Fascinating story in The New York Times about Google’s support of electric cars. Google’s philanthropic arm, Google.org, will be giving $10 million to support better battery technologies, plug-in hybrids and technologies that allow the cars to sell power back to the power company.
The plug in hybrids can reach up to 75 miles per gallon.
“These guys have clout with hundreds of millions of young and middle-aged people,” he said, adding that what was necessary to jump-start a new type of car was a combination of reliability, affordability and “cool.”
Not only does Google influence consumers, it influences utilities. Google’s announcement was made in conjunction with PG&E, the electric company in the area.
I recently watched Who Killed the Electric Car?, a documentary on how the car companies and politicians conspired to kill California’s zero-emission mandate. I highly recommend seeing it.
Now you can kill time watching YouTube videos anywhere, assuming you have a phone that can display streaming video. You should also have an unlimited data plan, lest you have to hold up a Brinks truck to pay your cell phone bill. Just go to http://m.youtube.com. (The link also works from a Web browser.)
The current version of the service is limited to selected videos. You can’t log into your account and show strangers videos of your kids or access your playlists. According to the FAQ, “We have a selected library of videos on the mobile website. We try to make the best videos from the website available on mobile, and we are working hard to add more content.”
The videos were intelligible on my Samsung A900, though noticeably worse than the same videos on the Web. The quality will suffice for killing a few minutes before a flight.
The New York Times has a fun read today about the rise of OpenTable, an online restaurant reservation service. One of the benefits to restaurateurs is the ability to keep track of the quirks of diners. Among the funnier quirks:
The restaurant staff knows in advance, for instance, that a regular always insists on a table under a particular piece of artwork. They know about another person’s request for kosher food — but only when dining in certain company. And there is the guest so reliably late that staff members know to add 45 minutes to the reservation time.
…
Doug Washington, a co-owner of Town Hall, said the notes were not just helpful, they are occasionally indispensable. Next to the name of one regular, who has a habit of bringing in women he is not married to, is an instruction to make sure the man’s wife has not booked a separate table for the same day.
Another frequent guest asks the restaurant to send over dessert compliments of the chef but to put the charge on the guest’s bill. Of another, who takes many of his first dates to Town Hall, the instructions read, “Do not treat like a regular!”
OpenTable is a great service. There are enough good restaurants on OpenTable that I’m likely to pick from the selections offered there. The ability to make reservations whenever I have a moment (instead of waiting on hold during the dinner rush) is a godsend.
OpenTable has its own quirks. Left unsaid in the story is that not all of the tables in a restaurant are available through OpenTable. You can sometimes call the restaurant and get reservations when it appears to be booked. Restaurants also set aside a portion of their traffic for walk-in traffic.
Last week’s chat with Post food critic Tom Sietsema has a complaint from a restaurant manager that people were putting in special requests in the “special requests” field on OpenTable and (gasp) expecting them to be honored. “A simple call to the restaurant would have prevented the problem. As it was they decided to eat elsewhere. We are in the hospitality trade, give us a chance to work for you instead of leaving writen requests that you hope we will read.”
One of my big frustrations with navigation devices and online mapping services is that it can take months to more than a year for to get new roads added, closed roads deleted and errors corrected. Making changes required getting an update from map data providers. Roads that I drove on every day couldn’t be added to the map and routings on my Acura TL’s navigation system.
It’s the first system I know of that allows users to customize the map data. The changes you make can also be shared with others and you can download changes other TomTom users have made. There’s an option to download only verified changes.
The MapShare feature will be available on the TomTom GO 720, due out at the end of July. Among the goofier features in the 720: “Voice recording capability, so users can be guided to their destination with the voices of their children, family or friends.”
Every once in a while, I get comments on my flickr pictures asking to add one of my pictures to a group, use it with a news story or include it in a travel guide. I’ve contributed pictures to groups about Italian wineries, rainbows and Kauai.
YouTube and CNN announced today debates with Democratic and Republican candidates for president. The debates will feature video questions uploaded to YouTube and will air on CNN this summer and fall. Audience questions have been featured in presidential debates before, but these are usually submitted in writing and read by a moderator or asked by an audience member in a “town hall” format.
Video adds another dimension: the questioners can use props and backgrounds to help illustrate their question. Although the questions will be screened for content and production values, it should be interesting to watch. I hope that all submitted videos will be available, not just the ones that are aired.
YouTube has already had a large effect on American politics. If it weren’t for his macaca moment, it’s very likely George Allen would have been re-elected to the U.S. Senate from Virginia, tipping the balance in the U.S. Senate. A gaffe that otherwise wouldn’t have made it on TV blew up in Allen’s face after being posted on YouTube.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee has issued a guide for candidates (pdf) on how to make the most of Internet video. Among the guidelines: assume that you’re on camera all the time, record every public event of your own and send people to record video of your opponent.
The guide also emphasizes the importance of email, blogs and the Web in a section comparing the old vs. new ways of communicating messages to the public. Its conclusion: “Voters hear about issue/candidate/opponent through blog community, local newspaper, local news station, national media, email, website, etc.” (The Politico has a great analysis.)
Internet video allows candidates to get their precisely crafted, highly produced message to voters without being filtered by the mainstream media. But, as the Wall Street Journal reports, the top videos aren’t those produced by the candidates.
An anti-Clinton “1984″ video, in which the New York senator is portrayed as a Big Brother-ish figure, accounted for about 75% of all traffic to candidate-related videos on YouTube in March, Nielsen found.
I bought an Apple TV over the weekend. It’s quite simply the most elegant, well-designed consumer electronics device I’ve used.
Apple TV works with iTunes to bring music, video, movies, photos and podcasts to life on your HDTV. (In geek terms, it’s a “digital media adapter.”)
You can virtually flip through your music collection and select what you want to listen to. Album art is shown on screen as the music plays. You can play unprotected music or music purchased through iTunes; music from competing services such as Rhapsody won’t work.
In the photos section, photos from your PC are rendered in high definition. The pictures are so vivid that I could watch them for hours. You can choose to have background music as the slideshow runs.
Apple TV also plays back audio and video podcasts, including some podcasts that are HD quality. This opens up a wide new range of content possibilities for your TV.
You can also watch TV shows and movies purchased from iTunes; I haven’t tried either of those.
The software is easy to understand and the graphics are gorgeous. The photo screensaver alone is almost worth the price of the box.
Unlike my new laptop, configuring it to work with my wireless network took just a few minutes.
A lot of companies have tried over the years to bridge the computer-to-PC divide and I’ve tried many of these products. This is the first one worth using. And this is just the first release.
Some of the things I’d like to see:
A better remote control. Apple TV comes with a very limited remote control. For content libraries with thousands of songs and photos, the remote is serviceable, but not ideal.
More Internet connectivity. You can watch movie trailers on Apple TV; you should be able to click to get showtimes. You should be able to share pictures with friends.
I’m excited about the possibilities for a device like Apple TV, but I may be one of the few. The signs so far aren’t good — I’ve seen pallets of Apple TVs sitting at Costco. In a recent speech, Steve Jobs referred to Apple TV as a “hobby”. There’s still hope, though: Jobs also announced upcoming support for playing videos from YouTube.
CNN’s ratings have been on a steady decline since 2003, when it regularly got 689,000 households to tune in each day, to a low of 383,000 last year, according to Nielsen Media Research. For the first six months of this year, it’s up to 431,000.
And where the viewers go, so do the ad dollars. Since 2003, CNN’s cable revenue has dropped 11%, from $424.2 million to $378.5 million in 2006, while digital revenue has nearly doubled, from $34.8 million to $71.4 million, according to TNS Media Intelligence.
CNN still has some great programming, amid the tripe like Lou Dobb’s hourlong anti-immigration crusade that airs each weekday. Some of the best programs, like Reliable Sources, are available online as podcasts. (I watch it from the comfort of my couch on Apple TV.)
This week’s Reliable Sources has a great montage showing how the three cable news networks handled the announcement of General Peter Pace’s replacement. All three went straight from Pace to live pictures of Paris Hilton. Video, Transcript (search for CONTESSA BREWER, MSNBC)
Fascinating story in The New York Times about Google’s support of electric cars. Google’s philanthropic arm, Google.org, will be giving $10 million to support better battery technologies, plug-in hybrids and technologies that allow the cars to sell power back to the power company.
