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Retailers Struggle to Join the 21st Century: Instant Price MatchDecember 3

Image via Wikipedia

This ReadWriteWeb story reports that barcode scanning applications on devices like the iPhone and the G1 are causing a stir among offline retailers.

I've seen such an app on the G1, but don't remember what it's called. On the iPhone there are apps like Checkout and Snappr. The big announcement today was that Amazon is releasing their own app called "Amazon Remembers" that's supposed to work from a picture of the product--not just a barcode.

The story on ReadWriteWeb reports:

Although consumers may be catching on to this barcode-scanning trend, some stores are still in the dark. For example, a Target store in Michigan recently requested a shopper to stop scanning merchandise, saying it went against store policy. The customer reported

CTO Breakfast this Friday: Dec 5December 3

The CTO Breakfast for November and December will be on Friday December 5, at 8am in the Novell Cafeteria (Building H, Provo Campus). If you are interested in technology and especially it's use in building high-tech products, then you're invited--you don't have to be a CTO, just have aspirations!

Here are the scheduled dates for future breakfasts:

• Jan 30, 2009 (Friday)
• Feb 26, 2009 (Thursday)
• Mar 27, 2009 (Friday)

There's a Google Calendar with dates for the CTO breakfast that you can subscribe to if you like.

If you'd like to be reminded by email, just sign up for the (low volume) mailing list here:

I'll see you on Friday!

Tags: cto breakfast utah events

Verizon Calendar MathDecember 2

When I started up VZAccess Manager (the software that connects my V640 3G modem to the cloud) today, it showed me how many megabytes I'd used and when it would be reset:

Apparently at Verizon the years have 13 months.

Tags: verizon dates calendar+math bugs

Reactivating Vista in Parallels 4.0December 2

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Windows Vista (oops, can I still call it that?) has "Windows Genuine Advantage" and so when it's moved to new hardware have having been installed somewhere else, it needs to be "reactivated."

Parallels Desktop was recently updated to version 4.0. This apparently involved some changes to the virtualized hardware presented to the OS since machines created with older versions of Parallels have to be upgraded.

You can see where this is going. The conversion process "fails" with a message that something has to be done manually. When you get into the machine, Vista is asking to reactivated. Here's the kicker. The reactivation process wants to use the network. But you haven't installed the drivers for the virtualized hardware yet, so it isn't available.

You've got a

Technometria Podcast No. 100: Elias Torres and Ben Adida on RDFaDecember 2

Today I published the 100th Technometria podcast on IT Conversations. The show was a conversation with Elias Torres and Ben Adida about RDFa. I learned about RDFa from Elias and Ben when we were in Beijing for WWW2007 last April. The idea is simple: RDF is nice but requires people write metadata separate from the content it describes. Why not embed that semantic information inside the HTML as attributes? This is a pretty cool idea--complimentary to the idea of microformats, I think--that just might make the semantic web palatable enough that it actually happens.

Bonus: Here's an RDFa Primer

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