pricing

Widget makers aren't just drawing big money from investors, now they're luring the venture capitalists themselves.

On Thursday, Hummer Winblad Venture Partners' Will Price left his post as general partner to join Widgetbox as its chief executive officer. Widgetbox operates a large community of widgets--roughly 41,000 pieces of software in the form of games or gadgets--which it distributes to sites and social networks like MySpace.com or Facebook. The company has raised $14.5 million since it was founded in April 2006, from investors including Sequoia Capital, NCD Investors, and Hummer Winblad.

Price, who worked on early … Read more

The demise of the HD DVD format has been bad news for both bargain hunters and at least one big-time technology company.

In the three short weeks since Toshiba announced that it was pulling the plug on the high-definition technology, prices for standalone players using the rival Blu-ray format have been headed north. In fact, as noted by PriceGrabber.com, Blu-ray prices are at their high point for the year, at an average of about $400 apiece for the devices. The Sony BDP-S300, for instance, was just a small mocha latte above that level, at $403 as of Wednesday.

Prices … Read more

The men of the 404 are here with Chris Grant from Joystiq.com, who talks with us about Governor Spitzer's resignation, more importantly BioShock's highly anticipated sequel, Xbox 360's price drop overseas, and a Web site for storing files an easier way.

Listen now: Download today's podcast

I've looked at a handful of price watching services, but this one has got to be the coolest. It's called Pricepinx, and it's been designed to work on any site--not just some of the big retailers.

All you have to do to get going is add a small bookmarklet to your browser, highlight the price of the item and click on the bookmarklet. If there are any changes in price, you'll be notified by e-mail. As an added bonus for those who register with the service, added items are pooled together in a list. You can … Read more

San Francisco may have shaken some flowers from its hair since hosting the first Earth Day 38 years ago, but the city continues to be named one of America's greenest. Satirists mock its politically correct "smug cloud" of eco-hipness, but many other regions tend to follow the city's environmental lead. For instance, more than a handful of U.S. cities are now mulling a ban on plastic grocery bags, first passed in San Francisco last March.

Fresh into his second term, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newson in January set goals for the city to become carbon-neutral … Read more

I expected to see some lower Vista prices in this weekend's ads, but was surprised to see just how low the prices had fallen.

Officially the price cuts announced by Microsoft on Thursday don't take effect until later this year when Service Pack 1 hits retail shelves. However, the company had said that many retailers were offering promotions that bring the software to its lower price.

But the ad at OfficeMax took things a step further. In this week's circular, the office products chain is selling Windows Vista Home Premium for $99. That's $30 less than … Read more

In looking at the reasons behind Thursday's price cut for Windows Vista, it's easy to blame the OS itself. After all, plenty of critics have panned it, users have grumbled and even Microsoft executives themselves were slinging arrows that the software wasn't ready for prime time when it launched last year.

But, it's important to note that this cut doesn't affect the bulk of the PC market, where folks get Vista as part of a new PC. Rather, the cut is limited to the comparatively small number of folks who buy a boxed copy of … Read more

Microsoft is cutting the price on its Vista between 20% and 40% from its price as of the beginning of this year. While most copies of Windows aren't sold via the retail channel, Microsoft is apparently hoping to reduce the disparity between hardware costs and its software. When you can buy a new PC for $400, it hardly makes sense to drop another $400 for an increasingly irrelevant operating system. (All operating systems, not just Windows, in terms of perceived customer value.)

But the bigger reason appears to be an effort to make Windows more appealing to emerging markets, … Read more

I don't know about you, but I often find myself saying "I'd totally buy that if it cost $__ less." It happens to me all the time with items such as RAM, video cards, Windows Vista (joking), and the Amazon Kindle. Luckily there are two handy services to help keep tabs on prices for online goods.

The first, and newer of the two is called Waitable. It simply monitors the price of whatever items you put in either by URL, Amazon.com sales number, or UPC code. All you need to do is plug in what … Read more