This year, gift cards go beyond just plastic as companies add features to lure you into buying the profit-filled gifts.
New card ideas include Target, which has added a small digital camera to their card, and Best Buy, which chose to go with a speaker that can connect to any MP3 player and play music through the included mini headphone jack.
While the Target card makes sense, because you can use it to capture holiday memories, send thank you pics to the gift giver, and even use it as a camera stand-in on your way to buying a real digital camera of your choice, the Best Buy one seems a little strange, since I can’t imagine the tiny speaker sounding any good as it attempts to keep up with the enthusiastic gift recipient.
Either way though, it’s an interesting idea, and it will be interesting to see what gets attached to a gift card next.
Delicious (the social bookmarking site formerly known as del.icio.us that calls itself “the tastiest bookmarks on the web” and was also the father of the strange domain name), launched its long awaited redesign yesterday to help move the site beyond its late ‘90s style.
Though the underlying functionality is still the same, the new look and feel is designed to make it faster, easier to learn, and hopefully more desirable.
Speed: We’ve moved to a new infrastructure that makes every page faster. This new platform will enable us to keep up with traffic growth while ensuring Delicious is responsive and reliable. You may not have noticed, but the old backend was getting creaky under the load of five million users.
Search: We’ve completely overhauled our search engine to make it faster and more powerful. Searches used to take ages to return results; now they’re very quick. The new search engine is also smarter, and more social: you can search within one of your tags, another public user’s bookmarks, or your social network. Now it’s easier to take advantage of the expertise and interests of your friends, not to mention the Delicious community at large.
Design: Finally, we’ve updated the user interface to improve usability and add a few often-requested features (such as selectable detail levels and alphabetical sorting of bookmarks). Our goal has been to keep the new design similar in spirit to the old one, so all of you veterans should be able to jump in without any confusion. At the same time, we’re hoping that newcomers to Delicious will find it easier to learn.
I’m a big Delicious user (http://delicious.com/cory411), but since I use the Firefox plugin, I rarely if ever visit the site.
However, with looks like this, I just might have to give it a second chance.
CarType is “a comprehensive collection of emblems, car company histories and logos, reviews of typographical and graphical applications, design features and just about anything that is car related.”
What’s interesting is that instead of the typical reviews that most car sites feature, CarType instead focuses on the design elements that go into the cars that we see everyday, including emblems, vents, body lines and more.
The new Line Rider is going to be called Line Rider 2: Unbound, and judging by the latest ‘preview’ video, it’s going to be crazy:
Do the extra features take away from the simplicity that made Line Rider 1 such a success, or will the additions reinvigorate a game that has fallen off the map?
CHDK, or Canon Hacker’s Development Kit, is a firmware enhancement that turns your Digic II and Digic III camera into a high dollar impersonator.
Because it’s a firmware enhancement and not a firmware modifier, CHDK is also non-permanent and non-destructive, so even those with a fear of killing their camera can give it a go without [...]
