. The crowd knocked him over and he was trampled to death.
"He was bum-rushed by 200 people," said Jimmy Overby, 43, a co-worker. "They took the doors off the hinges. He was trampled and killed in front of me. They took me down too...I literally had to fight people off my back." ...more
As we all know, Black Friday is the one day of the year that prices are unbelievably slashed down. And the toys we usually want but won't buy at regular prices are the Apple gadgets. They're just too expensive sometimes. Anyway, Apple is, in light of the Black Friday tradition and the start of the Holiday shopping season, slashing down the prices of some of its most wanted gadgets. However, there are no discounts for the most waned Apple gadgets, iPhone and MacBook Air.
iMac: The three high-range versions have been discounted $101, the low-end has been discounted $51.
MacBook: The two new 13-inch versions are both $101 off, the older 13-inch (white) version is $51 off (making it $948). ...more
Carl Icahn, activist investor in Yahoo!, bought another 6.8 million shares of the company. According to an SEC filing, Icahn purchased the shares at $9.92 a pop bringing his total stake in the Sunnyvale based web giant on its knees to about 75.6 million shares or 5.5% of the entire company.
Not surprisingly, this move by Icahn comes merely a week after Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang announced that he was stepping down.
Icahn launched a proxy fight against the Yahoo board of directors earlier this year when Yang denied Microsoft the sale of Yahoo at $33 per share. To resolve the proxy fight, Yahoo gave Icahn 3 seats on the board of directors, one for him and two for people of his choosing. ...more
When I was young, I thought that dominos were made to just tumble around, I never thought of it as a game of strategy. So twenty years later, I still play with dominos the way I did then. Besides, it's just more fun.
Unfortunately, it gets really tiring to keep on setting up dominos standing up every time. Now however, there's a solution, Drawminos. It's a Flash game that lets you virtually position dominos and tumble them over. Like all flash games it's nothing technologically advanced, it's simple, easy, addictive and loads of fun.
Japan, Land of the Rising Sun, is the fourth largest market for mobile in the world. Some 85% of the Japanese population have a mobile phone and most of them change phones every year. This makes Japan a market that phone manufacturers want to penetrate and dominate. However, the Japanese are keen mobile phone users, usually always staying technologically ahead of the entire world. That means that non-Japanese phone makers are having a hard time keeping up with Japan made gadgets.
Foreign companies, excluding Sony Ericsson, only occupy around 5 percent of Japan's mobile phone market, according to IDC Japan, a research firm. Japanese manufacturers, in turn, have only a small presence outside their home market.
Finland-based Nokia, the world's largest mobile phone manufacturer, has been in the Japanese market for quite sometime. Unfortunately, not even them can dominate in the small technologically advanced country. Today they announced that they will stop selling mobile phones in Japan except for its luxury Vertu brand after struggling to expand its presence. ...more
Rickrolling: an Internet meme typically involving the music video for the 1987 Rick Astley song "Never Gonna Give You Up". The meme is a bait and switch: a person provides a Web link they claim is relevant to the topic at hand, but the link actually takes the user to the Astley video.
The URL can be masked or obfuscated in some manner so that the user cannot determine the true source of the link without clicking (and thus satisfying their curiosity). When a person clicks on the link given and is led to the web page he/she is said to have been "Rickrolled" (also spelled Rickroll'd). By extension, it can also mean playing the song loudly in public in order to be disruptive. [Wikipedia]
Remember what they say in politics about publicity? "There is no good or bad publicity, just the one that makes you popular," or something like that. Well, it worked pretty well for Rick Astley.
Rickrolling made him popular to a generation that was way beyond the spray net, square shoulder pads, compact discs, tight leather pants and avalon hair cuts. Rickrolling actually made him quite popular again that he got to Rickroll America Live on the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade in New York City.
The Macy's Thanksgiving Parade is already an American tradition every year. Floats of all shapes and sizes, mostly cartoon characters for the kids to enjoy. This year during the parade, Cartoon Network's float featured Rick Astley singing his 1987 song 'Never Gonna Give You Up' as a surprise number.
A Qik user was live streaming the parade on TV so the surprise performance of course caught the attention of a gazillion Twitterers and as usual flooded into the news. The video stream can be seen here. ...more
Twitter is a lifestreaming-microblogging service and it's primarily used to update everybody what exactly you're doing right now. It does work pretty well for people tied down on their computers all day and not living any social life. However, for the normal people who do go out and keep Tweeting, Twitter has a mobile service that allows them to send and receive Tweets via SMS on their mobile phones.
Actually the mobile system of Twitter works perfectly. Unfortunately, it's not free for Twitter. The company actually pays subscriptions to mobile carriers around the world so they can keep on sending Tweets from their servers to the mobile users. For most countries, their phone bill is bearable and affordable. For Canada, it's a different thing.
Twitter is canceling their outbound SMS Tweeting service to their Canadian patrons. The reason for which is simple, high phone bills. Apparently, Twitter's service provider in Canada have been jacking up their SMS rates consequently doubling Twitter's phone bill. ...more
Don't give up on Yahoo! just yet. Sure the company may be in trouble and all but be reminded that it's still the second best search engine on the web.
Yahoo! has a tool called Yahoo! Search BOSS or Build your Own Search Service. It's basically an API that developers can use to leverage the Yahoo! Search's index, infrastructure and technology. Developers on this API have created such search engines like Hakia and Me.Dium search, both specialized search engines. Now, Yahoo! gets another partner for a more detailed vertical search engine.
Vertical search engines are nothing new, these are the search engines that focus on a single niche. So for TechCrunch to use Yahoo! Search BOSS to make a search engine focused on technology makes perfect sense. They call it "vertical lens". ...more
I really like the English (must be because of all the Top Gear I watch). They're so orderly and proper. Of course that's a generalization but that's what I think.
Anyway, Apple has been selling the iPhone3G in the United Kingdom for quite some time now and those sales are nothing special, they're OK. Like the US and the rest of the countries where the iPhone3G is sold, there are TV ads marketing the device. And the selling point of the iPhone3G versus the first iPhone is simply speed. The British however, wants the ad to specify how much really.
The latest iPhone3G TV ad in the UK stated, "So what's so great about 3G? It's what helps you get the news, really fast. Find your way, really fast. And download pretty much anything, really fast. The new iPhone 3G. The Internet, you guessed it, really fast." ...more
Venture Capital Latest News
- GazProm Media Acquires RuTube
- Tesla Motors Get $40 Million Cash Infusion
- Fitbit Raises $2 Million from True Ventures and SoftTech VC
- Giga Omni Completes $4.5 Million Round
Startups Latest News
- JPG Magazine Folds
- Reunion.com and Wink Merge
- Layoffs Galore: Startups
- Passionato Launches Classical Music Download
Gadgets Latest News
- Sony Touchscreen Walkman Rumored at The CES 2009
- Puma Glow Rider
- Mojo Mobility Develops Wireless Charger
- AMD Yukon Looks Beyond Netbooks
Advertisers