Circuit City in the Dead Pool



Well, I figured this would happen, and now it’s been announced that Circuit City will liquidate its remaining stores. That includes the one that I go to almost weekly, that is about four miles from my house.

I’m left with…

Best Buy. O Joy. Let me do my happy dance now. NOT. Best Buy just sold me a power adapter for a notebook for $90 on New Year’s Eve. The same adapter that, if I’d had time to order online, would have cost about $20. And could have been gotten from Circuit City for about $40.

I am not a happy camper. We really have no more choices to buy technology locally. CompUSA died a horrible death, and previous larger stores have all crashed and burned. I can get some things at the Office Max or Office Depot, but that’s limited. There are a few smaller resellers around, but they are pricey and their stock is extremely limited. And I don’t mind buying most of my technology online, but the value of the local store was the ability to pick up an emergency item, like a power adapter.

What’s scary is I live in a major metropolitan area. How can we be losing so many choices, heck, ANY choices we have in technology products? It’s frightening to think I’ll never get to buy any more technology that I can touch and feel first. I’ll have to take the chance and order it online and hope it is what I think it is, and will do what it’s supposed to do, and not mind waiting a week or two to get it.

Hard to do when you have a laptop with no power adapter and all of your presentation files locked within it, along with all of your contact information and maps and I could go on and on. Where can I go for on-hands technology purchases when all of the technology stores are closing?


GNC-2009-01-16 #443 Sorry about Audio on Last Show



Apologize for the Audio on the last show. Dropped the ball on the audio quality think a little hand had been playing with the knobs. Lots of feedback on show format.. All comments are good so thanks for the feedback.

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Show Notes:
Windows 7 and the XP Upgrade Path
GPU’s Will see more Interesting Hacks
The Future of Field Medicine
CNBC Bans Fake Steve Jobs
CFL Bulb Tips
Super Humans in out Future?
Did you know you may be a Hologram!
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Windows 7 on your Macbook with Bootcamp
RIAA Trial Live Streamed
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Mac Powered by Nvidia ION
Google Axes huge Number of Services
Discovery to the Pad
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Intel down 90%
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Shure Interview at CES Unveiled 2009



We caught up with the Shure team the first day at a evening event and found out about a new line of microphone products that podcasters will like and music professionals.

New Products from Shure Include:

  • SE-115 Single Driver Earphone $
  • Shure USB Microphone X2U (Zero Latency Monitoring) $129.00
  • Shure USB PG42 (Vocals) and PG27 (Instruments)

If your looking for more info on shure, and some special deals we will announce in the coming weeks visit www.rawvoiceoffers.com and enter the promo code SHURE in the form, as soon as we announce the deals we will send you a email with more info.


CES Unveiled 2009 Shure Interview



We caught up with the Shure team the first day at a evening event and found out about a new line of microphone products that podcasters will like and music professionals.

New Products from Shure Include:

  • SE-115 Single Driver Earphone
  • Shure USB Microphone X2U (Zero Latency Monitoring) $129.00
  • Shure USB PG42 (Vocals) and PG27 (Instruments)

If your looking for more info on shure, and some special deals we will announce in the coming weeks visit www.rawvoiceoffers.com and enter the promo code SHURE in the form, as soon as we announce the deals we will send you a email with more info.

Media Link


Is Pre enough to save Palm?



Palm’s long awaited responce to it’s rapidly disappearing market was finally released at CES. If you have not yet seen the details of the Pre listen to #442, or check out the Engadget wrap-up of the product.

The product itself looks pretty good. I think the smaller size is attractive without compromising the viewing space, and having a fast OS is essential. I am not confident that this will be the product to recapture market share for Palm, and not just because the name is a little tacky and derivative.

Palm is late to the market. Blackberry and HP did much to move the PDA market to the smartphone before Apple’s entry heated the market white hot. Since then Apple has released a second generation phone, RIM has produced a response product, the first Android phone has been released and all the traditional mobile phone companies have released some form of competing product.

While there is space for a good alternative phone to carve out a small niche for itself, Palm cannot afford to be that company. It is too large to survive as a niche player in this market, and they do not have a suite of other products to support them. In order to save their company they need this product to be a big player, prefferably top 3 in this market.

While the product seems at this stage to be good enough to compete, most of the potential customers have already purchased a phone from one of their competitors. For them to catch the amount of market they needed, the Pre needed to not just be good enough to compete, it needed to have something bigger and better, and it does not have that. Typically if you are late to market you need to be either perceptibly better or significantly cheaper if you want to get market share and the Pre is neither of these.

I am also concerned with their decision to also include a new operating system. The decision was probably made quite some time ago, and changing tack mid stream would have delayed the product even further. Unfortunately for Palm now though, to get the same applications as their competitors they will need to develop them in house or bribe companies to make Palm versions. While it does give them better control over the product features they may have been able to make the splash they needed if they had made it an Android phone. Or they could have teamed with the other laggard in this market and used the Windows OS. Palm have previously had both PalmOS and Windows versions of their PDAs on the market, so maybe this is something we will see later in the year.

The feature that has my interest the most though is the Synergy information correlation engine which pulls together information from the different applications on the phone that it finds it can link, like linkin your contact, facebook friend and gmail details for your friends. This is the type of feature that would make a lot of difference to me. This is unlikely to create the sort of strategic advantage they need as it software and too easy for their competitors to copy quickly.


CES 2009 Back Channel Video from 1-7 off to Cntrstg



Each day during CES we would leave the Monte Carlo after I had processed the Primary Video coverage for our Pick of the day because the bandwidth in the Monte Carlo was so beyond horrible!

The Blogger Cntrstg venue was a place we could go work and have access to amazing bandwidth, food, beverages and social time with other bloggers.

In this back channel segment which was shot with inexpensive cameras from Samsung it show us leaving the Monte Carlo and heading to the Wynn hotel where Cntrstg was held.

We Spent a lot of time in Taxis throughout the week, probably well over $500.00 in cab fares to get between different venues. The back channel coverage is our attempt to show you what it takes to cover CES along with the additional events like Show Stoppers, Digital Experience and CES Unveiled.