Woot!

Frugal geeks rejoice! If you haven't seen it yet, check out Woot! It's a blog/store dedicated to the bargain hunter in all of us. Woot buys up a large volume of products wholesale and then offers them up at a discount, one a day for 24 hours only. Woot ties in a humorous blog to advertise the product, often pointing out the product's shortcomings. This hasn't stopped the frenzied buyers, however: products often sell out within hours or even minutes of their announcement. Today, for example, they offered a refurbished TomTom GO 510 for $280, plus the regular $5 shipping charged for all products. I checked Amazon and the lowest price for a used one is $294. Needless to say, the units were already sold out on Woot. But don't despair, there will be a new bargain posted tomorrow. If you sign up for the RSS feed, you can be one of the first shoppers to try and push through the virtual door and snap up whatever bargain they offer tomorrow.

Woot!

Apple TV is Coming...soon

According to Gizmodo, Apple TV will be here by the end of this month. With an interface that looks something like my Media Center PC interface, Apple TV looks to be a smaller unit than the mini, with a low-power Intel mobile processor, Apple remote and 40GB hard drive and sells for $299, making it an easy fit into an existing entertainment system. The 40GB drive can store about 50 hours of video and iTunes libraries. The built-in 802.11 wireless support lets you download TV shows and movies from the iTunes store to your PC or laptop and automatically synch up the latest on your Apple TV so you can view them on your nice, big HDTV screen. Finally, you can see that mole on Will (ala Will and Grace)'s face again!

Links
Official Apple TV Site
Pre-Launch Review

Let's Separate the Product from the Porn

Shiny, Shiny, the geek site written by and aimed at women, is tiring of the overuse of underdressed women in technology ads. Hear, hear! The gadget world should wake up and realize that women control more wealth today than ever and are huge buyers of the latest and coolest gadgets. Instead of appealing to pimply 17-year old boys with no jobs, wouldn't it be more lucrative to entice successful women to open their wallets wide rather than disgust them with more pics of naked females splaying themselves over otherwise great-looking electronics gear? Being a techie, I tend to read the reviews and look at the features of a product and ignore the ads, but I'm not the norm. So drop the "sex sells" mentality from the 70's and show the raw sexiness of the product instead and you're likely to turn on a much larger market.