KFC gambling on chicken that is grilled, not fried

Would KGC ever have the same ring?

In a culinary gambit backed by buckets of big money, KFC is hoping to replicate its founder’s recipe for success with the national introduction of Kentucky Grilled Chicken.

This week’s rollout is KFC’s most ambitious attempt to win over health-conscious customers as the chain known worldwide for fried chicken tries to reinvigorate lackluster U.S. sales.

"It’s going to get people who haven’t eaten KFC for a long time to come back into our restaurants," said KFC President Roger Eaton. "It’s going to get people who have never eaten KFC to come into our restaurants."

Eaton says he spent years as part of the team tinkering with a grilled alternative, and the rollout follows KFC’s longest market test ever. It will be backed by a marketing blitz.

Grilled chicken items are staples at some KFC competitors. McDonald’s Corp. offers grilled chicken in sandwiches and wraps, and says chicken sales "continue to be extremely good." McDonald’s has also recently been emphasizing its new Southern Style Crispy Chicken sandwich, which is fried. Chick-fil-A says its Chargrilled Chicken Sandwich "continues to grow rapidly" as part of a menu offering "balanced choices" for customers.

KFC’s slow-grilled chicken drew strong reviews from the lunchtime crowd Monday at a KFC restaurant in Louisville, the chain’s hometown. Eddie Collard proclaimed grilled better than fried.

"I think the colonel would be happy," Collard said of KFC founder Colonel Harland Sanders.

Like its predecessor, Kentucky Grilled Chicken has its own secret recipe. The original copy of the recipe — a blend of six herbs and spices — will be kept in an electronic safe at company headquarters. It will sit alongside Sanders’ handwritten recipe of 11 herbs and spices coating the chain’s Original Recipe fried chicken.

The difference is in the nutritional numbers.

KFC says each piece of its grilled chicken has 70 to 180 calories and four to nine grams of fat. By contrast, the Original Recipe items have between 110 and 370 calories and 7 to 21 grams of fat, depending on the piece. The grilled chicken contains from 160 to 440 milligrams of sodium per piece, as opposed to 290 to 1,050 milligrams of sodium per piece of Original Recipe chicken.

See the full article at Yahoo News.

Android platform v1.5 highlights and new features

Four months of discovery and hearsay later, the Android build that we’ve all been waiting for is near. The Android Developers Blog announced today the availability of an “early look” Android 1.5 SDK. This release seems like a mostly complete version of the final release, though Google warns that some of the APIs are bound to change.

Beyond the features that v1.5 brings to the end user (see below), the new SDK carries a few key changes:

• The SDK now supports multiple versions of the platform, so developers can continue to work on applications for the current release (v1.1) while preparing their apps for the next one.
• Developers can now install SDK add-ons. This allows carriers, OEMs, and other third-parties to easily expand the SDK for their needs without Google having to hold their hand.

Some important new features:

• On-screen keyboard support, with support for auto-correct, text prediction, user dictionaries, and third-party keyboard layouts
• Live folders (Auto-updating folder shortcuts for things such as YouTube favorites, Starred Contacts, and, with the API now available, whatever else developers conjure up)
• Video Recording
• MPEG4 and 3GP Video Playback
• Stereo Bluetooth
• Browser enhancements: New ultrafast “Squirrelfish” javascript engine, search within a page, copy and paste, UI changes
• New Linux Kernel
• Google Application enhancements: View Google Talk friend statuses in contacts, SMS, MMS, Gmail, and Email
• New frameworks for developers to build upon: Widget creation, Live Folder creation, Raw audio recording/playback, Video recording, Speech recognition
• Faster GPS, Faster camera startup, faster Gmail scrolling, and smoother browser scrolling

See the full article at MobileCrunch and the full feature list at Android.com.

European Duo Seeks to Buy Skype Back From EBay

The European duo who created Skype and sold it to eBay for billions may have another trick up their sleeve: buying it back.

Niklas Zennstrom, left, and Janus Friis, founders of Skype, are said to be raising money to buy the Internet phone service back.

Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, the founders of Skype, have approached several private equity firms and are pooling their own substantial resources to make a bid for the Internet calling service, say several people with knowledge of their plans.

The two men sold Skype to eBay in 2005 for $2.6 billion, and later received bonus payouts that increased the final price to $3.1 billion. Since then, Mr. Zennstrom, a native of Sweden, and Mr. Friis, of Denmark, have created the venture capital firm Atomico and backed the online video service Joost, both based in London.

Skype has more than 405 million registered users, up from 53 million when eBay bought it, and the service had $145 million in revenue in the fourth quarter of 2008. Calls are free between Skype users, and rates are a few pennies a minute for international calls to non-Skype users; the low cost has helped the company gain 8 percent of the world’s international calling minutes, according to TeleGeography, a market research firm.

Skype also currently has one of the most popular applications for Apple’s iPhone, and has said it is developing software for the BlackBerry, which is expected in May.

EBay has admitted, however, that Skype has few synergies with its core e-commerce and payments businesses. In addition, John J. Donahoe, eBay’s chief executive, has repeatedly signaled his willingness to sell Skype for the right price.

See the full article at the NY Times.

ATM card skimming happening right in NYC

Previously on C.S.I… a man found an actual card skimmer in the wild, in the flesh. Today, Gizmodo reader Sean became the card skimmer/PIN camera’s latest almost-victim. Where? Chase Bank in Manhattan, East Village.

Sean Seibel was inside a local Chase bank where he inserted his ATM card into one of two side-by-side automatic teller machines. When the machine told him it could not read his card, it took him a bit of jiggling to get his card back. He tried it a couple more times and got the same results. Before trying the other machine, he inspected the slot of the current ATM he was using and realized that it had a false plastic cover attached to the slot. The amazing thing about the cover was that the translucent green plastic matched the card reader slot perfectly, meaning that it was made specifically for Chase ATMs. After snapping a few photos with his iPhone, he alerted the branch manager and explained what happened.

As he was leaving, Seibel remembered reading about card skimmers having small cameras in the proximity in order to read PIN pad activity, so naturally, he went back to the ATM to inspect, which is where he found an extra mirror attached to the vandalized machine that the other ATMs didn’t have. Drilled into the mirror was a tiny pinhole with a camera inside, directed at the PIN pad. Seibel alerted the branch manager again and asked Chase why they hadn’t inspected the ATM after he had warned them the first time. Chase honestly replied that they hadn’t thought of it because they had never encountered that sort of thing before.

From the crazy amounts of feedback we received last night after we posted the first story, it seems that card skimmers are a common crime everywhere from Thailand to Mexico. But actually hearing about it happening to our very own readers here in America makes us want to help get the word out. Seibel says it best: "Take this as a warning and please inspect every ATM machine you use, no matter how secure you think the environment is."

See the full article at Gizmodo.

Blockbuster Dangerously Close To Going Under

Blockbuster, the $500 million video rental chain, has been in a long battle to remain relevant in the Internet-enabled age–lately by attempting to strike a deal for online content distribution. But the company’s Internet leap may be too late: An FCC filing has revealed that the company is in deep trouble.

The filing, made to the Securities and Exchange Commission late yesterday, shows that the company is unsure whether it can continue doing business. Specifically, Blockbuster may not survive the months between a planned $250 million loan deal arranged last week and when the agreement goes into effect on May 11. Blockbuster management say there’s "no assurance" the company can meet the requirements of the deal.

In effect, the company is saying it’s within days or weeks of having to close up shop–postal, online and brick-and-mortar. 

The latter of those categories is mostly to blame, of course. In an age when music and movies are easily downloaded at a few moments notice, companies stream content over your phone lines to TV set-top boxes on demand, and even waiting for the postman to deliver a NetFlix envelope with your next DVD is beginning to seem slow, driving to a real store to rent a movie or game just isn’t convenient. Managing and funding the company’s physical assets must have become a real burden as its business eroded. Compare that to NetFlix, which doesn’t have to worry about storefronts with its warehouse-centric distribution model, and online streaming systems like Hulu, which have barely any overhead at all.

Blockbuster’s recent announcements that it would be partnering with TiVo, and get its content onto Apple devices, now just rings hollow. It was the right move, but taken far too late to have the needed impact on the company’s fortunes.

See the full article at Fast Company.