http://coinlab.com/2012/01/deposit-cards-the-good-wife-vending-machine/Bit-Pay Announces Deposit CardsSource : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UmynaPg8hw, https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=57303.0;topicseenBit-Pay's new service, Deposit Cards, allow non-technical BitCoin beginners to accept BTC without ever handling it themselves. Bit-Pay is offering wallet or key-chain sized cards which include your name, a picture, and a QR-code for a bitcoin address. Whenever Bitcoins are sent to this address, Bit-Pay automatically changes them into USD and sends a text message to the recipient with the USD value that was just deposited. The following day, the funds are directly deposited into the recipient's bank account. They have also launched PimpCoin.com, an identical service, branded as a way for strippers to accept bitcoin tips. Bit-Pay is also selling Bitcoins from their booth at CES this week.
BitcoinBeta's 2011 Bitcoin Awards Results InSource: http://bitcoinawards.bitcoinbetas.com/Bitcoin Betas recently announced the winners of their community-voted awards for the year. Special congratulations to Gavin Andresen (won Person, Developer of the Year), Bit-Pay (Company, Start-Up, Merchant Services of the year) and Casascius (Most Interesting Bitcoin Project)!
Armory - A Seriously Promising ClientSource: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/armory-discussion-thread-56424Armory is a new alternative to the official client that incorporates a huge number of feature requests from the community. Features include: Multiple wallets, deterministic wallets, paper wallets, Read-only wallets, stronger encryption, corruption and error correction, batch importing of addresses, offline transaction creation, zero-confirmtion transactions, private key accessibility and more. Currently for Windows and Linux. The project is still young however, so it may not be stable, and it still has some bugs, such as needing to load the entire blockchain into memory and needing to run the Satoshi client simultaneously. Could Armory overtake the Official client?
Bitcoins to be featured in CBS's The Good Wife on Jan 15thSource: http://bitcoinmedia.com/the-good-wife-bitcoin-for-dummies-promo/The show synopsis indicates that this episode will be about the protagonist legal team defending the lawyer representing the mysterious creator of Bitcoin. Though it seems the show will likely be alarmist, making Bitcoins seem shady, the general consensus of the Bitcoin community is, "All PR is good PR", for now. Tune in this Sunday to see it for yourself.
Bitcoin Vending Machine DevelopedSource: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDOcLros-w0Stuart W. Card of Critical Technologies Inc. announced the first ever Bitcoin Vending Machine transaction. While leaving plenty of room for improvement, Card has made a functional vending machine which lets customers buy snacks using a wallet on a smartphone which can read QR-codes. The process is still somewhat cumbersome, but we look forward further innovation in this space.
A Visual History of Bitcoin DevelopmentSource: http://codinginmysleep.com/2012/01/bitcoin-development-history-visually/ Using Gource, a development history visualizer, the Coding In My Sleep blog has created a video which shows how the Bitcoin codebase has grown and changed over the past three years. Very cool!
Pay to Script is up for voteSource: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/BIP_0016Bitcoin Core Developer Gavin Andresen implemented a pay-to-script-hash solution this week, and put it out for vote to BitCoin miners. The proposal is named "BIP0016". It adds significant functionality to the Bitcoin block chain by allowing users to send coins to a script, the script to be executed later.
In a simple form, the script might validate any two out of three possible signatures on a 'send' request to a new address, providing an escrow service enforced by the blockchain. UI for functionality like this is some time out; many months at the least.
Especially of note is that Gavin asked miners who agreed with the proposal to add the string "P2SH" in blocks they mine; he will count blocks mined during January to determine how the BitCoin mining community 'votes' on this issue. This is an interesting and novel development in BitCoin governance, and we look forward to seeing how this 'voting' mechanism evolves.