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WHSmith will sell video games again with GAME's help
Magazine and stationary retailer WHSmith is to start selling video games in-store again, thanks to a partnership with GAME to trial concessions in a small number of locations. WHSmith pulled games from shelves six years ago due to competitive pressure from more specialist retailers like GAME and HMV. Once adversaries, the two now appear to have found common ground. For WHSmith, it'll mean being able to offer games to its customers again -- new and high-profile console releases, we imagine -- and for GAME, increased exposure on the high street, however small that increase might be.
WHSmith mistakenly emails customer details to other customers
IT gaffes don't come much bigger than this. UK newsagent WHSmith has accidentally leaked a wealth of customer information by mass-emailing details that were submitted through a "contact us" form. The affected page is supposed to send customer messages and their contact details directly to WHSmith -- instead, they were reportedly sent to everyone on its mailing list. It's a huge technical blunder, and to make matters worse, some subscribers used the form when they first received the emails, thereby putting their own details into circulation. WHSmith confirmed to the Guardian that the problem was "a bug, not a data breach" and that it was caused by I-subscribe, an external company that manages its magazine subscriptions: "I-subscribe have immediately taken down their 'Contact Us' online form which contains the identified bug, while this is resolved."
iriver WiFi Story turns to the 'overpriced wireless connectivity' chapter
Outside of a perhaps too strong resemblance to the Kindle, there was nothing much to fault the iriver Story when we played with it back in January. Its biggest downfall, however, was a lack of wireless connectivity, and iriver is going to rectify that with the new iriver WiFi Story. Apart from this obvious enhancement, nothing's really new with this reader, which was already pretty feature-flush on the software side, including decent format support for books and even Microsoft Office files. Unfortunately, while the current iriver Story goes for £149 at WHSmith in the UK (which is doing the e-book store end of things as well), the new WiFi model will apparently retail for around £250 -- exactly double the cost of a Kindle in the UK right now, with the sort of WiFi premium that only Microsoft could love. So while consumers are getting a kick out of this Amazon / B&N price war in the e-reader space, it looks like it's indeed going to be tough for other manufacturers to keep up. Right, Sony?
UK retailers slash the PS3's price!
For those of you who went out and snagged a PS3 on launch day, you might want to cover your ears, click around randomly until this post magically disappears into some other realm, never to be heard from again until one day the Judges of Destiny decree that a hero needs to appear and this post is, inexplicably, "The One" to save the world wide web. Why? WH Smith (not Will Smith as I mistakenly read it initially as) has become the first High Street retailer to slash the price of the PS3 by a whole £25! That's right, you can grab a new PlayStation 3 for the low, low price of £400 (well, 399.99 but that's just poppycock). This offer is only good until April 10th, after that tricky Easter holiday weekend. So, guys, let's beef up those sales numbers so we don't see another significant drop![Thanks, Colin McP!]
