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There aren't many new companies launching at this year's Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, which runs Tuesday through Friday. One of the few that are is Lunch.com, which strives to get a little more juice out of user-generated publishing.

Here's the premise of Lunch: You can review anything you want, from a TV show to a restaurant to a food product to a household appliance. I guess it aims to be, sort of, a Wikipedia for opinions. Founder J.R. Johnson, who started building the site after he sold previous creations VirtualTourist.com and … Read more

We previously reported that the second-generation jailbroken iPod Touch required either a hardware dongle or a computer to be booted.

Recently, the iPhone development community has resolved this inconvenient booting method by releasing a software-only jailbreak solution. As a result, the current software/firmware 2.2.1 revision has been jailbroken (full read/write access to the file system), meaning that unofficial third-party applications can be installed under this release.

According to a post on ipodtouchfans.com, this exploit had been discovered "shortly after redsn0w in early February," which means the discovery was made sometime after the initial (… Read more

Updated at 5:20 a.m. PDT with Phil Schiller keynote info.

When it was first announced that Steve Jobs was taking a leave of absence I was interviewed for an ABC affiliate about the prospects of Apple without Jobs. What would happen? Would he be missed? Was Apple vulnerable?

Sadly, I can't say that I came up with any earth-shattering sound bites. I said Apple would be fine in the short run; it had a roster full of talented executives, including a rock-star head designer (Jonathan Ive), and that the company's product road map was planned out into the future--presumably with Jobs' stamp of approval.

That said, no one could replace Steve Jobs, pitcher extraordinaire, a Sandy Koufax on the marketing mound, if there ever was one.

The fact is, no one can create a reality distortion field like Jobs. And ultimately, I said, that's what Apple would miss most, especially after Apple's senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, Phil Schiller, hadn't done much to inspire the faithful with his ho-hum keynote speech at MacWorld 2009.

However, little did I know that Jobs' absence would be felt so acutely in the release of the company's latest products, though I probably wouldn't categorize the new Mac Mini, updated iMacs, and third-generation iPod Shuffle as premium releases for Apple.

While the new releases may be a step up from Apple TV, which just hasn't been able to find a broad audience, they're not the iPod Nano or a new MacBook or iPhone OS 3.0. But what's a little disconcerting is how the products, particularly the Mac Mini and iPod Shuffle, landed with a bit a thud. Sure, they got a ton of publicity--and publicity is good--but a lot of it ranged from neutral to negative.

… Read more

In not-so-shocking news, iLounge is reporting that third-party headphones and headphone adapters for the new buttonless iPod Shuffle will require an Apple-licensed authentication chip.

This doesn't come as any great surprise to us because exacting licensing revenue from iPod accessory makers has become a brilliant way for Apple to add to the company's bottom line. But that "Apple tax," so to speak, does get passed on to consumers, and iLounge and others are now assuming that Apple headphone adapters will cost a minimum of $19 and possibly as much as $29. The handful of VoiceOver-compatible headphones … Read more

CNET tends to review products from the outside looking in (see Donald Bell's full review of the new Shuffle). But the good folks over at iFixit make it habit to start right from the inside. In the case of the third-generation Shuffle teardown, like with all recent iPods, Apple doesn't make it easy to crack the case. And although only one screw had to be removed, iFixit describes how it had to insert a "metal spudger into a crevice between the rear cover and the rest of the Shuffle" to get the device open. As you might expect, things are pretty simple--and tiny--under the Shuffle's hood.

There are a couple more pictures after the jump, but the full dissection (with lots more photos) is available at iFixit, where one unsatisfied reader writes:

"Have you disassembled the headphones with remote yet? Have you figured out, how the buttons work? Do they work by connecting two lines with a resistor? Is it possible to add such a remote to other headphones?"

As always, feel free to comment.

(Source: iFixit via Gizmodo)

See more pics after the jump.… Read more

I recently trashed the third-generation Shuffle in a blog post, saying it was "a disaster." Well, I meant it. A button-less, tiny, entry-level MP3 with special "VoiceOver" features just seems so unnecessary. But then a reader made an interesting point to me. What if the lede got buried in Apple's Shuffle announcement?

While everyone was harping about how the thing's really small (I say too small), requires an adapter for you to use your own headphones, and has a voice-over feature that doesn't seem to really add much (we know what our favorite … Read more

I recently trashed the third-generation Shuffle in a blog post, saying it was "a disaster."

Well, I meant it. A buttonless, tiny, entry-level MP3 with special "VoiceOver" features just seems so unnecessary. But then a reader made an interesting point to me. What if the lead got buried in Apple's Shuffle announcement?

While everyone was harping about how the thing's really small (I say too small), requires an adapter for you to use your own headphones, and has a voice-over feature that doesn't seem to really add much (we know what our favorite … Read more

Apple said it would have third parties developing accessories for the new third-generation iPod Shuffle, and sure enough, they are. First out of the gate: Klipsch and Scosche. And by the end of the week--if not the end of today--we should be hearing about more.

As Engadget notes, Klipsch's press release was pretty weak--the company only said that it would have VoiceOver-compatible Shuffle 'buds by summer and that they would cost $99.99.

Scosche was a lot more specific. It plans to have three earphone models--the IDR350M, IDR450M, and IDR650M--that feature an integrated control surface and range in price … Read more

According to Outdustry, iTunes gift cards have been pirated, and China's biggest C2C online shopping site, Taobao, is the platform used to sell the cards.

Chinese hackers have figured out a way to generate iTunes gift card keycode numbers and help themselves to songs from Apple's music store. The hackers have been selling pirated $200 iTunes gift cards on Taobao for as little as 17.9 RMB, or just $2.60--a savings of almost 99 percent!… Read more