In its three-way food fight with Burger King (BKC) and Wendy's (WEN), category leader McDonald's (MCD) is finishing a tough year in the industry battered but victorious.
The company announced Friday that it will being offering an extensive dollar breakfast menu in January -- all the better to reach its cost-conscious customers (and, incidentally, destroy its rivals). Meanwhile, halfway around the world, Wendy's announced it's pulling out of Japan after 29 years. With McDonald's an apparently insurmountable force in the Land of the Rising Sun, the smaller chain is throwing in the towel.
Last month we reported that the glossy chronicle of the filthy rich Robb Report is offering the world's most expensive Christmas gift this year - a matching custom private jet and megayacht set costing $500 million. The profligate publication has a few more eye-popping offerings as part of its Ultimate Gift Guide, a seasonal smorgasbord of over-the-top exclusives. Among the most enticing is a $1.5 million Monaco Grand Prix gift package, consisting of the following: a VIP experience at the 2010 Monaco Grand Prix F1 races in May; round-trip private jet travel from North America to Nice, France, and helicopter transfer from Nice to Monte Carlo for a party of four; five nights' accommodation in the top-floor suite at the luxe Monte Carlo Bay Hotel & Resort; privileges aboard a private 170-ft. yacht that will provide a prime vantage of, and tender service to, four days of racing and activities; and last but not least a custom Spyker C8 Aileron Spyder (above) "as a keepsake".
Welcome to the final installment in our look at the state of gaming on the Mac. We started out taking a good look at what the problem is, identifying the factors that led us to where we are today with video games on the Apple platform. Next, we made an earnest plea to developers, stating why they should seriously consider developing for both PC and Mac simultaneously. Last week, we examined the alternatives available to Mac users who want to play PC games but don't want to actually buy a PC.
This week, we'll try to prognosticate a bit and guess what the future of Mac gaming might look like. Will it get better, worse, or limp along as it currently does?
Even though Motorola's only officially announced a small handful of devices that run Android so far, this much is clear -- the company was dead serious about going all-in on the platform because we're seeing new leaked hardware practically every time we look. This time around, it's a clearer view of the Zeppelin, which turns out to be coming to market on China Telecom as the XT800. It looks like it could be a sharp-looking handset, borrowing design elements of the Instinct HD and featuring both GSM and CDMA radios for compliance with Telecom's up-and-coming 3G network. What makes this juicier, though, is the fact that QQ.com alternately identifies the Zeppelin as the Titanium, a device we'd just seen in the FCC with EV-DO Rev. A last week. That leads us to believe we could see this bad boy on Sprint or Verizon in the near future -- and with an HDMI output in this thing, 2010 is shaping up to be a great year for high-end Android gear.
Looks like EpixHD may have a second distribution partner soon, Bloomberg is reporting rumors that it is close to a deal with Cox to bring the premium movie network / online streaming service to its network in 2010. Analys reports peg as many as 1,000 FiOS subscribers per day signing up for the channel in its first month there, but that investors are currently focused on the slow progress in expanding to other carriers for Epix. more than a third of them take advantage of the online streaming, we'll see if capped & throttled cable customers have the same response.
A Patek Philippe Yellow Gold Calibre 89 pocket watch, the world's most complex timepiece as mentioned by my colleague Ariel Adams last month, just sold for a world record price of CHF 5,120,000, or $5.068 million at Antiquorum's 35th Anniversary Sale in Geneva. "The incredible result realized for the Calibre 89 in our 35th anniversary auction indicates that the market for the most complicated and important watches in the world remains exceptionally strong," notes Antiquorum Chairman Robert Maron. "We are extremely honored to have sold this exceptional and unique timepiece for the second time in Antiquorum's history and are thrilled that we have once again achieved a world record price at auction." With a staggering 33 complications, the watch weighs nearly 2.5 lbs. and has an 18k yellow gold case. It was made to honor the 150th anniversary of the famed Swiss watchmaker.
Demonoid, one of the most popular torrent sites on the web, went down due to hardware failures and data loss back in September. Although this left a hole in the hearts of many torrent aficionados, there was a glimmer of hope in November, when Demonoid's tracker came back online. Now, more good news: as of yesterday, Demonoid's website is back up, and registered users can sign in. Servers are busy, so the site might be inaccessible at times while things stabilize again.
The site is reportedly back to the way it was in early September, when it went down, except that a couple hundred new torrents have already been uploaded. Old torrents are still there, and users' upload:download ratios seem to be intact. RSS feeds are still down, and the site isn't taking new registrations right now, but it does seem to be alive and well. Happy holidays, torrent fans!
TomTom has done a respectable job of keeping its iPhone GPS app up to date when compared to formidable options from Navigon and the like, but today it's making its biggest move yet by way of a significant price drop. We've heard directly from the company (and confirmed with our own two peepers) that the US and Canada version of the app is now on sale for $69.99, while a US-only version is currently on sale for just $49.99. If you'll recall, the former was just selling for $99.99 a few days ago, so if you're planning on making that fateful trip to grandmother's house again this year, you might want a robotic gal leading the way. Just sayin'. [Warning: Source link directs to iTunes]
The lastest Angus Reid poll a pretty sizeable change over three weeks, as a 15% Con lead is reduced to 7%. Angus Reid mirrors others, showing a gradually erosion in Conservative support, but it also a different dynamic, Liberal support ... Read More... [Source: Conservative - Google Blog Search]
The Khronos Group, which is in charge of the tried-and-tested OpenGL framework, has announced that its work with Mozilla to form a 3D Web standard has reached draft standard form. Ladies and gentlemen: WebGL is born!
Draft standards rarely undergo many changes, and most of the important details and unique selling points are now set in stone. There are already nascent, developer versions of WebGL built into beta versions of Firefox, Safari and Chrome -- and now, with the draft standard in place, you can expect to see rapid development of both full WebGL support in the browser, and applications that can utilize the new technology.
Don't expect to see first-person shooters like Modern Warfare 2 rendered in-browser for a while though; it's still very much early days. First you'll see 3D-editing tools, then simple virtual worlds, and eventually in-browser 3D games that rival their native-code cousins.
Although the FCC has recently realized that CableCARD is a failure, it'll be years before anything changes; and even when things do change, the cable industry is probably going to support it for years to come. So we are still happy to see that Panasonic is continuing to try to push tru2way into more homes. Currently only available in Comcast areas of Chicago, Denver and Atlanta; Panasonic plans to add Boston to that list. The interesting twist here is that apparently Panasonic has given up on HDTVs with tru2way built in, and is instead pushing a set-back solution. Basically it would be a box designed to attach to the back of a Panasonic TV and presumably require it's own power but only one connection to the TV via HDMI. Then it would work just like the function was built into the TV -- this kind of defeats the purpose of tru2way, but it is better than a traditional set-top box sitting under the TV with its own remote. The problem is the set-back box doesn't have an analog tuner, which crazy enough is a FCC requirement, so Panasonic is also asking the FCC to waive this requirement, and honestly this is one waiver we would agree needs to be granted.
You've been deceived. All those computer interfaces you saw in the movies? They were made without CGI! Watch our video "The Binary Snowjob" to discover the terrible truth about computers that never were.
Back in February we reported that Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, the sexy supermodel, singer and first lady of France, had sold her family's castle in Italy (above) to an Arab sheikh. Now the buyer, who has since been revealed as billionaire Saudi businessman Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, has relisted the historic castle with an affiliate of Christie's Great Estates with a reported asking price of about $28 million; he was said to have originally paid anywhere from $12 million - $25 million depending on sources. The 40-room, 21,000-sq.-ft. Castello di Castagneto Po, near Turin, has been repeatedly destroyed and rebuilt over the years but is believed to first date from the year 1019. Bruni's father, the billionaire industrialist Alberto Bruni Tedeschi, bought the historic estate in 1952 for about $1.5 million. It is surrounded by 175 acres replete with vegetable gardens, orchards, flowering terraces, ancient greenhouses, a caretaker's house and a farm building.
Traveling light is a challenge - I'll admit that it is the kind of challenge I usually avoid, but with rising luggage costs and more exotic destinations, people are starting to pack as lightly as possible.
In this list, you'll find a couple of gifts that can reduce your luggage load, and help make your trip more enjoyable.
Of course, every lightweight and "one bag" traveler has different needs, so if you have a great tip for a lightweight travel item, let us know and leave a comment below!
You knew the trend toward transparency on the web would reach this point eventually: there's now an app that lets you automatically publish every credit card purchase you make to the web, where friends can comment and interact with them, Facebook-style. It's called Blippy.
The idea of showing your friends everything you buy obviously raises some privacy concerns. Some purchases are embarrassing, and sometimes you might just want to be off the grid. Blippy suggests using a separate credit card for the service, so you have control over which transactions show up and which don't. On the other hand, Blippy makes location-based social networking almost automatic: if you share your purchases in real time, your friends know your location in real time, no check-in necessary.
Blippy will also integrate with other sites, like iTunes and Amazon, to show more details of what you bought. That's pretty cool, actually, because it's more than my bank and credit card websites show me. Sometimes it's easy to forget what you spent that $40 on at Amazon. Even if you're not cool with sharing your whole retail life with the Internet, that extra information might make a private Blippy account worth having.
What do you think, Download Squad readers? Will Blippy catch on? Would you use it?
In its three-way food fight with Burger King (BKC) and Wendy's (WEN), category leader McDonald's (MCD) is finishing a tough year in the industry battered but victorious. 
