Deal Seekers Will Love Woot.com

Shoppers who love a good deal will find it hard to pass up visiting woot.com on a daily basis.

Woot.com is an Internet retailer that sells one item per day at one low price until the product sells out or the day ends (it rarely ends before the item sells out). Once it hits 11:59pm central time, the previous day’s item is replaced by a new deal, anything from tech gadgets to TVs to hammers. Items are often from recognizable brands and cannot be found at a cheaper price.

Some items are refurbished, but many are brand new and often times released on the website before they are available anywhere else in the marketplace. You cannot purchase items from previous days and you will never find out what products will be released in future days. It’s a day by day thing.

Woot offers witty and informative product reviews and descriptions that are fun to read and sometimes brutally honest, usually poking fun at the item being sold. As soon as a new item is posted on the website, the Woot community will contribute opinions on the product, reviews, and other relevant information.

The company holds a policy to where they are not directly responsible for the products sold. There is no customer support (unless you can get help from the community on the forums), and all returns must be sent directly to the manufacturer of whatever product you purchased. The products being sold are held to high standards and they will not knowingly send you faulty products, but they are not your typical retailer with warranties and a return policy, in fact they discourage returns.

Woot keeps tracks of stats as well, in case you want to know how fast something sold, where it sold best, or what didn’t sell at all. Items sell fastest between 12am and 1am, as soon as a new item is released on the website. You never know how many of an item there will be, so many stay up until midnight to see what new item is on sale just in case the deal is so absolutely amazing that their life would be ruined if they missed it.

The site also offers specials and surprises. A Woot-Off is when a number of products will be on sale for an unannounced period of time. The Bag O’ Crap is sold for $1 and is a random selection usually offering nothing but crap, but once in awhile a person will be awarded with something as grand as a flat-screen TV. “2-for-Tuesdays” is an event every Tuesday where the site sells two or more products at once, and product launches are special events where Woot partners with other companies for a special pre-release of a product.

This is a warning, do not check out Woot.com if you despise glorious deals and interesting products caressed with enjoyable commentary and informative description.

Club Nintendo Offers Free Gaming Swag

Nintendo has quietly released their North American Club Nintendo service, allowing customers to earn coins for purchasing Nintendo products.

These coins can be earned by purchasing and registering your Wii games for 50 coins, DS games for 30 coins, and Wii Shop games for 10 coins (after linking your Wii Shop account to your Club Nintendo account through the settings tab in your Wii Shop channel). More coins can be earned by completing surveys, purchasing new releases, or indicating games you’re going to purchase before you actually purchase them.

Prizes range from 300 to 800 coins for items such as Wii remote holders, DS cartridge holders, and exclusive games (such as a Game & Watch Collection for the DS that is going for 800 points). The full list of prizes can be seen here.

The initial offerings are swell, but the Japensese Club Nintendo selection is full of popular DS games, music CDs, and more. The Japanese club has been up and running for some time now and has built its collection of offerings over this period of time. Hopefully this means that the North American club will see an increase in offerings over time as well.

The current state of the website is clunky at best. Right now if you go on the Club Nintendo website, you are going to run into error pages, timeouts, and issues with log-ins and switching accounts over from My Nintendo. This may be why Nintendo hasn’t made a big deal of the site yet, it’s more like a beta version than a finalized website. The constant interruptions are extremely frustrating, I am grinding my teeth to dust while trying to fill out these surveys.

Registrations are not retroactive either. If you’ve already registered games with Nintendo, you will not be able to get your coins for those games, and of course you cannot register them again. This is almost like a punishment for users who registered their games for the extended warranty Nintendo offers and is a slap in the face. I’ve heard from a couple of users that they received coins for their previous Wii and DS registrations, but most say they can’t and I am unable to test it out right now because of how buggy the site is.

But at least we do finally have a North American version. Purchasing Wii and DS games now is a little tastier since Nintendo is offering us some nice rewards for being loyal customers. Even with the current technical problems and non-retroactive registrations, I am a fan of this new service. The North American offerings are slim right now, but they are quality goods which would be nice to own or fetch a decent price on eBay with since many of the items are not offered anywhere else. If’ I’m going to purchase a game, this service isn’t going to convince me to buy anymore than I would otherwise, I’m glad I can add to my stockpile of coins and get some free swag. It really won’t take that many games to rack up enough coins to buy things anyway. Free swag for me!

New “Green” Batteries Will Save the World and Your Laptop

Starting in the first quarter of 2009, Hewlett-Packward will be offering new green batteries to laptop buyers under its new Enviro Series brand.

HP has been working with Boston Power for the last three years on creating a longer-lasting and more sustainable laptop battery. Not surprisingly, Boston Power had just announced that HP will be the first laptop manufacturer to offer their new batteries. Boston Power says the battery, named Sonata, charges faster and is safer to use. Lithium-ion batteries tend to be cased in iron, but the new Sonata batteries use a certain alloy that is less likely to crack open if there is an internal fire.

The green factor comes in to play because of the life of the battery. No longer will you have to replace several batteries in the lifetime of your laptop. A laptop battery’s power time drops significantly after 150 charges, but the Sonata battery can be charged over 1,000 times and still be as strong as the day you bought it. The price-tag for this power has yet to be announced.

Boston Power has also kept out PVC plastic and several types of heavy metals which make it so that the batteries can be recycled. The batteries are designed to be eco-friendly and will be marketed as such.

“Our tests found that 40 percent of consumers over three years have replaced laptop batteries up to five times, says Christina Lampe-Onnerud, founder and CEO of Boston Power. “If each is $150, that’s almost the cost of the whole system. I think this will change the appetite for sustainable products. Instead of purchasing something expendable, they can have something that lasts.”

Boston Power soon intends to enter the auto battery market and will release a portable lithium-ion battery for recharging your cellphones, iPods, and other on-the-go gadgets. The young company it attempting to fix all of our battery charge problems while taking care of the environment.

Soon you will be able to run a laptop all day in Starbucks on a single charge and keep your phone from blanking out when you need it most. The first part of that last sentence might be a stretch, but the batteries are supposed to last longer per charge and will come with a 3-year warranty from HP, the longest there is for laptop batteries. If Sonata turns out to be all that it is said to be, it will truly be an advancement and the next step in laptop batteries.

Dante’s Inferno: You might have read the epic poem, now play the epic video game!

EA Redwood Shores, makers of Dead Space, are about to turn away from outer space and go to the underworld. The company has just announced a third-person action title called Dante’s Inferno.

Its tough to come up with new ideas for video games, but I think it is better to get inspiration from Fourteenth Century master works rather than the latest flash-in-the-pan movie. For those who aren’t familiar with this masterpiece, The Inferno is one of three parts of The Divine Comedy, a long poem by Dante Alighieri.

In The Divine Comedy, the poet is taken on a trip through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, in that order. Since there isn’t really any combat in this poem, I can imagine that certain creative liberties will be taken in this adaptation.

Believe it or not, Universal has actually bid on movie rights for this game, beating out Paramount, New Regency, MGM, and Warner Bros. You might want to check out the trailer below, as it appears horror in video game has been taken to a new level. How could you not? The game’s tagline is go to hell, for crying out loud.

It appears that EA is planning for a hit with this. I can’t wait to see what other masterworks from the Middle Ages will be adapted into video games. Perhaps The Canterbury Tales or The Song of Roland. How about Doctor Faustus, where you must make a deal with the devil and fight to get yours?  Bound to be a hit.

Source

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSMPmuXzrgQ[/youtube]

Watchmen: The End is Nigh, A First Look

The game trailer was first played at the Spike TV VGAs and looks pretty damn good from this little teaser, but no doubt Watchmen creator Alan Moore will gouge his eyes out before ever playing the game.

First let me say that I think the trailer looks awesome. The graphics are meh, but the combat style appears to be top notch and I like how Night Owl looks like Batman. The game is a prequel to the Watchmen film and will hopefully add some new and interesting story elements behind Alan Moore’s masterpiece graphic novel, Watchmen (even if Moore would hate the new content, I would love it). It also looks like the developers are aware of the differences between Night Owl and Rorschach, as their fighting styles show in the trailer.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dpO-6HoO7s[/youtube]

Alan Moore has said in recent interviews that he despises the movie industry and wants nothing to do with the Watchmen film, he won’t even bother to watch it. As of yet I have found no comments from Moore about the video game prequel, but he undoubtedly will hate it as well. His graphic novel is one of the most revered graphic novels of all time. Many consider it to have depth and complexities that surpass many top-selling novels. Time recognized Moore’s graphic novel as one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, and it was the only graphics novel on the list.

The game will be downloadable and episodic, marked for release next Easter. Does this mean you will be paying each time for different campaigns of the same game? That is not yet known. There was no plot given away in the trailer, so we’ll have to wait and see how well it syncs up with the movie and the novel.

What do you think of the game so far? Tell me if it lives up to your expectations or if you’re like Moore and hate that his novel is becoming so commercialized.

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