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IDC: Essential shipped less than 90,000 phones in 2017
Andy Rubin's Essential Phone found its way into our best-of lists this holiday season and had a couple of great price drops, including a $399 Cyber Monday deal. Still, the phone doesn't seem to be doing very well. According to a tweet from IDC research director Francisco Jeronimo, the phone sold less than 90,000 units in the first six months after it launched.
Tesla electric Semi's price is surprisingly competitive
When Tesla unveiled its Semi electric truck last week, everyone agreed that it looked cool, but some actual truckers weren't necessarily sold on its functionality. Most observers will be impressed with the pricing if it holds, though. Tesla has listed estimated price on its Semi website for the 300- and 500-mile versions of $150,000 and $180,000 respectively, less than some pundits predicted. The fancier Founders Series, with the top specs, will cost $200,000.
There are over 770,000 registered drone owners in the US
Over 770,000 drone owners have registered to fly in the US since the FAA made it mandatory in December 2015, Administrator Michael Huerta told drone group AUVSI yesterday. As Recode notes, that's up from 670,000 at the beginning of the year, meaning 100,000 users have signed up in the last three months alone. The FAA has also issued 37,000 Remote Pilot Certificates that let drone owners do filming, inspection and other commercial operations.
CableWiFi ties up 50,000 WiFi hotspots for cable subscribers to share
When it comes to supergroups, The Traveling Wilbury's haven't got anything on these guys. Bright House, Cablevision, Comcast, Cox and Time Warner are teaming up to share around 50,000 metro WiFi hotspots for their customers, under the banner of "CableWiFi." New York City and the Tri-State area, Los Angeles, Tampa, Orlando and Philadelphia will be among the first to get the service, with growth to more cities pledged for the future. If nothing else, it should be a good way to stick it to the man when he snatches your unlimited data plan.
Humble Indie Bundle moving towards $1 million, still being pirated
The Humble Indie Bundle that we posted about the other day is doing quite well -- they've raised almost US$800,000 by selling five indie games (playable on Mac, Linux, and Windows) for pay-what-you-will. In fact, they've done so well that they've added another game into the mix -- you'll also get Samorost 2 if you pick up the bundle. And a little birdie pointed out to us that if you pause their trailer video at about 1:16, they'll be adding another bonus to the mix if they reach a full million dollars raised. [Spoiler: They say they'll actually release the source code of Gish, Lugaru, and Penumbra Overture.] Is there any bad news about this giveaway? Well yes: people are still pirating it. The developers claim that 25% of the bundle downloads are "pirated" -- people who didn't pay anything at all for it. They didn't secure the link, authenticate the downloads, or protect the game with DRM (and they didn't ask users to pay any more than one cent for it), and people are still just rolling up and downloading the games for free. Unfortunately, that doesn't solve any arguments -- those for DRM would say that real security would prevent that, and those against DRM would claim that it won't. At any rate, those are five great indie games that are worth your money -- if you downloaded them for free, put a few bucks in the pot.
Panasonic's 85-inch plasma screen is $30,000 worth of decadence
For anyone who can live by the credo that money is no obstacle is the way of getting the very best in your life, Panasonic's unveiled the 85-inch TH-85PF12U plasma HDTV. It outputs 1080p -- but we'd be honestly surprised if it didn't at this point -- and weighs in at 260 pounds, with its main body about 3.9 inches in depth. Price? Well, if you have to ask... it's $30,000 -- honestly not that surprising when you consider the years-old 103-inch model is still teetering around $45,000, give or take five grand.
BlizzCon tickets: how it went, and what's next
Yes, if you were around on Saturday, you know that the first round of BlizzCon tickets sold out, and sold out fast. Tickets went on sale right around 10am PST (which was 1pm EST), and sold out just about 28 minutes later. If the queue numbers are trustworthy, over 21,000 people (we've heard as high as 25,000 at a time) logged in to buy tickets that day, and from unconfirmed reports around the web, it seems like about 5,000 to 8,000 tickets were sold: most people who got in line around number 5,000 were able to pick a ticket up, and that was a few minutes in already. Some of those people are already selling tickets on eBay as well.We believe (though aren't sure) that they'll be selling more than 15,000 tickets this year, since that's what they sold last year and they're using even more of the convention space. If that's true, then Blizzard probably went through only about half of the tickets, and will sell the rest during the second session on the 30th. But that's probably not much of a consolation -- given the frenzy around this last Saturday, there'll probably be more people trying for tickets, and given the prices on eBay, possibly more scalpers clogging up the queue. We'll see.Update: Lots of people point out, rightly so, that I missed something in my guesstimates of how many tickets were sold: you could purchase up to five. My personal guess is that the majority of people bought only one or two, but even if you go with three as the average, 5,000-8,000 people in the queue is actually 15,000-24,000 tickets. Blizzard probably did sell the majority of tickets on Saturday then, not just half. So the process on May 30th will presumably go even faster.BlizzCon 2009 is coming up on August 21st and 22nd! We've got all the latest news and information. At BlizzCon you can play the latest games, meet your guildmates, and ask the developers your questions. Plus, there's some great looking costumes.
Wrath of the Lich King falls off the top sales spot (for now)
It only took four months, but a new title has knocked Wrath of the Lich King off the top of the PC sales charts, according to industry trackers NPD. Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II, the much-awaited RTS title featuring that other fantasy universe with "war" in the title, has taken the top spot, knocking Wrath down to number two (and the original version of WoW and the Battle Chest hold their spots around six and seven).We suppose it had to happen at some point -- with PTR interest kicking in this past week, and the game having sold so many copies already, there had to be a point where something else jumped up above Wrath. But don't count the award winning expansion out of the number one spot yet. While Dawn of War II is getting reviewed very favorably, this little bump is likely due to an audience of fans who wanted to get the sequel on day one. Once first-week sales for that game level off, it's entirely likely that we'll see WotLK back up on top. Not that Blizzard needs any more money, of course. But it is good to be the (Lich) King.
App Store reaches 20,000 apps
Our friends over at Apptism, a site that tracks and rates App Store apps, have pointed out that their counter recently flipped over the big two-zero... zero zero zero. That's right, only three months after hitting the 10,000 mark (and that took only six months), the amount of apps in the store has doubled, and there's no sign the acceleration will be stopping any time soon.The ease of development in the iPhone SDK, combined with the huge success of the device and Apple's own promotion revolving around how many apps are in the store, mean that the platform is taking off like a rocket. Sure, numbers aren't necessarily the best indicator of quality (anyone want to speculate how many of the 20,000 apps have to do with farting or belching?), but the fact is that people are both developing and consuming apps from the App Store in gigantic numbers. How long before we reach 50,000 different applications on the iPhone? A million?
"I Play WoW" Facebook app reaches 100,000 users
"I Play WoW" is probably the premiere World of Warcraft-related application on social networking site Facebook. We reported on it a while back, and since then, it's come quite a long way, including bringing in Armory updates when that became possible, and slowly growing over the past six months. And now they've hit another milestone -- Korale of Medivh (who runs the app with his wife Jeanelly, also on Medivh) has announced that they've reached over 100,000 users tracking over 260,000 characters. That's quite an undertaking. He also says that over 70% of people invited to the app actually use it (which is fairly high, we'd imagine, for Facebook), and that over 40,000 people visit the app at least once a month to update their status.Congrats to Korale and Jeanelly on all their hard work. Our own Facebook page isn't quite as big -- it's at 2,601 fans so far, but we're aiming higher. Our very own Turpster from the WoW Insider Show has promised us a brand new song if we can break 4,000 fans, so if you're on Facebook (or even if you're not yet, it's free to sign up) and have a few WoW-playing friends to invite, send them our way -- the sooner we get 4,000 fans, the sooner we get that song (and Turpster tells us he might even have a few other familiar faces on WoW Insider join in, too). Sure, it's not 100,000, but if we can hit that magic 4,000, the results should be worth it.
