Gadget Couture Tech News

Google gives you a new way to flip through the news, the Apple TV gets a price cut, and the HP Mini-Note shows off its spring couture.

Gadget Couture Tech News Google gives you a new way to flip through the news. The Apple TV gets a price cut and the HP mini note shows its spring couture. It’s Tuesday, September 15th. I’m Natali Del Conte and it’s time to get loaded. Google launched a new way for you to browse through the news. It’s called Google Fast Flip. It’s basically a thumbnail view of stories of interest. You can browse through images of popular stories with their headlines and decide if you want to read those stories. It’s a lot prettier than browsing through hyperlinks or our as folders. In fact, Google probably did this because they know that the average user will never adopt an RSS reader but they might flip through this the way they do in magazine. Try it yourself at fastflip.googlelabs.com. The Apple TV got a price cut. The 160 gig version is now $229.00 which was the price of the old 40 gig model. The 40 gig model is no more. I’m not sure why Apple would do this so quietly when they have the international press attention last week during their press event. Nevertheless, $229.00 is still does seem a little pricey considering the Rocco is only $99.00 and the iPod touch is $199.00 and both do so much more. But a price drop is always a good thing so we won’t complain. There are also rumors that the Wii could see a price cut to $199.00 some time this week. It is confirmed Intuit has purchased Mint, the personal finance site. We were reported this is a rumor on Monday but Intuit confirmed it later in the day. The deal is valued at $170 million. This will definitely make your taxes a lot easier if you use Intuit’s turbo tax. Bing launched to new visual search feature this week. It’s like Google’s image search although it does look a little more elegant. For now, it’s only available in a handful of categories such as entertainment, famous people, shopping and sports. To try it out for yourself, go to bing.com/visualsearch. You must have Microsoft Silver lite installed in your browser. Google is doing something slightly surprising. They’re making it easy for you to leave them. Engineers at Google have launched the data liberation project. It makes it easy for you to take your information off of Google services and transfer it to another site. Let's say you want to take your photos out of Picasso or stop using Orchid as if you even were, then you could just easily export that data into Flickr or Facebook or wherever else you’re going to go. This is a very cool thing and makes our social networks much more of an open place to live and work. To find out more, visit liberation.org. Overstock will compete with the likes of Office Macs and WB Mason with its new sight O.BIZ. It’s a place for businesses to buy office supplies in bulk. Of course the company claims that the merchandize is highly discounted but I didn’t really priced compare. You can do that yourself at O.BIZ when the site launches on October 31st. If you’re thinking about buying a hybrid car, you might want to check out project to get ready. This is an online calculator from a company called Rocky Mountain Institute. It will help you figure out the out up front cost of the car as it relates to your long term savings. Hybrid cars can be expensive but this will help to see if and how it pays off in the end. To play with math yourself, visit the URL on the screen. Flickr launched a feature called galleries this week. It let’s you showcase 18 photos on a land in page and you can collect photos that are not your own. You can add a commentary to the gallery so it’s sort of like curating a theme to collection. Flickr is limiting this to 18 so that you don’t go over board. It’s for users to make a short, sweet artistic statement. You can now refer to another Facebook user with an @ sign. The same way you do on Twitter. @ signing someone will link to their profile so people can figure out who you are having a massive branch with if that becomes your status update. If your Facebook friend doesn’t like that, they can choose to un-@ sign themselves which is nice. I sometimes wish that I can do that on Twitter. Fashiosnistas this one’s for you. HP is shoeing off the new Vivian Tam netbook at New York City’s fashion week this week. It’s a spring line of laptop and it is decorated with butterflies. HP has not announced to price over this date but these couture netbooks are usually about $400.00 more than a non-decorative version of the HP mini note. But people seem to like that Molly with sports last year’s model. I like the butterflies but it won’t go with my outfit. These are your headlines for today and I will see you tomorrow with more. Thank you for watching. I’m Natali Del Conte with CNET TV and you’ve just been loaded.