iLounge

By Charles Starrett

Senior Editor, iLounge
Published: Monday, February 4, 2008
News Category: Mix

Wal-Mart’s head of digital media, Kevin Swint, has left the retail giant, and will join Apple this week as head of the company’s international movies and TV efforts. Wal-Mart recently closed its online movie download service, while Apple in January announced intentions to expand its iTunes Movie Rentals service internationally in 2008.

Despite the company’s intentions to build its own cell phone software platform, Google co-president Sergey Brin spoke of his personal experiences using the iPhone during a recent earnings-related conference call. “I was at a conference in Switzerland,” Brin said. “I was able to find a really small hotel, then switch over to the satellite view on my phone to figure out I needed to take a funicular to get up there. It was a really amazing experience.”

iPhone user Mike Beauchamp has posted pictures of his phone, after it was run-over by a semi truck, to photo-sharing site Flickr. In the comments, Beauchamp tells the story of how the phone came to end up on the highway, and his delight in discovering that it was still functional. “As I picked it up and cradled it gently in my hands, I saw the screen displaying my caller ID—the screen still worked! I slid my finger gently over the answer slide and paused as I held the tattered and torn device to my ear—my heart must have skipped a beat when I heard my mom’s voice at the other end of the phone—the phone still worked,” Beauchamp wrote.

Design is Fuel has announced iPhoneSender, a new web browser add-on that allows users of Safari and Firefox to send addresses from their desktop computer to the iPhone via email. The addresses appear as Google Maps links, allowing the user to immediately access the address from the iPhone’s or iPod touch’s Maps application. “While we love the iPhone and its Google Maps application, we still found ourselves printing directions from Google when in a hurry. Why? Because there wasn’t a fast way to get that address and map to our iPhones,” says David DeMember of Design is Fuel. “So we developed iPhoneSender, a model of simplicity.” iPhoneSender is available as a free download from iphonesender.com, and works on both PCs and Macs.