This weekend, I'm going on a trip to South Bend, Indiana. For the trip, I decided I should have an iTrip, the very helpful device that charges your iPod or iPhone while also transmitting the audio over the radio waves. It's a great product and I've had ones numerous times before, but I seemed to have misplaced mine over the last 6-8 months. I looked up the product on their site and found that the product I wanted was regularly priced at $69.99. (It seems that having an iPod connector and the stickers that say "Made for iPhone" and "Made for iPod" cost at least $20 per device, which is ridiculous.)

I am leaving on Friday night, so I was a bit short on time to get the product. So, I went to the most convenient location: the Best Buy in the Mall of America, which is close to work. Sure enough, they had the product there. But wait? Wasn't the MSRP at $69.99? Yeah, it is, but Best Buy is charging $72.99! Well, I need it pretty quick and I don't have time to order it online, so I went ahead and purchased it. With MN sales tax, my total expense was $78.30.

After the fact, I decided to do some online price comparison. Of course, I went to Amazon.com, where they verify that the MSRP is $69.99. But lo, they're selling it for $46.99! Just as a comparison, I priced out overnight shipping from Amazon.com for the same product, and Amazon.com will get it to my door tomorrow for $64.97.

Why the discrepancy? First, Best Buy knows that you came to their store to get this item. The Griffin ITrip is not like the DVD, CD, or even that Nintendo DS game where you just say, "Yeah, that's not too pricey, I'll get this too." You need the iTrip. Therefore, Best Buy is going to make sure they can get all the profit out of the iTrip that they can. Amazon.com, on the other hand, offers the iTrip at just a bit above their cost of getting the product, most likely. If we assume both Best Buy and Amazon.com have get these units for the same price from Griffin, Best Buy just got over 35% of my product's price as profit. On the other hand, Amazon.com didn't charge me the 33% and kept the couple percent as profit and operating costs.

Is this highway robbery? Not really. Best Buy has massive costs they have to cover, such as renting all that retail space and paying undereducated employees. The part I think is highway robbery is the extra $3 over the Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price (MSRP). I probably should have left and gone to the Apple Store, because if they have the product, I doubt they sell it for more than the MSRP.

This morning it was announced that Marvel Entertainment is to be acquired by Walt Disney Corp. for $4 Billion. Many of my friends, as well as myself, seem to be a bit worried and skeptical about the future of their favorite Marvel characters. But, upon thinking about it more and more, I think this is a sound business decision and Disney will likely handle it well.

First, many Marvel fans seem to think that being associated with Disney means that Spider-Man and Wolverine will be portrayed as kids stuff just like Mickey and Hanna Montana. To many, that's all the Disney brand means. Remember that Disney is a multinational corporation that owns Disneyland, Disney World, Walt Disney Pictures and PIXAR, as well as other Hollywood studios such as Touchstone Pictures, Miramax, and Hollywood Pictures. Disney also owns The ABC Network, ESPN, as well as a couple music labels and a radio network. People don't think of Wes Anderson's first four films, most of Quentin Tarantino's films, as well as Scream, Spy Kids, and Farenheight 9/11, but that's because Disney doesn't stick the mouse ears right on the screen. Not everyone in the world is fans of Mickey and Donald, and Disney still does business that caters to them.

Second, Disney is always looking for some of the hottest properties out there. Marvel Entertainment, a leader in the comic book world, is definitely a great new business to get into when looking for more avenues to make profit. Marvel used to sell the movie rights to other studios for such things as X-Men, Spider-Man, and The Fantastic Four. But more recently Marvel Entertainment has been financing and producing the movies themselves. So far, with films such as Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk, the production quality and the reception by the fans has been even better than before Marvel Studios was formed. Marvel and Disney did say that the distribution agreements with Paramount, Sony, and Fox are going to be continued. I can see Disney wanting to buy back some of these rights, but it shows that Disney knows Marvel has done things right and they don't want to ruin that for the rather small distribution fees. Also, the news also cited that Disney has many hot properties for the female market such as Hanna Montana and The Jonas Brothers and are looking for more products to capitalize on the male teen and adult, and that's right where Marvel is at the top of the list.

Third, I think Marvel does stand to gain from the help of Disney. George Lucas may be known as the one who started "merchandising" for movies, but Disney definitely brought merchandising to a whole new level and does it in smart, intelligent ways that cater to their audience. Will we see cool Superman or X-Men rides at Disney World? That could be awesome! Will we see more Iron Man toys? Probably. One quote from Disney CEO Bob Iger, who brought Disney back from the brink of losing its magic touch four years ago, was that PIXAR Animation Studios is excited about working on Marvel properties. (Think the action of The Incredibles with some of the world's best-known comic book characters.) Also, Marvel has over 4,000 characters, but they don't really have the money to make movies for even a fraction of those characters. With the financial muscle of Disney, I think we can expect plenty more Marvel content in the future.

Don't get me wrong. Disney could screw this up really bad. However, for these reasons and others, I think it's too much in Disney's best interest to let Marvel do their thing and help them out. In that, I mean that Disney sees the dollars rolling in with the acquisition of Marvel, as long as they stay smart. The last four years since Bob Iger's takeover as CEO has been Disney's best in the last decade, and with smart business decisions like this, I think Disney may get even better.

This week, Google released an iPhone web app for Google Latitude, their location-aware social networking tool. The weird part was this program was just a web app running in the iPhone's Safari browser and not even an app like Google has made for almost every other phone. Here's a snippet from the TUAW post about it:

As Google's Mat Balez notes in his blog post announcing the Latitude release, Google actually developed a native app for Latitude... only to have Apple, uh, suggest that the big G redo the concept as a web app to avoid user confusion with the Maps app. Really? Must have been an interesting phone call.

No kidding. Google spent all their sweet time, no doubt, making a really nice and powerful iPhone app to allow you to manage contacts and see where your friends are on a map. Then, while submitting it to the iTunes App Store, they're told that Apple will not accept this. Great, that's a couple months of programmer time down the drain for Google.

Hold on a second here, though. When Apple announced the App Store, they announced their venture capital friends were putting together a fund for new small businesses to make apps for the phone. One of the first companies that got in on that cash was Pelago Inc., which started a service call Whrrl. I've since then deleted that app and used one that a number of my friends are on called Loopt. All of these apps are already doing the same thing that the Google Latitude app wanted to do, but apparently because Google is a much bigger partner and competitor of Apple's they do not get the option to do an app like this. It doesn't make any sense, and it costs Google thousands of dollars down the drain just because Apple can axe anything they don't like for their phone.

It's even a bigger problem for Apple and third-party hardware makers. Apple does give an API to interface with hardware devices that a company develops and plugs into the iPhone. Companies have already made nice car mounts that will charge your phone and add a couple other features. Medical service providers have made adapters to hook up various types of medical equipment, and Apple has been fine with this. But add some cool thing that will let you do things with still or video cameras? A cool way to import video to your iPhone? The company will likely spend millions developing that hardware component and thousands creating a cool iPhone app to interface with the hardware. But, in the end, if Apple wants to say "no" to the app submission the company has a cool hardware gadget with no way to use it.

On one hand, Apple does all this controlling of applications in the iPhone App Store in the name of protecting the customer, and in some cases they are protecting us from crappy products. But, with situations like this (and some other things that they should have protected us from but got out) it's proving that not only are they doing a terrible job of protecting us, but Apple is too often blocking the cool stuff. Often Apple is even blocking the cool stuff because they want to release their own version a couple months later.

I think that Apple should keep the platform more open. We would get more crap, but the iPhone App Store ecosystem would be even more healthy and have even cooler solutions for iPhone users. Besides, without Apple protecting us from the crap, we would still mark it as crap and not use it. I'm not saying that Apple cannot host the app store, but let it run free and see it become even more useful and powerful.

First of all, yesterday I went out and saw Pixar's latest film, Up, and it was a blast. As usual, the cartoony but more-and-more realistic-looking animation was superb. The plotline was very touching at points but still contained enough eye candy and silly jokes ot keep everyone on the edge of their seat and laughing. In short, it was another great Pixar film, although I'm not yet sure where it will go in my personal favorites; that can only be determined over time, I think.

This afternoon, though, I took the chance to rewatch the film in "Disney Digital 3D", which is just Disney's fancy branding to the RealD digital technology. Unlike old 3D glasses that used separate polarization or colors to each eye, RealD uses a more advanced polarization on alternating frames of the digital projection. This results in a much crisper picture than the older 3-D technologies, but it still suffers from a slightly dark look due to the polarization, although that might be due to the fact that I was sitting almost at the front of the theater.

My experience with seeing it in 3-D wasn't amazing, but I did find it interesting. Only at a couple points in the film did the characters or sets seem to jump out of the screen for me, but when they did, the effect was pretty cool. Most of the time, the 3-D effect was subtle or barely noticeable, or at least subtle enough that I couldn't decide if it looked much better than the regular 2-D projection. On the other hand, when the film was showing photos or artwork on a wall, it definitely felt more flat to me, so maybe it's just my imagination building last night's show into 3-D. I think, to Pixar's credit, they never stooped to the level of making shots just so they wow the audience in 3-D, but they only used it to full effect when it filled the story. (I've seen numerous previews for other movies where it just seems that all the characters are sticking their face right up to the camera, which might be overwhelming but at least seems gimmicky to me.)

My main disclaimer on this front is that I do have an eye condition that does make it hard for me to see things far away (I'm almost legally blind, but not quite), and it may be that part of this condition makes it less exciting to me. People often ask me what I can see compared to them, and I tell them that I've never seen like them so I cannot really compare.

I guess my point is that the 3-D technology in films these days is much better than it was even a couple years ago. If it sounds intriguing to you, check out the new world of 3-D films and see for yourself if you like the experience. And speaking of which, besides a bunch of new films coming out in 3-D over the next year, it seems that both Toy Story and Toy Story 2 are going to be released in Disney Digital 3D over the next year before Toy Story 3 is released in June 2010.