MIT developing carbon-free, stackable rental cars

Sure, we know you love actually owning a car, but let's be honest -- in large cities with condensed layouts, your H3 doesn't make a lot of sense.

A group of researchers at MIT have been hard at work developing a solution that's kind on the planet and your scrawny legs. A team called Smart Cities have designed a small, two-seat, electric vehicle -- which they call the City Car -- that can be "stacked" in convenient locations (say, just outside a subway stop), and then taken on short trips around urban areas. The cars -- which are based around an omnidirectional "robot wheel" that encases an electric motor, suspension, and steering -- can be "folded" and attached to a group of other cars for charging.

The lineups of rentable vehicles would be accessible from various points around a city, with six or eight cars occupying just a single "regular" car space. Of course, you'll have to forgo your 24-inch rims... but that's life.

Engadget

$200 gPC launches at Wal-Mart

PC maker Everex rolls out a budget desktop PC today that costs $200 and combines the Ubuntu Linux kernel with Google applications and open source software.

The Everex gPC, goes on sale tomorrow at Wal-mart and is being touted by the company as a close collaboration between the PC maker, the open source community and Google that is intended to "bring Linux to the masses."

The machine uses a 1.5GHz Via C7-D processor, Via UniChrome Pro IGP graphics core, and comes equipped with 512MB of memory, an 80GB hard drive, a DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive, and has built-in Ethernet.

But the real secret sauce is a software suite that begins with what the company calls its "gOS," which turns out to be a customized Ubuntu Linux kernel. The software bundle includes open source desktop applications highlighted by OpenOffice, GIMP photo software, the Xing DVD and video player, and Rhythmbox music management software.

PC World

Pay Up, Kid, or Your Igloo Melts

A virtual penguin teaches kids how to spend real cash, upsetting some parents.

New York Times

Hello, India? I Need Help With My Math

In a new wave of global outsourcing, personal chores are moving offshore, and this is leading to some daunting challenges, both economic and cultural.

New York Times

Who needs an ad agency when your corporation is a cult?

I guess there's not much point in doing creative development when when someone's already made your commercial, and tested it, for you. An 18-year-old student from Leeds gets his youtube video polished up a bit to be the television commercial for Apple’s new iPod Touch.

New York Times

Gnarley: FunnyOrDie Extends Into Extreme Sports

Will Ferrell’s FunnyOrDie video startup is spreading its wings with a new site: ShredOrDie, focused on extreme sports and hosted by pro skateboarder Tony Hawk.

TechCrunch

WPP Group Buys a Top Digital Agency

The WPP Group, the giant advertising company, bought Blast Radius, a leading interactive agency, as part of a digital shopping spree.

New York Times

Microsoft Buys Stake in Facebook

The investment ends two months of jockeying among Microsoft, Google and Yahoo for the right to invest in and forge close ties with the fast-growing social networking Web site.

New York Times

New eBay site helps finance poor

Ebay launches a new web site that allows people to invest in loans that lift people out of poverty.

BBC News

Google’s Purchase of Jaiku Raises New Privacy Issues

While Google’s Jaiku purchase may not seem like an earth-shaking event, some say it is the start of a truly interconnected world, where a chunk of our existence will migrate online.

New York Times

The Web as Dominant Platform: Google VP Articulates a Revolution

Jeff Huber, Senior VP of Google, talking about Google "Gadgets" (aka Widgets ) at the Web 2.0 Summit made a very telling statement about the future of computing:

“The Internet has already won. The Web is the platform–a mosaic of gadgets, APIs and container all over the Web.”

His declaration of the web as the dominant platform in computing describes an approach to software design that is kind of a no-brainer for anyone watching the trends in desktop widgets, Facebook applications and the like. However, this kind of thinking also represents a paradigm shift in the established thinking about how we use computers.

Thinking about networks as the basic platform, not as a function of computers, but as their essential identity, represents a change in how companies will approach software design, and how users' will approach their own PCs.

Reading this, I can't help thinking of Sun Microsystems' original vision of the future of computing; as network based, with applications living on the network rather than individual hard drives, and PCs being little more than dumb terminals with storage capacity for personal files.

The ramifications of such a structure, however, are far reaching, affecting computer cost and, therefore, the so-called "digital divide", collaboration and, therefore, the structure of new business, as well as security, ownership, copyright, and much more.

It's a simple statement that, as I said, seems obvious to anyone with a passing interest in the subject. The downstream effects of this thinking, however, are very significant.

ZDNet

Don't Fear Big Beer: The Long Tail is Nothing New

Garrett Oliver, Brooklyn Brewery Brewmaster, writes an interesting Op-Ed piece in the New York Times. Coming off the recent merger of beer giants SABMiller and Molson Coors, forming MillerCoors, he writes about how, as a "craft-brewer" he isn't worried about his business in the face of this new super-brewery.

His example of the beer industry has obvious parallels to the growing trend of locally grown produce, small batch production etc. With all the talk about the revolutionary "Long Tail" economy, it is interesting and refreshing to hear this much hyped "small is beautiful" trend spoken of in terms of "a return to normalcy" after one generation's aberration rather than a wholly new phenomena.

New York Times

Firms seek online copyright pact

Firms including Viacom, Walt Disney and Myspace unite to set guidelines to protect copyright online.

BBC

U2 Tower

What a week for music!

So Radiohead and NIN went DIY, Madonna is consolidating her music revenues with Live Nation and the RIAA is still suing housewives.

With music downloading firmly established as the distribution method of choice and the significance of record sales as a revenue generator diminishing, it seems musicians are being forced to redefine their careers, expand their thinking on what they're marketable assets are and reconsider how they manage their income sources.

Is it any wonder then, that the Band U2 has gone into real estate.

Teaming up with, apparently Great Britain's only employed architect, Sir Norman Foster, the Irish foursome of Bono, The Edge, Adam Clayton and Larry Mullen won the contract to build Dublin's first skyscraper. The tower is a 600ft shiny tilted triangle full of luxury apartments with an egg-shaped recording studio suspended at the top.

The Telegraph

MySpace and Skype to Announce Partnership

In November, MySpace will add the Internet telephone service’s features to its instant messenger software, which will allow users to make free calls from their computers.

New York Times

Blogged with Flock

AT&T gearing up for 3G

AT&T has agreed to pay $2.5 Billion to Aloha Partners for all their licenses held in the 700-Mhz range, making AT&T the largest owner of licenses in the 700-800 Mhz range, a range reserved for 3rd generation network service.

This deal paves the way for the implementation of a 3G network in the US which makes mobile internet, video and file transfer a viable enterprise. There have been many grand attempts at marketing mobile video and other large bandwidth mobile applications only to be scuppered by the limitations of the current mobile network. Look out for a wave of innovation in the mobile arena as network capacity finally catches up to the possibilities that mobile technology offers.

It's kind of a kick in the teeth for all the people who jumped on the iPhone though (the one's who didn't already get one from having their phones bricked), since the very thing that makes it so great (besides being super sexy), its capacity to show the real internet rather than the internet lite offered on most phones, is kind of pointlessly slow on current networks. The iPhone being released in Europe this fall, however, works on a 3G network since it is already well established there. Oh well, I guess it should be expected, if you buy Apple stuff you should already be used to upgrading to the next new hot gadget every other year anyway. Oh stop pouting... I'm just as covetous of those sexy little machines as the next guy.

New York Times