iPhones at Best Buy…and Everywhere
Yesterday afternoon’s rumors turned out to be true: Best Buy will begin selling the iPhone 3G in September in its stores’ recently spruced-up “Best Buy Mobile” phone departments. (The  confirmation of that fact answers one of the questions I had–whether the iPhone would live in BB’s Apple section or its phone section.) In related news, Apple-watching analyst Gene Munster has forecast that Apple will sell 4.47 million iPhones this quarter. If so, those lines of buyers outside Apple Stores may be be around for awhile. And those of us who snapped up an iPhone 3G immediately will lose our bragging rights and gain lots of company.

Read more at: MacWorld’s iPhone Central , ZDNet

Is That Sebring a Hotspot?
Later this month, Chrysler will begin offering Uconnect Web, a $499 option that puts a Wi-Fi hotspot in your car, using an EVDO wireless Internet connection. Unconnect is based on technology from a company called Autonet Mobile, which has put on-the-go Wi-Fi into Avis rent-a-cars for awhile now. An Autonet spokesperson told TWICE that the hotspots are necessary to please today’s klds, who are bored with watching DVDs in the back seat. What, travel bingo isn’t good enough for them?

Vudu, Only Cheaper
Vudu, which makes a $299 box for streaming movies across the Internet onto your TV, has announced that it will offer 99-cent specials on 99 movies in its catalog, slashing the $3.99 rental fee it usually charges. (The list looks pretty good–I’d certainly pay a buck to watch Groundhog Day at will.) The Vudu gadget is one of the better-designed pieces of consumer-electronics hardware I’ve seen in awhile, and I hope the company succeeds, although I worry about its prospects when even Steve Jobs sounds a tad pessimistic when discussing Apple’s Vudu rival, the cheaper and more versatile Apple TV.

California’s Antique Software
When I think U.S. states suffering from aging infrastructure, crumbling bridges come to mind. But these days, some of that infrastructure is digital–such as California’s payroll system, which is written in the extremely old-school language known as COBOL. The state is having trouble finding anyone who knows how to maintain the software–COBOL dates to 1959 and was kinda archaic even when I got into computers thirty years ago. The good news: At least it’s not running on banks of TRS-80s.

Read more at: Jordan Says

Baked Apple
More than 60 firefighters put out a three-alarm blaze at a building on Apple’s Cupertino campus on Tuesday evening , apparently caused by faulty air conditioning. Nobody was injured, and it sounds like smoke damage was the most serious upshot. No definitive word on what the building is used for; let’s hope that no unique prototypes of next-generation iPods or MacBooks were lost.

Read more at: AppleInsider, Valleywag