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Kickstarter-sponsored WALdok is a speaker dock that plugs into your wall
It takes quite a bit for me to be impressed with yet another speaker dock. I run my music through some pretty good PC speakers, so I don't really have a need for a separate speaker to play music directly from my iPhone. But something about the WALdok appeals to me. It's a tiny dock that plugs into the wall and gives you what sounds like a surprisingly powerful speaker anywhere you have an outlet. Combine it with the nano, as you can see above, and I think I might be sold on a tiny and simple solution for something like a workspace or a hobby room. The whole project is being funded through Kickstarter, which means it's just an idea that someone had and ran with. For pledging US$59 or more, you get access to one of the first units off the assembly line, and you get to read about the product as it's made and designed on the process blog. This definitely doesn't seem like just another dock. The project is aiming for $30,000; it's nailed down just over half of that so far, but I don't think they'll have a problem getting a few units out there to start.
AppFund offers VC money for iPad apps
A group of investors has teamed up to form AppFund, a company solely focused on raising money for and incubating apps for the iPad. You'll remember the somewhat similar iFund, which even got a mention in an Apple keynote a while back, and eventually offered up millions of dollars to emerging iPhone app companies like ngmoco and others. AppFund is trying to do the same thing, though they're starting out a bit smaller, promising $5000 to $500,000 to folks with interesting iPad ideas and the means to get them up and running. They're soliciting ideas right now, so if you saw the iPad on stage and came up with a brilliant way to use it, you can send them a report and see if they bite. You'll probably need a solid business plan and/or a prototype as well, since they probably won't give you $500,000 to develop an iPad whoopie cushion that you can sneak onto a chair and make someone sit on. Or will they? Excuse me, I have go to compose an email...
Pricy mounts support goldsellers
We talked about this a little bit on the podcast the other day while speaking about the mail delay now built into the game. I asked what goldsellers were even selling gold for anymore (because there's so much of it to be found in Azeroth, and both Turpster and Robin answered me with: "epic mount."Yes, there is no bigger drain on the funds than the epic mount price of a whopping 5,000g, and Bornakk says that isn't changing any time soon. I completely agree that having an epic flying mount is definitely an epic achievement, and if Blizzard doesn't want to lower the price, that's their business. But as Captnclaw notes, the refusal to change the way epic flying mounts are obtained is almost singlehandedly keeping goldsellers alive.There are lots of ways to give out epic mounts and keep them epic-- one we mentioned on the show was daily quests (which is what you're doing anyway, if you're trying to raise 5k gold legally), but anything in that vein would work-- a reputation grind, an item turn-in, an epic questline, or a combination of all of these. Making one of the best, most wanted items in the game simply cost a chunk of gold is more or less creating a market for goldsellers. And refusing to lower the price (or, better yet, take the whole process out of the gold market entirely) is leaving the door wide open for gold sellers to continue hawking their wares.
