Hi, I'm Molly Wood, and welcome to the Buzz Report, the show about the tech news
that e eryone's talking about.
This week, the Dark Knight meets Angry Birds on
Facebook ...
now there's a visual.
iOS 4.3 arrives, and HP aims big.
But first, it's the
Gadget of the Week.
The Gadget of the Week is the Microsoft Xbox Kinect ...
the new World Record holder
for "fastest-selling consumer device." Microsoft announced it had sold more than 10
million Kinect accessories, and between November and January, it was selling the at
a rate of more than 133 thousand a day.
The Guinness Book of World Records
certified the fastest-selling record this week.
Microsoft, for its part, issued a
statement saying, "NOW can we stop talking about the Kin?
Seriously, people."
And now for the news.
Warner Brothers announced this week that it would sell
streaming movies on Facebook.
The first movie to launch will be The Dark Knight,
with more movies coming soon.
Rentals will cost about three dollars, but you have
to pay in Facebook credits -- ugh.
It'll be about 30 Facebook credits.
The news instantly caused analysts from Goldman Sachs to claim Facebook
could could become a credible threat to Netflix, and Netflix shares were actually DOWN on the news.
Wait.
Isn't it Goldman Sachs bought a huge chunk of private Facebook shares and is trying to get its
investors to buy into Facebook pre-IPO?
And now they're convincing people to sell Netflix because their
"analysts" say Facebook is going to kill them?
Wall Street is shady.
I know.
Shocker.
But also, isn�t it Netlfix that costs about eight dollars a month and gives you basically unlimited access to
either DVDs or streaming movies, and Facebook is offering you one movie, and then more movies from
one studio, that are going to cost three dollars eacxh that you can only watch on your computer?
Why are
shareholders so whimpy?
Moving on to much bigger Facebook news ...
it's confirmed.
Angry Birds is coming to Facebook in May.
The combination of combing through your old high school friends' pictures AND playing Angry Birds is
likely to prove so engaging that I predict global productivity will plummet and Internet addiction will get so
strong it will cause people to literally stop eating and sleeping and fall over dead like those people in the
"Serenity" movie.
Seriously.
This is not a good idea.
This could be a good idea, though: Deutsche Telekom is reportedly in talks to sell T-Mobile USA to Sprint
Nextel.
If those two merged, you'd have a mammoth third carrier in the U.S.
that supported both GSM and
CDMA networks, meaning it could pretty much carry any phone it wanted.
Then you know what would
happen.
The commercial wars would get REALLY good.
And in headlines this week, HP's new CEO, Leo Apotheker, said all HP computers will ship with WebOS
installed as a dual-boot option.
Which ...
wow.
I mean, you hear people talk about being an iPad killer or an
Android killer ...
but when do you see somebody announce they're going to try to be a WINDOWS killer?
That?
Is ballsy.
I LIKE that.
Google pulled more than 50 apps from the Android Market that were infected with malware.
And THEN,
Google reached out and remotely killed the apps on people's phones, so they wouldn't have their identities
stolen and junk.
Which, I guess that's the responsible thing to do?
But wow.
Imagine if Microsoft did that
with your computer.
RIOTS.
Apple's iOS 4.3 arrived Wednesday, two days before its scheduled March 11 release.
The update lets you
use your iOS devices as a personal hotspot, for an extra fee, and lets you use AirPlay to stream music,
video, and pictures to an Apple TV.
And it's reportedly a lot faster, so you don't have to feel bad about
getting in line for a newer, faster, iPad 2 on Friday.
You're not doing that, are you?
Don't do that.
And finally this week, Charlie Sheen jumped the shark.
Yep.
Just that fast.
First, his new Twitter stream
became the most annoying, self-promotional, self-important Twitter stream of all time.
Then there was the
super embarrassing bomb of a Ustream show, Sheen's Korner.
And then there was the massive overuse of
the word winning.
Now, the Internet worm has turned, and there's even a browser extension that lets you
censor all mention of the Sheenster.
It just goes to show ...
batsh*t crazy only gets you so far, tiger blood or
not.
And that's the Buzz Report for this week, everyone.
I'm Molly Wood, and thanks for watching.
