By Patrick Clark 1/10 8:22am

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PICEDITOR-SMH

Booting Up: When Google’s Eric Schmidt Discovers North Korea is Isolated Edition

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt urged North Korean leaders to open Internet access to its citizens, or doom them to a state of virtual isolation. Which, if we understand Mr. Schmidt correctly, he thinks will be far more insidious than the actual isolation North Koreans are currently experiencing. [AP]

North Korea’s official Twitter account only follows three, and only three, other accounts. One belongs to Jimmy Dushku, a 25-year-old investor who’s been to almost 60 Coldplay concerts and counts The Fast and the Furious as his favorite movie. What? [Mother Jones]

They’re not saying how they know, exactly, but U.S. officials are convinced that the cyberattacks on the consumer-facing websites of American banks are the work of the Iranian government. [NYT]

Soon you will buy prepaid iPhones at Walmart. Sounds like another season of The Wire is in order. [PRNewswire]

Not to put a timetable on anything, but Digg figures its content discovery app  is about one percent done. Which is as fine a time as any to talk about monetization. [Digg]

By Kelly Faircloth 11/09/12 9:02am

Apple in Your Eye

Service with a smile? (Photo: flickr.com/zooboing)

Attention Walmart Shoppers: Employees are Smashing iPads in Aisle Nine [Video]

You’ve always suspected stockroom staffers were a bit cavalier with the merch, and now, thanks to a couple of Walmart employees in Pikeville, Ky., you have video evidence.

“This is why you don’t buy an iPad from Walmart,” says the bespectacled dude who introduces this clip (found by The Next Web). We then see his colleagues hurling iPads across a rather large room. “I think the next one’s going to hit the floor,” he predicts, right before his buddy smashes one on the ground.  Read More

By Jessica Roy 10/10/12 8:15am

Brony Beat

(Photo: Equestria Daily)

Walmart is Now Selling an ‘I <3 Bronies' T-Shirt

Yesterday Walmart announced that it is beginning to test same-day delivery, much to the chagrin of its former partner Amazon. But you know what you can now get delivered from Walmart, hopefully same-day? Brony-themed t-shirts!

According to Equestria Daily, the #1 news source for all things brony, Walmart has begun to sell women’s t-shirts with “I love Bronies” emblazoned on the front. The only trouble with this, as the Daily Dot points out, is that Walmart has used the image for the old vintage 1980′s My Little Pony cartoon instead of the modern day update, which most bronies far prefer. Read More

By Nitasha Tiku 8/15/12 12:30pm

Tap It To Me

smiley

Retailers Like Walmart, Target, and Best Buy Band Together to Create Yet Another Mobile Payments App

Before most consumers have gotten around to downloading a single mobile payments app onto their smartphone, a consortium of a big chain stores are preparing to push out yet another alternative. The Wall Street Journal reports that Walmart, Target, 7-Eleven, Best Buy, CVS, Sunoco, and more are in the early stages of developing a horribly-named payments network called Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX), which will let users pay with a tap of their phone.

Rather than go the Starbucks route and partner with Square or follow other national retailers (like Duane Reade, RadioShack, Banana Republic, etc.) into Google Wallet, the group is going rogue, arguing that Google and other telecom providers–AT&T and T-Mobile have a payments app called Isis; Verizon and Vodafone have one as well–don’t understand customers like they do. The retailers behind MCX point out that they have a combined $1 trillion in annual sales and “serve nearly every smartphone user in the U.S.” Read More

By Kelly Faircloth 4/26/12 11:10am

People of Walmart

Wal-Mart (flickr.com/Monochrome)

Hey, Mobile Wallets Don’t Work for Everyone

So, a decade from now, it’s going to be all smartphone-enabled mobile wallets, right? Children being born right this minute will look at good old greenbacks the way today’s teenagers think of VHS cassettes. Well, Wal-Mart apparently isn’t so sure about that, because the big box behemoth has just launched an online “Pay with Cash” option specifically targeted to consumers who don’t have debit or credit cards. That’s a bigger market than you might assume. Read More

By Adrianne Jeffries 4/16/12 10:26am

Don't Be Evil Jokes

MAYER_MARISSA-1

Marissa Mayer Nominated to Walmart’s Board of Directors

Marissa Mayer, vice president of maps and local and employee no. 20 at Google, may be about to take on another high profile board seat. Ms. Mayer serves on the boards of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Ballet, the New York City Ballet and the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. The new board seat is a bit of a departure: cheapo retailer Walmart has nominated the blond moguless to become the sixteenth member of its board. Congrats! Read More