Podcasts

Wrapp rolled out in the U.S. today. It's a mobile/Facebook gifting platform, kind of like Karma, which I covered recently and liked quite a lot. I don't think Wrapp is as slick or as fun as Karma, but it's got a devilishly clever business model, and I'm having a hard time seeing how it can go wrong.

See my Reporters' Roundtable interview with Wrapp CEO Hjalmar Winbladh, below, for more. His perspective on the business of gift-giving is interesting, and it might help you come up with ways you can think around the edges of your business.

What Wrapp does that's so clever: It combines gift-giving with targeted marketing with social metrics. The idea is that if you want to gift someone (I guess that's a verb now), Wrapp will look at the person you're thinking of, figure out where they are and how valuable they are to the Wrapp partners, and display for you a number of potential gift card option. For example, if you're looking at getting something for your fashionable girlfriend, you might see a $10 gift card from H&M you can give her -- at no cost to you.

You can add on to the gift card value (and you'd better, you lout), to give her $100 (at a $90 cost). Or you can just cheap out and go for the freebie.

Either way, H&M gets a good potential customer into the store, and for a very reasonable (to H&M) expense of only $10.

Wrapp, of course, takes a fee when the "card," which resides on the recipient's smartphone, is redeemed. The company also helps brands collect data on who's connecting with whom. If the companies working with Wrapp are smart, they're also correlating big data about who's buying what based on their social profiles.

Personally, I'd rather pay for a box of chocolates with cash and give that as a gift; I don't like the thought of an honest gesture being exploited as a datapoint on some product marketing wonk's Powerpoint. But that's because I'm a romantic. Wrapp is a smart business and it really could help more people connect through gifts and gift-like gestures.

If you've ever been curious about the price of a particular house in America, chances are you've been to Zillow.com. That's the site that lets you type in an address to find out its estimated sale price (called a "Zestimate") along with details about the house and, in most cases, the exact date and price it last sold for as well as information about property taxes, nearby schools, and neighboring homes.

In addition to sale prices, the company also estimates rental prices and displays rentals in your area.

The startup Wavii fascinates me. I've spend a career honing my writing and analysis skills, and here comes a punk startup that can read what I write and summarize it in a clear headline that's often better than my own.

How does it do it? Is my job threatened? I sat down with the CEO of Wavii, Adrian Aoun, and we talked about how the product works, why he built it, and how it traces its lineage back to the famous linguist Noam Chomsky.

For more on Wavii, read my review, Wavii groks the news so you don't have to.

It is the coolest tech demo we've seen this year: Google's Project Glass, which is an effort to create a glasses-based heads-up display for the real world.

With the Google glasses, you look out a window and get a weather report overlaid on your field of view. Look at a product and get information about it. Look at a bus stop and see when the next bus is arriving. Share photos. And maybe even look at a face and get the name that goes with it. Who wouldn't love that?

If you can't wait for Google to launch its augmented-reality product, I hope you like snow because Recon Instruments makes a heads-up display product just for skiers. Today, I'm talking with two guests about Google Glasses, the Recon products, and personal augmented-reality in general with:

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Google launched a redesigned version of the social network Google+ this morning. In the blog post announcing the upgrade, Google Senior Vice President of Social Vic Gundotra wrote, "More than 170 million people have upgraded to Google+." What does that really mean? Are 170 million people using the social network the way they use Facebook? I talked to Gundotra, as well as VP of Product for Google+ Bradley Horowitz, on a special Reporters' Roundtable interview this morning.

When I asked Gundotra how many people are using Google+, he deftly told me I was looking at it wrong. "You have to understand what Google+ is," he said. "It's really the unification of all of Google's services, with a common social layer."

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On the very last episode of Car Tech Live, CNET"s Antuan Goodwin and Wayne Cunningham give you a taste of the new cars coming out at the 2012 New York auto show.

The news of Yahoo has not been good of late. A patent lawsuit against Facebook turned tech commentators against the company. And then Yahoo announced a massive 2,000-person (14 percent) staff layoff.

Is it all part of a new Yahoo strategy? We'd all like to hope so, but new CEO Scott Thompson has not revealed how these moves serve a broader purpose.

Where does Yahoo go from here? Can it bounce back? Can it co-exist with Google, Facebook, and the rest of the Web?

Our guests today are:

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At 1,588, it's the final episode of Buzz Out Loud, the podcast that launched a thousand news stories, arguments, hosts and co-hosts, producers, and good times. We packed the studio full -- Tom Merritt, Veronica Belmont, Jason Howell, Rafe Needleman, Donald Bell, plus, of course, Molly Wood, Brian Tong, and Stephen Beacham...and it's possible there was some Champagne, a little whiskey, some cake, and even a couple of news stories. Oh, and tears. Definitely tears.

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Justin, Jaymar, Antuan & Stephen predict the future of the Android Operating System all the way in the year 2020. All that and more on this week's edition of Android Atlas Weekly

Jaymar’s Predictions for 2020

Google Play Movies will be re-rebranded as YouTube Android will be available as a standalone desktop OS, and it will come loaded with Chrome Browser (a la Windows & IE). (This, of course, means that Chrome OS is dead) Android@Home … Read more