reservations

When the Apple Store app first arrived on iPhones, it was little more than a shopping portal for Apple goods.

With the latest update, however, new features have arrived to make this app a keeper for any Apple customer who frequents a retail store.

The biggest of these is a retail store button that can not only book Genius Bar reservations or other one-on-one appointments, but can also reserve products for one-day pickup at a store.

As a small tease, the app also has a button for iPhone Reservations, but it currently doesn't reserve an iPhone. (UPDATE: product reservation … Read more

NEW YORK--When my friend told me he thought there was a chance he could help me get to see the largest deposit of gold on the planet, you might say I was a little excited.

It's not that I hadn't seen the visceral representation of massive wealth up close and personal, and even recently. After all, only last month, I got a behind-the-scenes tour of the U.S. Bureau of Engraving & Printing's production line of the brand-new, next-generation $100 bills, and found myself staring at $38.4 million in cash.

And not long after that, I … Read more

A decade ago, on March 10, 2000, it seemed almost difficult to find someone skeptical about the dazzling future of dot-com stocks.

An undeniably prescient strategist at Warburg Dillon Read, now part of UBS, told the New York Times that "I don't see the end in sight." The Los Angeles Times quoted a Banc of America Securities analyst as saying that, before "too long," the Nasdaq index would double.

It was exactly 10 years ago that the Nasdaq index reached its all-time peak of 5,048.62, and the tech-heavy index has never come close … Read more

Updated at 2:30 p.m. PST with additional information on PG&E deal.

SolarReserve said on Tuesday it has signed a deal to build a utility-scale solar plant in Nevada with a molten salt storage system that will let it supply power when the sun isn't shining.

The Santa Monica, Calif.-based company has a 25-year power purchase agreement with utility NV Energy to supply about 480,000 megawatt-hours of electricity a year, enough to power about 75,000 homes during peak times. The capacity of the concentrating solar system will be 100 megawatts and be located … Read more

APT Sports Scheduler provides users with the capability to manage and schedule games for various sports fields. While users may need to take time learning the program, it will be very beneficial for juggling multiple teams and locations.

We quickly became frustrated by the program's interface, as it provided no direction. The Help file's brief descriptions of each command and some experimenting allowed us to operate things smoothly. We were soon populating a database for sporting fields. The options include everything from baseball and football fields to tennis courts. By using a menu similar to calendaring software, we … Read more

OpenTable was the special of the day on Wall Street on Thursday.

The restaurant-reservation company's stock soared on its first day of trading on Nasdaq, gaining nearly 60 percent to close at $31.89 after selling 3 million shares at $20 a share during its initial public offering Wednesday. Nearly 5 million shares changed hands, trading as high as $35.50.

OpenTable's stock performance is the biggest first-day gain for an IPO since energy-management systems firm Orion Energy Systems gained 65 percent in its debut in December 2007, according to IPO research firm Renaissance Capital.

OpenTable's revenue … Read more

Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, is best known for his sense of humor. He seems to be developing a sense of social responsibility, too.

Adams' blog is one of my favorite places on the Internet, one of only a handful of pages I try to check every day.

I like his blog because Adams is both funny and smart. He understands that he can exert a certain amount of public influence, but unlike most celebrities, he's smart enough to recognize his own limits. He's also smart enough to expand those limits by gathering data and studying the opinions of others.

Earlier this month, Adams spent his own money on what he calls the Dilbert Survey of Economists, gathering the opinions of over 500 professional economists to see if they could tell us anything useful about McCain's and Obama's economic plans.

They couldn't, really--ask 10 economists to count their own fingers and you're likely to get 11 different answers--but this in itself is good information, because it teaches us that economics is not yet a real science.

On Tuesday, Adams asked the readers of his blog (a valuable if unreliable resource) to help him find a good analysis of the potential consequences of allowing the free market to deal with the recent market meltdown. … Read more

NEW YORK--What if you could get that coveted table for two at one of the hottest restaurants in town...by paying $25 for the reservation?

New York's famed Restaurant Week is fast approaching, which means that black books and BlackBerrys are filling with reservations aplenty. But this year, a new start-up called Tablexchange.com might put a fork in the system. The New York-based company has a simple model: it's a marketplace for buying and selling reservations at chic, trendy restaurants. It's brand new, and it's already controversial.

"So let's have a show of … Read more

We're admittedly confused by the press release for Lenovo's ThinkPad Reserve that went across the wires this morning. We already wrote about the leather case, the white-glove service and support, and the (ahem) $5,000 price tag in June. The formerly secretive marketing Web site has had plenty of specs available for months. But today, it seems, marks the official unveiling of the fancy-pants limited-edition laptop, which was created to celebrate the ThinkPad's 15th anniversary.

The specs--Centrino Pro with a Core 2 Duo L7500 processor, 2GB of RAM, and a 160GB hard drive--are fairly typical for … Read more