What I Like About …

In May I am traveling all the way across the country to San Francisco for business.  I am not a very good traveler, and so was not looking forward to the flight even though I was looking forward to meeting the folks out there who have successfully built what we are trying to build here in New Jersey.

But now I am STOKED (yes, that is me screaming) to be heading out to the Bay area of California because I can get my dinner delivered by helicopter drone.

Order your Tacos by TacoCopter in San Francisco!

Yeah, you read that right.  I can use my HTC Incredible smart phone to beam my GPS to the Tacocopter dudes and they will send the drone to wherever I am standing.  It’s fast, geo-located food!

My excitement is a little tempered by the fact that they advertize, unlinked, LobsterCopter on the east coast where I live and there’s no such thing.  So I suspect this is a hoax that the NetoRama folks (where I first learned about taco helicopter delivery) didn’t post.

But if it’s real I’ll order these dang things and eat them even if they don’t have non-cow and non-pig ones (fish or chicken is fine with me!).  In fact, I’ll probably order them even if it is a hoax.  Because it’s that kind of awesome!

Kindle Fire Under Fire?

When you go to a restaurant prix fixe is usually a pretty good idea.  But when the prices are fixed across an industry to inflate profits and gouge the consumer, that’s a bad thing.

And do the United States Department of Justice started investigating the publishers and Amazon over how they were pricing their e-books.  Now the EU has joined in.

<blockquote>It should have been a brave new online world where writers could be matched directly with their readers – but electronic book sales are instead mired in investigations on both sides of the Atlantic for price-fixing and anti-competitive practices.

The European Commission and America’s Department of Justice are both looking into the electronic, or eBook, market. The world’s leading publishers face potential fines running into millions of pounds if they are found to have conspired to rig the market and fixed prices. </blockquote>

As a buyer of books, this could be a good thing for me.  As a writer trying to sell my first novel, I’m not sure what this means.  I guess we’ll have to let it all settle out over time.