Filed under: Internet, Windows, Podcasting, Blogging, Productivity, Web services, Freeware

FeedDemon has been the ideal RSS news reading application on the Windows platform for a long time. The folks at NewsGator certainly thought so, and instead of building their own standalone news aggregator for Windows, they purchased FeedDemon. The ideal news is that though FeedDemon was at one time a commercial product (and worth each penny), it’s now available for free.

Even when it was a standalone application FeedDemon got news reading right. The user interface is simple to interact with, and the application is solid. But now that it is a client for NewsGator’s web application, it has gained another whole level of usefulness. FeedDemon synchronizes with your NewsGator account giving you the capability to keep your feeds in sync between it, your NewsGator web account, and any other clients you select to use from NewsGator, including ones for most mobile phones, and even Macs.

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Filed under: Industry, Consumer experience, Competitive strategy, Wal-Mart (WMT), Circuit City Stores (CC), Sears Holdings (SHLD)

One sign the snow is coming is that retailers begin their marketing for the holidays. In a bad economy the discount signs are coming early this year. It is time to break out the salt. The ice is already on the driveway and the front walk.

According to The Wall Street Journal, “Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE: WMT) stated it will cut prices on some of the most popular toys and speed up the opening of Christmas shops in its stores nationwide as it tries to lure budget-conscious shoppers and jump start its biggest selling season.”

The news can hardly be good for most other large, national retailers. Discounts mean lower margins and discounts early in the season mean pressure on earnings for the fourth quarter. Wal-Mart has the balance sheet and cashflow to support price cuts. That might not be true of some other store operators.

The move by Wal-Mart puts pressure on much less healthy retailers like Sears (NYSE:SHLD) and Circuit City (NYSE:CC). In a credit crisis financing inventory will be hard and in some cases impossible. How may banks want to give a failing firm like Circuit City credit to purchase TVs and PCs for the holidays? Not many.

Wal-Mart’s move may speed up the inevitable. Some retailers won’t be around to greet Santa.

Douglas A. McIntyre is an editor at 24/7 Wall St.

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Filed under: Business, Internet, Text, E-mail, Productivity, Web services, Commercial, Freeware, Search

Recently our sister publication, TUAW, did a series of posts about each blogger’s favorite iPhone and iPod Touch apps. We thought here at Download Squad that we’d take that same approach and apply it to our favourite Windows applications. This first post is my first of three in this vein that’ll cover Evernote, FeedDemon, and MindManager.

Evernote

It seems you can’t go very far online these days without someone extolling the virtues of Evernote. While this note-taking application has been around for a long time, it has recently been reborn as a cross-platform powerhouse. The original concept behind Evernote was that you had one scrolling piece of note paper that you could continue to add notes to, then easily search within them both based on content and based on a timeline of when your notes were created. While this paradigm still exists, it’s no longer Evernote’s claim to fame.

Evernote now has a powerful web application that serves as a central nervous system for your note taking. All of your notes that are created in the local Evernote client on your Windows (or Mac) computer are synchronized to Evernote’s servers, where they have the ability to apply OCR (optical character recognition) to any images that you have included in your notes. This means that you can search for a word that is visible in a pic, and Evernote will find it.

Evernote’s interface has been refined over the past few years and is very simple to navigate and use. On the Windows platform most people seem to pit Evernote against OneNote from Microsoft, and in my thought with the advent of Evernote’s server-based system and reliable synchronization, it’s no contest.

A free account at Evernote is enough for most users, offering up to 40 MB of file transfer per month, but if you find you are a heavy user you might need to upgrade to a Premium account, which offers 500 MB of transfer per month, plus other features.

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Filed under: Bad news, Products and services, Consumer experience, Competitive strategy, Ford Motor (F), General Motors (GM), Toyota Motor Corp. (TM), Economic data, Recession, Financial Crisis

September proved to be yet another tough month for American auto maker Ford Motor Company (NYSE: F) as the company saw its U.S. sales drop by a huge 34% during the month.

The company noted that we’re in the middle of an “atmosphere of caution” as the troubled economic environment, and tightening credit conditions are still taking their tolls on the automotive industry.

We will hear more troubling news later today as more auto makers release their September numbers, and analysts are expecting to hear more of the same from the other major names in the industry. Fellow Detroit auto maker General Motors Corporation (NYSE: GM) is expected to announce sales dropping around 27%, while Japanese maker Toyota Motor Corporation (NYSE: TM) is expected to show a sales decline of around 17%.

Today’s news from the major names should really come as no surprise, since we have been hearing much of the same through most of the year. Through August, nationwide sales of vehicles was down 11.2%.

As consumers continue to express their concerns over the overall economy it is going to continue to be tough for vehicle dealers to get shoppers into their showrooms. More massive incentives should help a little, but until consumers start to turn more positive on the overall economy, it is going to be tougher and tougher to sell them new automobiles.

Michael Fowlkes has worked as a stock trader for seven years and spent the last four years working as an analyst for the online investment advisory service Investor’s Observer.

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Filed under: World wide web, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

You might think that the last thing the world needs is yet another desktop client for Twitter. And you’d probably be right. But that doesn’t make new kid on the bloc Toro any less pretty to look at.

Toro doesn’t have a ton of features when compared to the reigning champs like Twhirl and Alert Thingy. It doesn’t have a shortcut for sending direct messages and doesn’t have a tab for direct tweets. And it has exactly two options in the settings dialog (turn alerts on and off, and turn sounds for alerts on and off).

But that stated, Toro is one of the most physically attractive Adobe AIR-based Twitter clients I’ve seen. Items like Current, Public, and Replies are separate into tabs. There’s an integrated search feature. And you can view a list of your friends and followers in the Friends tab. I don’t know why most desktop Twitter clients insist on having colorful backgrounds, but there’s something about the black and white simplicity of Toro that makes it an attractive alternative.

[via RefreshingApps]

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