Tuesday, May 01, 2007
Tesla scales back range targets
Filed under: Transportation
While we doubt it'll be enough to get any of the lucky few first customers to cancel their orders, those planning a long haul trip in their shiny new Tesla Roadster may find themselves slightly disappointed when they finally get the keys, as the company's pulling back a bit on its promised 250 mile range on a single charge. Apparently, testing the car on an EPA-compliant dynamometer proved to be a bit more taxing than their initial estimates, forcing them to reconsider their boasting. While Tesla's not quite ready to get specific with the new numbers, it says it'll still come in at greater than 200 miles, which would still peg it well above other, less stylish electric vehicles. Now, if they'd only find an excuse to scale back the price.
Monday, April 30, 2007
Lexar's 8GB ExpressCard SSD sneaks on the scene
Filed under: Storage
While Lexar does a fine job competing in the flash memory arena, it appears that the outfit is giving it a go in the solid state disc realm as well. According a marginally descriptive product page, Lexar is offering up an 8GB ExpressCard SSD, which should go nicely above that 120GB PCMCIA NAND drive as you attempt to cram more storage into peripheral slots than inside your laptop's casing. Moreover, the device features a peak data transfer rate of 250Mbps, and while it doesn't appear to be available for shipment just yet, it'll run you a penny under $200 when it formally launches.
Hip-IP's Mobigater Pro routes Skype calls to your mobile
MIT researchers tout "practical" holographic video
Filed under: Misc. Gadgets
A team of researchers at MIT seem to think they've finally come up with a way to make holographic video a bit more practical for everyday use, touting the new system they've developed as a possible display for PCs and video game consoles, Technology Review reports. According to the researchers, the display will be small enough to fit in an entertainment center when finished, boast a resolution as good as a standard analog television, and only cost a "couple of hundred dollars." Much of that increased practicality comes from the fact that this latest version, dubbed the Mark III, simply relies on a standard graphics processor instead of specialized hardware. The researchers also managed to streamline some of the other optical hardware, which they say made the previous incarnations as big as a dining-room table. It apparently still has a few drawbacks, however, with it currently only able to display monochromatic holograms in a space about the size of a Rubik's Cube. They insist that's only a temporary problem though, and promise that the next model will be comparable in size to a desktop monitor and boast a full range of color. No word if there'll also be a port of everybody's favorite quasi-holographic arcade game, Time Traveler, to go along with it, but we can hope.
Friday, April 27, 2007
Convert Long, Complicated Web Addresses Into Small URLs
Here's a quick review of the most popular URL redirection servicesto help you pick the right one for your job.
TinyURL.com - This is a name synonymous with URL redirection with maximum number of users. You can drag their bookmarklet in your browser and create short URLs in a single click. The advantage is that users can preview the web address embedded in TinyURL before visiting the actual website. With Preview, Without Preview
urlTea.com - A relatively new but promising URL shortening service. It allows you to describe or annotate the destination website in the short URL itself. For instance, http://urltea.com/g20 is the same as http://urltea.com/g20?my_site but the latter makes more sense to the visitor. And you can also use Google Talk or Yahoo! Messenger to create short URLs through a buddy called teabot@urltea.com.
SnipURL.com - With SnipURL, you can choose your own web address with some meaningful text instead of using random addresses generated by tinyurl.com. This will help visitors get an idea of what they are about to click. It is possible to modify the underlying URL without changing the existing SnipURL address. Best of all, SnipURL can generate private URLs that can only be accessed after providing a password.
Shorl.com - This may well be the favorite URL redirect service for bloggers and website owners since it provides usage statistics of your short URLs (i.e., Number of Hits). When a user clicks a URL created by shorl.com, he is shown the web address of the destination for few seconds before the actual redirection.
Now that's an intelligent design since users can opt-out even after clicking the short URL. Nothing deceptive about it.
Final Thoughts - Shorl.com gives control in the hands of the user and automatically increases the level of trust. SnipURL gives you click through stats and more control over URL text so that makes it my favorite URL shortening service.
[I personally use these services for sharing hyperlinks in my newspaper columns that are published in the Hindustan Times and Financial Express.]
ScratchYourself: Viral Sweepstakes That Brands Could Love
A new service called ScratchYourself came to our attention today. It’s a fairly simple Flash application that lets users upload an image and build a lottery-style scratch card from it. During the beta period people have a chance to win some very limited cash prizes that total $90 or so per day across all winners.
Once a scratch card has been created, users can email it to friends or embed it on their site. I created a quick scratch card with our logo and have embedded it below.
What interests me more than the front end, which would easily be duplicated, is the business model and payments infrastructure they’ve put in place. Users have an incentive to create and embed these on their blogs, MySpace page, etc.: if you create a scratchcard and someone wins a prize, you get the same prize as the creator of the card. Prizes are awarded, at the winner’s choice, via paypal, mailed check or amazon gift certificate.
The company’s business model is to attract advertisers to sponsor prizes (cash, products, coupons). If ScratchYourself turns out to be trustworthy and can circumnavigate the rather complicated federal and state regulations governing sweepstakes, brands could be attracted to this. You get a good long look at the image underneath the scratch area, which is more than can be said for most banner advertising. And publishers will like the ability to win the same prizes as their readers.
Shycast and Bix (acquired by Yahoo) are also experimenting with brand based contests, albeit through video (and Shycast is also a social network).
Akamai Releases FoxTorrent 1.0 - Firefox BitTorrent Add-on
This is no Azureus (my BitTorrent client of choice), but it does the job and saves time by allowing you to manage torrents directly from the browser. I tested it on a few (non-copyright infringing, of course) files and it worked great on the standard BitTorrent functionality. Streaming just didn’t work, although with the way the BitTorrent protocol breaks files into pieces and reconstructs them in a non linear way means you may have to wait until the file is mostly complete to even begin streaming. I’ll try it again once the files are nearly complete.
Audiobaba.com - An Acoustic Similarity Search Engine
Audiobaba is a new kind of music search engine. You type in a song you like, and they give you a list of similar songs by other artists. You can listen to the sample of those songs, and if you like them, you can purchase them at Amazon or iTunes. The selection of songs they return is based on the acoustic structure of the selected. If what they returned doesn't sound similar to you, you can give it the thumbs down, helping their system to more closely match songs to each other that are more relevant. If you like a song in particular, you can add it to your bookmarks, or favorites. It's an interesting new way to find new music. They also offer their API to developers, sharing their new search technology.
In their own words:
"Audiobaba is a next-generation music search and recommendation engine. We realize that unless you know the name of the song you want, searching for music has so far been a pretty pathetic undertaking. Because there really is no better way to describe a song than "da da dee da da da", rather than using text to search for music, Audiobaba searches for music by fingerprinting the acoustic and impossible to articulate qualities of every song in its database and searches through them acoustically. We then further refine and personalize results as we receive feedback from our valued users."
Thursday, April 26, 2007
Stewart and Caterina
Verizon/Vonage Lawsuit As A Proxy For What's Wrong With The Patent System
With the news that the federal appeals court has granted a permanent stay on enforcing the injunction placed on Vonage preventing it from signing up new customers, Tim Lee has written up a good article about how the case demonstrates many of the problems with the patent system, from software patents to obvious ideas getting patented to overly broad patents to the fact that companies are now using patents for nuclear stockpiling purposes rather than for innovation. It's an idea that we've discussed here quite a bit, and as Tim says, "Vonage's fundamental mistake was that it chose not to join this arms race. As a result, when Verizon sued, it was completely defenseless." We keep asking for people to explain to us how this is beneficial for promoting innovation, but no one seems to have a good answer. On a related note, Tim points out the latest ridiculous patent on tabbed windows, wondering "would anyone seriously claim that granting legal monopolies on the general characteristics of windowing systems is either necessary or helpful to the progress of the software industry?" Anyone?
Group Of Banks Sues TJX Over Data Breach
One of the reasons that big data breaches, such as the one at TJX, keep occurring, is that there aren't sufficient incentives in place for companies to take this issue seriously. The key then is to develop ways for companies to see value in data security, and to be properly punished for their carelessness. At this point, the government doesn't seem to be doing much on this account, and even if it tried to do something, there's no guarantee that it would be effective, since many government regulations fail to achieve their desired goals. Now, a group of New England banks have filed a lawsuit against TJX, in hopes of receiving compensation for their own expenses from dealing with the situation. Their complaint seems legitimate since it's known that the breach has contributed directly to fraud, which is something that the banks themselves have to combat. As one representative from the group put it, "Right now we've had major breaches from major retailers, and there's very little recourse and little incentive for them to change." While the tort system is often abused, it can be used by legitimately injured parties to get compensation. If the banks are successful in winning damages, it's likely to open up a new (and hopefully effective) avenue in punishing companies that mishandle their data.
Got A Good Credit Score? Rent It To Someone In Need
One of the common consequences for victims of identity theft is that they can see their credit scores get damaged, and because the big credit agencies don't offer much help in monitoring and fixing this, it can be a major hassle to get the problem resolved. Barry Ritholtz to an interesting story about a different kind of fraud, whereby people with good credit scores can sell their credit histories to people who want their own score boosted. Basically, the law states that people are allowed to add an unlimited number of individuals to their credit card accounts; it's mainly intended for parents who want to put their kids on the account. But, various websites have emerged to take advantage of this loophole, enabling people with bad credit histories to improve their score by getting access to a good credit history. It's not clear how widespread this actually is, but it pretty clearly violates the whole point of a credit score, since it's supposed to give the lender some idea of how reliable the borrower is. Fair Isaac, the company that developed the FICO score, says it's currently in talks with the FTC to stop the practice. The question, then, is whether shutting down this loophole will do the trick, or whether credit history brokers will simply find another loophole.
Zipcar + ParkatmyHouse
London is host to one of the coolest and most functional partnerships we've seen recently. A collaboration that lets people share cars and parking places! It's hard to believe it's taken so long for something like this to come around...
ParkAtMyHouse is a new service that provides affordable and penalty-free parking around public venues by enabling property-owners to rent out their empty driveways, garages, car parks and other spare pieces of land to drivers needing somewhere to park. Anyone can register to rent out their parking space to consumers and/or businesses.
The new service has just partnered with ZipCars - another progressive company that allows users to rent cars by the hour or day. Users can book a Zipcar online or over the phone at any time, any day of the week. Then all you have to do is walk to the nearby car, unlock it by swiping your unique Zipcard across the windscreen and drive away with the minimum of fuss.
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