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Better Late Than Never: Wine.com Gets A Mobile Website

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 15:03:43 +0000

Today, the online retailer for wine enthusiasts (with the killer domain name) Wine.com is finally launching a mobile site at m.wine.com . Like its desktop-sized counterpart, the new site allows customers full access to Wine.com’s inventory of wine, gifts and accessories, site search with filtering, product details, account management, and of course, the ability to make purchases from your mobile device. The mobile site is also able to identify your location automatically so it knows which wines are available for shipping to your region. And after you’ve placed an order, you can track your packages via the new site, too. Alongside the launch, the retailer also announced several milestones, including the fact that it now has over 1 million registered users. Wine.com says it ships over 2 million bottles of win per year, representing 35% growth over last year. As for the size of its inventory, there are over 13,000 different bottles which can be shipped to 90% of the U.S. population, despite the complicated laws around shipping alcohol. The need to go mobile was pressing, as Wine.com reported that over 7% of its unique traffic came from iPhones alone (out of 8% smartphone traffic). And this is despite the fact that Wine.com has fully functional iPhone and iPad apps available in iTunes. That’s something other online retailers should take note of: apps are not enough . If your customers are used to visiting your website on the Web , many continue to do so, even if your cool iOS app offers added functionality (as Wine.com’s does, what with the geo wineries feature and wine cave, etc.). Also interesting: 6% of Wine.com’s overall traffic came from the iPad, but 8% of its revenue came from the iPad. That means either iPad owners buy more wine or the iPad experience is just really great and conductive to shopping. Meanwhile, only 1% of the revenue came from the iPhone, and the iPad average order value is 50% higher than on the iPhone. The company says that should change now that there’s a new mobile website. One would hope. It’s somewhat remarkable to see major retailers that have built mobile applications in advance of a functional mobile website, as Wine.com has. Look, I love a good app as much as the next guy, but really, the app everyone uses the most is still the browser. Thank goodness Wine.com finally figured that out.

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Better Late Than Never: Wine.com Gets A Mobile Website

Siri Cracked Open, Theoretically Opening It Up To Other Devices (Or Even Android!)

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 23:11:54 +0000

Serving as a stark reminder that there are people on the Internet who are way, way too damned clever, the guys over at the iPhone design/development house Applidium claim to have cracked open Siri to take an unsanctioned look at its ( her? his? ) inner workings. In a rare (but quite welcome. I mean, by us. Probably not by Apple) move, they’ve gone on to do a rather detailed debriefing of how they got through. So, what does this mean to you? Theoretically , it means that support for Apple’s voice-powered portable assistant could be hacked not only onto devices like the iPhone 4, but to anything from laptops to Android phones as well. As the italics on “theoretically” imply, though, there’s a bit of a catch. The catch: in the end, anything attempting to communicate with Siri’s backend needs to have a valid iPhone 4S identification string, unique to each 4S. In one-off experiments like this one, spoofing that string with one pulled from an actual 4S is somewhat simple — Apple wouldn’t (/couldn’t) ever really notice. If someone were to hack together an Android app and distribute it, though, the massive influx of requests all originating from the same unique ID would almost certainly trigger a blacklisting. Unless the app had a massive pool of authentic unique IDs to rotate through, the fishy activity would be pretty easy to discern. I’d highly recommend reading Applidium’s full rundown of the process, but here’s the tl;dr breakdown: By connecting Siri to a local router and then dumping data as it came through, they realized that Siri was sending all of its data to a server that we’ll refer to as “Guzzoni”. All trafic sent to Guzzoni was sent through the HTTPS protocol. With the “S” in HTTPS standing for “Secure”, this traffic wasn’t subject to simple packet sniffing. So they had a new idea: make a fake Guzzoni server, and see what came through on the other end. After a good bit of ridiculously clever SSL certificate trickery, they got Siri sending commands to their fake server. With each command comes the “X-Ace-Host” string, which appears to be unique to each iPhone 4S. After figuring out how Apple was compressing (read: not encrypting) the data, Applidium was able to decompress it and parse out a rough sketch of exactly what was being sent (including which audio codec Apple was using), and what Siri expected in return. With that process done, Applidium attempted to talk to Siri without any iPhone 4S in the equation. Their first challenge? Speech-to-text from a laptop running a custom script. Sure enough: it worked. Siri chewed through the sound file (a recording of them saying “autonomous demo of Siri”), didn’t bat an eye (as their tool was using their iPhone 4S’ actual unique ID), and returned a mountain of data detailing what Siri heard and how sure it was about each word. Incredible. The Applidium guys have provided a few tools for others to recreate their steps — but, as it currently stands, there’s not much that can be done to take this beyond a rather cool proof-of-concept.

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Siri Cracked Open, Theoretically Opening It Up To Other Devices (Or Even Android!)

IconSettings for iPhone: Like Having the Best Jailbreak App on Your iPhone Without Jailbreaking [IPhone Apps]

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 23:00:00 +0000

I used to jailbreak my iPhone because stock iOS couldn’t do the things I wanted it to. But then iOS got better and I stopped. But one thing I desperately miss from my jailbreak days is SBSettings. It’s a way to control your iPhone’s settings from your home screen. And now you can (kind of) do the same thing with IconSettings. Without jailbreaking. More »

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IconSettings for iPhone: Like Having the Best Jailbreak App on Your iPhone Without Jailbreaking [IPhone Apps]

How Do You Get a Million People to Buy a Gadget That Nobody’s Even Used Yet? [Gadgets]

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 20:22:18 +0000

The iPhone and the iPad are card-carrying members. Modern Warfare 3 is, like, the President . I’m talking, of course, about the Million-Plus Preorder Club. Now the Amazon Kindle Fire has joined the ranks. Before anyone even touched a Kindle Fire. More »

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How Do You Get a Million People to Buy a Gadget That Nobody’s Even Used Yet? [Gadgets]

Like Rainbows, Double Suction Cup Mounts Are Just Better [Kickstarter]

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 20:20:00 +0000

The best Kickstarter projects are the ones you find that are already funded. Like JR Sanchez’s MobileMount which uses twice the suction cups as other mounts, for twice the sticking power. More »

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Like Rainbows, Double Suction Cup Mounts Are Just Better [Kickstarter]

Today Is Your Last Chance to Get Apple Care If You Preordered Your iPhone [Blip]

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 18:40:00 +0000

Did you pre-order your new iPhone 4S? Did you skip AppleCare+? Well, today is your last chance to buy coverage. More »

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Today Is Your Last Chance to Get Apple Care If You Preordered Your iPhone [Blip]

Acoustical Ruler App Measures Distances With Your iPhone Like a Submarine [Video]

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 18:20:00 +0000

Thanks to a new app that uses the same approach as submarines for measuring distance, you can now add ‘semi-reliable tape measure’ to the list of things your iOS devices can do. More »

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Acoustical Ruler App Measures Distances With Your iPhone Like a Submarine [Video]

iTunes Match Is Live, At Long Last [Apple]

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 17:47:47 +0000

At last, at long last, iTunes Match has gone live, giving you access to your music, in the cloud, without you ever having to upload a thing. All download, no upload sounds like a formula for success. More »

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iTunes Match Is Live, At Long Last [Apple]

t’Light S iPhone dock doubles up as a table lamp

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 15:40:36 +0000

We’ve come across many iPhone docks in the past, and safe to say the good majority of them have been speaker docks, so you can imagine our delight when we came across an iPhone dock that doubled up as a table lamp as opposed to your run of the mill speaker dock, although to be fair the t’Light S by M&C Lighting does have a couple of speakers built into it, but you would never guess based on the design alone. (more…) t’Light S iPhone dock doubles up as a table lamp , By Ubergizmo . Top Stories : iPhone 4S Review ,

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t’Light S iPhone dock doubles up as a table lamp

SalesVu Raises $600K For Square-Like Mobile Payments Service

Mon, 14 Nov 2011 11:00:45 +0000

SalesVu , a new mobile payments application and SaaS solution designed for distributed sale teams, has closed $600,000 in angel funding, the company is announcing today. Like Square, SalesVu’s service includes a dongle that attaches to an iPhone or iPad, allowing its users to process mobile payments on the go using a mobile app. But unlike Square, the gadget doesn’t plug into the headphone jack – it uses the iPhone or iPad’s main port instead. The dongle also offers hardware encryption, something which Square’s competitors have criticized the company for not including. In addition, SalesVu takes Square head on in terms of pricing: it’s just 2.7% for all transactions (swiped or keyed in) compared with Square’s 2.75% (for swiped transactions only). To achieve these rates, the company does things a little differently than Square. For starters, it doesn’t hand out all its dongles for free. Each business customer gets the first dongle for free, but then has to pay $99 for each additional device. Of course, a company could get around this requirement if they wanted to by signing up using a separate email address for each employee in need of a device. But doing so would preclude the business from taking advantage of SalesVu’s other key feature: the cloud-based infrastructure for centralized price management, reporting and marketing. Using SalesVu’s SaaS solution , businesses can monitor mobile transactions, watching for trends by product, time of day and employee, and then make adjustments to pricing and inventory data on the fly, based on those findings. All of this happens in real-time and is presented in an easy-to-read format complete with graphs, bar charts, tables and other reports. As the pricing changes, business owners can also share those discounts directly from SalesVu to Facebook, offering a coupon code that will work to activate the deal. Because of its rich, real-time reporting capabilities, SalesVu is trying to solve a slightly different problem than Square or even Intuit’s GoPayment . That is, it’s not going after the small business or individual who could never before afford to take credit card payments – it’s going after businesses who rely on the performance of a highly mobile salesforce. The ideal customer is one whose potential bottom line can be impacted by access to real-time sales data and the ability to adjust product inventory quickly based on the analysis of that data. And as for that rate? The shockingly low 2.7%? According to SalesVu CEO Pascal Nicolas, the company had to negotiate quite a bit with its partner, Mercury Payment Systems , to get there. But Mercury sees mobile payments as a growth opportunity, so it was willing to take the risk. Austin-based SalesVu initially became available to the public on August 18th and now has around 1,000 customers worldwide. Its mobile applications for iPhone and iPad can work as standalone order processing/business management apps, but the credit card processing portion only works in the U.S. and Canada.

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SalesVu Raises $600K For Square-Like Mobile Payments Service