PLANET Bernie's world

Usain Bolt ha vuelto a volar sobre el 'Nido' de pájaros. Hoy ha conseguido un nuevo oro y ha establecido un nuevo récord del mundo al detener el crono en los 19,30, superando la marca de Michael Johnson de Atlanta 1996.

Palm as just released their much anticipated - and leaked - Treo Pro, a Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional device with a touchscreen and UMTS/HSDPA GSM networking. The phone also includes G.P.S. and improved WiFi handling for better and easier WiFi hand-off.

The new Treo is thinner than devices like the 800w and is targeted at the mobile professional market and is not an “iPhone-killer.” Instead it is part of a conscious strategy by Palm to release a series of “great” products in order to bring themselves back out of the doldrums.

Can anything put the wind back in eBay’s sails? The once-iconic auction site is making cosmetic changes to its fee structure and moving away from the auction model to emphasize more fixed-price listings. But it’s hard to get excited these days about eBay. It seems that the Web has moved on and eBay is stuck in still waters.

Don’t get me wrong. eBay is still a massive site and a cash machine. But once you reach 238 million visitors worldwide (comScore) and 26.4 billion pageviews a month, it’s hard to know where to go from there. Maybe that is why pageviews are actually down 15 percent year-over-year, and the stock is down 26 percent.

This is not about fixed price versus auctions. The main challenge eBay faces is that it is becoming easier and easier to find things to buy on the Web simply by searching for what you want on Google. During the early days of the Web, people needed a few big e-commerce sites they could trust and that could organize everything that was for sale online. That need was filled by Amazon and eBay.

Got that hacking jones, but can’t find anyone to hack with? Head on over to JustHackIt, a site aimed at developers that launched last night. It is a place for developers to find each other, work on projects, and maybe even start a company. Developers can post projects they want to do and search through postings from other hackers.

The site describes itself this way:

El avión, de la compañía Spanair, se ha salido de la pista cuando despegaba y ha terminado estrellándose. La Delegación de Gobierno confirma que hay al menos 45 fallecidos y 19 heridos graves.

TripAdvisor is in an expansive mood. In July, it acquired two small startups, VirtualTourist (user-gen travel guides) and OneTime (booking price comparison). And today it announced a majority investment in FlipKey, a guest review site for vacation home rentals. The amount of the investment was not disclosed.

FlipKey launched only last March. It covers 50,000 vacation rental properties in the U.S., which CEO TJ Mahoney says represents a $60 billion market. So it is a pretty big niche. FlipKey aims to become the reputation management system for vacation home rentals. Property owners can take review data in the form of a widget and place it on their sites or property listings. (See examples here and here).

Amy Winehouse se ha pasado toda el año luciendo camisas de cuadros. Ahora las marcas se apuntan a la tendencia, pero es mucho más que el look Brokeback Mountain. Hasta algunas grandes firmas han caído en esto de la camisa leñadora en su versión luxe.

Después de tanta polémica con el escudo antimisiles, EEUU y Polonia han firmado el acuerdo para instalar la base en suelo polaco.