Author: Serkadis

Whether or not you subscribe to the school of thought suggesting Samsung’s (005930) meteoric rise has been fueled in large part by unabashed copying of Apple (AAPL) products, there is certainly evidence to support the idea that Apple’s iPhone and iPad have inspired Samsung’s most popular devices. Count TheStreet’s Ernie Varitimos among those who believe Samsung’s success is due in large part to mobile devices that are “direct knock-offs” of Apple products, but he thinks Apple is now getting ready to make a move that Samsung will find impossible to copy.

Continue reading…

The authenticity of this doesn’t appear to have been confirmed by anyone so far, but a link to an old school Angelfire site was posted at Hacker News (via Gizmodo), and it was allegedly created by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg when he was a kid.

Again, it’s unconfirmed, and could be a fake, but either way, it’s pretty funny.

The site has links for: Java Drawing Tool, The Web, GPA, The Vader Fader, Pong Game, Magnetic Poetry, Molecule Viewer, The Best…, About Me, Cow-a-Bungee, Monkey Theory and Base Converter. It links to the email address: [email protected].

The about page says:

Hi, my name is…Slim Shady. No, really, my name is Slim Shady. Just kidding, my name is Mark (for those of you that don’t know me) and I live in a small town near the massive city of New York. I am currently 15 years old and I just finished freshman year in high school. I have remodeled this website in an attempt that perhaps some search engine will recognize it. I am trying to promote my new AOL Program, The Vader Fader, which you can download elsewhere on this site. It is a decent fader. If you have any comments about this website, the java applets on it, or the Vader Fader which I am trying to promote, please contact me. My E-Mail address is at the bottom of this page.

Zuckerberg’s hometown (as listed on his real Facebook Timeline) is Dobbs Ferry, New York. Born in 1984, he would have indeed been fifteen when Eminem’s “My Name Is” came out in 1999.

Here’s his description of the Vader Fader:

This is a fader that I made when I was a little bored and somewhat inspired on a long weekend in between finals. I am not sure what versions of AOL it works with but it has worked for myself and for all of my friends who have AOL 4.0. I am not sure if it works with AOL 3.0 though. This fader is a small download and it features a great AOL-Style Interface with many options. Its options are mainly limited to fading but the program can manipulate AOL in such a way that it can fade Chat Text, Instant Messages, and E-Mails. I first saw a chat fader and I thought that it was cool. However, it is very rare that one can find a program that fades Instant Messages as well. It is veritably impossible to find a program that fades E-Mails. So take advantage of this fader and tell your friends to download it as well!

Of his “The Web” app, he says:

As of now, the web is pretty small. Hopefully, it will grow into a larger web. This is one of the few applets that require your participation to work well. If your name is already on The Web because someone else has chosen to be linked to you, then you may choose two additional people to be linked with. Otherwise, if you see someone who you know and would like to be linked with but your name is not already on The Web, then you can contact me and I will link that person to you and put you on The Web. If you do not know anyone on The Web, contact me anyway and I will put you on it. In order for this applet to work, you must E-Mail me your name and the names of the two people that you would like to be linked with. Thank you!

Sounds like something a 15-year-old Mark Zuckerberg might create. Hopefully Aaron Sorkin’s already planning the prequel.

According to this version of Zuckerberg, the saying of the year at the time was “Suck it!”

You can check out the site here.

We’ve reached out to Zuck for comment, and will update if we hear back (which we almost certainly won’t).

Image: Zuckerberg launching “The Wall” in 2004

Google stock is currently taking a hit after reaching an all-time high last month. Any number of factors could be contributors to this, but some think it’s directly related to people’s decreased dependence on finding information with Google.

Can Google keep its edge in search for the long term? Let us know what you think.

Forbes, for example, has a piece out today called “Four Reasons Google’s Stock Is Slowing Down“. The first two reasons listed in this article are directly related to this issue: 1. Losing search market share and 2. Shift to mobile search.”

The author references a New York Times article making the rounds today, in which the case is made that people, particularly on mobile, are choosing other services first, based on the type of information they’re looking for.

“Say you need a latté. You might pull out your phone, open the Yelp app and search for a nearby cafe. If instead you want to buy an espresso machine, you will most likely tap Amazon.com,” writes the Times’ Claire Cain Miller. “Either way, Google lost a customer.”

This is a legitimate concern for Google. It’s been apparent, for years now, that any eventual decline in market share for Google would likely come at the hands of a combination of services chipping away at the need for consumers to rely upon one search engine for finding things. That is opposed to just switching search engines and using something like Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, etc.

Google itself has acknowledged this in the past, and even today, Google’s Adam Kovacevich shared the NYT article.

As Web Search Goes Mobile, Competitors Chip at Google’s Lead nyti.ms/Z2ZePD

— Adam Kovacevich (@adamkovac) April 4, 2013

Of course it helps Google’s case against antitrust complaints when reports come out that suggest there is legitimate competition. The Times reported back in September that 1/3 of shopping searches start on Amazon vs. only 13% on general search engines. Kovacevich shared that too.

Interestingly, when Google’s stock hit an all-time high earlier this year, analysts chalked it up to optimism for Google’s core business and mobile apps. Yahoo Finance said the market is convinced that these have “many good years ahead of them.”

Still, the search landscape just isn’t what it used to be.

As Miller writes, “No longer do consumers want to search the Web like the index of a book — finding links at which a particular keyword appears. They expect new kinds of customized search, like that on topical sites such as Yelp, TripAdvisor or Amazon, which are chipping away at Google’s hold. Google and its competitors are trying to develop the knowledge and comprehension to answer specific queries, not just point users in the right direction.”

That’s just a handful of the various services that are already replacing Google for certain types of searches for many consumers. There’s one app that just about everybody has on their smartphone, and it could potentially take an even bigger chunk out of Google’s mobile search share in time than some of these others.

Facebook Graph Search’s impact on consumer behavior has been underwhelming so far, but Facebook is pretty much keeping it that way so far. While the number has probably increased some by now, at last count, only about 0.09% of Facebook users even had Graph Search yet. Facebook was clear from the beginning that the roll out would be slow, and that many more features and capabilities would be added in the future. In short, Graph Search has nowhere to go but up. It will only get better and return results for more types of information.

As we’ve noted in the past, local search is one areas where Graph Search could make an immediate impact in the market. Interestingly, Facebook just renamed its “Nearby” feature on iOS to “Local Search”.

Not only has Graph Search not rolled out to the majority of Facebook users yet, but it has also not rolled out to mobile. Local search is all the more relevant when used from a mobile device, and that will be key for Facebook’s search offering once it finally does hit its mobile apps.

But its potential impact won’t be limited to local search. If Yelp can make a dent in Google’s market share from mobile for certain types of local searches, Facebook can surely make a dent across a broader spectrum of verticals (from both mobile and desktop). Graph Search recently has already started letting you search for things like movies “watched” by friends (or others), books “read” by friends or others, and TV shows “watched” by friends or others. That’s not just stuff people have “liked,” but stuff people have read and/or watched, regardless of whether or not they like them. Wondering whether or not you should watch “The Hobbit”? Search “my friends who have watched the hobbit” and ask them their opinions. You get the idea.

This is only going to expand to encompass more types of searches, and the more types of searches it works for, the more searches it can take away from Google. Is it going to replace Google in general? I’d say almost certainly not, but as a multitude of services chip away at Google’s searches, Facebook in particular is one of the few that has the potential to chip away at a bigger piece of the pie. Combined with the Amazon shopping searches alone, Google’s pie share could start looking a lot different.

The Times piece cites comScore data, saying that searches on traditional services (dominated by Google) declined 3% in the second half of last year after rising for years, while the number of searches per searcher declined 7%. Meanwhile, searches on vertical search engines increased 8%. Do you think this pattern is going to reverse anytime soon?

Will there come a time when the majority of searches aren’t performed using Google? Let us know what you think in the comments.

The Photon 3D scanner is a self-contained laser scanner that creates point clouds of real objects, allowing you, in turn, to create printable files of things you build or need to copy. It is $399 on Indiegogo and looks amazing. In short, you have no idea how badly I want to order one of these right now.

Built by Adam Brandejs and Drew Cox, a pair of Torontonians, the device uses a small laser and a turntable to scan all the surfaces of an object. The scans are converted to STL or OBJ files – filetypes usable by most 3D printers – and can be printed.

Similar projects are popping up these days, including a Makerbot-backed scanner – but none look as polished as this model. Some features:

I’m fascinated with the concept of in-the-field 3D scanning and it seems that we’re getting there faster than ever. We’re living in a world of miracles and wonder the fact that you can spend four Benjamins (or centiloonies or whatever they have in Canada) and get a 3D scanner is amazing to me.

Apple (AAPL) has Ping, Microsoft (MSFT) has Zune, and now BlackBerry’s (BBRY) BBM Music can be added to the list of failed music ventures embarked upon by consumer electronics companies. As the reinvigorated smartphone vendor fights to stage a comeback in 2013, it is also apparently still trimming the fat. The latest addition to the chopping block will be BBM Music, the curious service that gave users access to 50 songs of their choosing as well as songs chosen by each of their BBM contacts. “BBM Music service will be discontinued as of June 2, 2013,” BlackBerry said in a letter to customers picked up by CrackBerry. “For paying customers, April is the last month that you will be billed. In May, as your BBM contacts stop using the service, songs in your playlists will begin to turn grey and will no longer be available.”

Two large booms in the browser wars sounded on Wednesday; the loudest in a long time. First was the news that Mozilla and Samsung are partnering for a new mobile browser engine called Servo. Later in the day, before the echoes of that news disappeared, Google announced it would be forking the WebKit browser engine to create Blink. WebKit currently powers most browsers, so what gives?

Sorry, Mozilla, the Google news is bigger … for now

Depending on your point of view, this situation at its base level is either very good or very bad. On the positive side, both efforts are intended — at least partially — to create browser engines that take better advantage of multi-core chips and parallel processes to speed up the web on mobile devices. That’s great, but the biggest downside is the potential for websites to be rendered differently through different browser engines; that’s bad for users and for web developers, of course.

The Mozilla/Samsung effort is a long way off from any public final releases. And Mozilla isn’t really a force in the mobile web space these days, even though it makes a solid mobile browser. Samsung’s Android devices can obviously run Google’s Chrome browser now and Samsung has also skinned a browser for its devices; personally, I find Chrome to be a better choice, but opinions will certainly vary.

So the real story here, at least for the short- and medium-term, is Google’s effort. It has greater influence on more web users due to adoption of the Chrome browser on the hundreds of millions of desktops, laptops and mobile devices. And between Chrome and Safari, more people use the WebKit browser engine than any other. Here is worldwide browser/engine usage data from StatCounter, measured in March of 2013:

• Chrome (WebKit): 38.07%
• Internet Explorer (Trident): 29.3%
• Firefox (Gecko): 20.87%
• Safari (WebKit): 8.5%
• Opera (Presto): 1.17%

The current browser state and Google’s reason for the change

The open source WebKit rendering engine is currently used by Apple’s Safari browser — both on OS X and iOS — Chrome, BlackBerry 10 and, ironically, Samsung’s Tizen platform. As a result, it’s the most widely used browser engine. But Apple owns the trademark for the name WebKit, and that tells you part of the reason Google is forking it. The other part? Google already has its own JavaScript engine in Chrome called V8, even though it uses WebKit for rendering.

Google doesn’t want to use browser technologies that have been primarily used or built by others when it thinks it can fork or build its own code to make the web faster. And that’s a good part of the reason for the fork: speed. Not just speed the end user will see, which was partly why Chrome was built — the other part was clearly strategic — but speed of development. From the Chromium blog, emphasis mine:

“However, Chromium uses a different multi-process architecture than other WebKit-based browsers, and supporting multiple architectures over the years has led to increasing complexity for both the WebKit and Chromium projects. This has slowed down the collective pace of innovation – so today, we are introducing Blink, a new open source rendering engine based on WebKit.”

As an open source project, WebKit has many chefs in the kitchen, which is not necessarily a bad thing. But it also has different customers on varying platforms, so in order to keep it working for all, it takes a larger amount of effort in coding and testing than if it were used by a single entity. Alex Russell, a Google developer explains:

“Directness of action matters, and when you’re swimming through build files for dozens of platforms you don’t work on, that’s a step away from directness. When you’re working to fix or prevent regressions you can’t test against, that’s a step away. When compiles and checkouts take too long, that’s a step away. When landing a patch in both WebKit and Chromium stretches into a multi-day dance of flags, stub implementations, and dep-rolls, that’s many steps away. And each step hurts by a more-than-constant factor.”

As Russell works directly on Chrome for Google, it’s fair to question his motives here. It’s up to you to believe him or not. For my part, I do. I worked for years as a Software Quality Assurance tester in a Fortune 100 company and I’ve seen exactly what Russell is talking about. Projects were routinely delayed because the primary team made software changes that had negative downstream effects on other teams using the same code. Coordination was a nightmare.

The other side of the story: Web standards and bad intentions

The obvious question here is how much of Google’s effort is truly meant to improve the web versus how much of it is to take a shot at Apple? That’s a business question that can have a negative impact on web users as a whole if web standards are ignored or changed in favor of a particular browser component. Out of all the reactions I’ve read, Rob Isaac’s interpretation of the Blink news illustrates this best. He translates Google’s effort as:

We have a direct strategic interest in destroying Apple’s mobile platforms because their lack of participation in our advertising and social ecosystems does not benefit our long term goals. You should expect Chrome and Blink changes in the short term to be focused in this direction.

In the longer term, we aim to have sufficient control over the installed base of web browsers to dictate whatever conditions we consider most appropriate to our business goals at the time.

Snarky? Yes. But possibly part of Google’s rationale? Sadly, also yes. Google’s entire business is built upon the web, so exerting control over the web protects that business. In the Blink announcement Google says it will maintain transparency and use open standards, although it’s possible — likely even — that any new functions or features in Blink could be lobbied for becoming standards:

In practice, we strive to ensure that the features we ship by default have open standards. As we work on features, we track their progress in the web standards community with the Chromium Features Dashboard, which lets us be transparent about the status of each feature and about how we make decisions about which features to enable by default for the open web.

If, indeed, the Blink effort creates any new standards, it wouldn’t likely happen for a long, long time. For all the talk about HTML 5 over the past several years, the standard itself isn’t expected to be stable until 2014. But make no mistake: there’s clear potential for Google to have more direct influence over standard web browser technology as the result of Blink. And that’s something that no single company really should have.

It’s too early to say if the good outweighs the bad

For now, the situation is well worth watching over the next six to 12 months. We’ll see what Mozilla and Samsung actually produce with their collaboration, for starters. We should see a leaner and meaner Chrome as Google starts paring out code — up to 4.5 million lines and 7,000 files, says Google — from WebKit in Blink. Those are clearly good things. But we’ll also have to see what, if anything, from Blink looks like it could be pushed as a web standard. That will be the clearest warning flag that Google’s “Do no evil” theme is just a front in the new browser battle.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• What Does the Future Hold For Browsers?
• HTML5’s a Game-Changer for Web Apps
• Takeaways from mobile’s second quarter

For almost three years many of the creators of Sun’s Zettabyte File System have been slaving away in a Menlo Park, Calif. building trying to build a chip that would improve the performance and reliability of flash memory for high performance computing, newer data analytics and networking. Funded by Andy Bechtolsheim, the startup is called DSSD, and a recent hiring campaign plus the release of several patents offers some clues as to what this stealthy startup is about.

DSSD was founded in 2010 by Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore — both part of a select few of engineers with experience building out storage operating systems. With the backing of Bechtolsheim, a Silicon Valley rock star and co-founder of Sun Microsystems, who has backed Google and co-founded switch startup Arista, the company has some of the smartest people in the Valley working there. No one from the company wanted to comment on the story.

My sources tell me the startup is building a new type of chip — they said it’s really a module, not a chip — that combines a small amount of processing power with a lot of densely-packed memory. The module runs a pared-down version of Linux designed for storing information on flash memory, and is aimed at big data and other workloads where reading and writing information to disk bogs down the application.

This fits with the expertise of the team, but this is a problem that others are trying to solve as well with faster and cheaper SSDs and targeted software to to optimize the flow of bits to a database. But the proposal here appears to be about designing an operating system that takes advantage of the difference in Flash memory when compared to hard drives to boost I/O.

For example, on old disk drives you store a group of bits in sequential order, but in reality those bits may get dropped anywhere in the drive. After regular use, when you delete a file, a tombstone marker is placed on the “deleted” file and you have to then find that tombstone and re-write just the amount of data in that space and then find more space for the rest. So the data goes everywhere.

But the DSSD system sounds like it treats files not as a series of bits but as an object that gets a name. That name is the file’s address and it stays the same for the life of the file. The result is there’s no central index that stands between sending the data to storage and storing it, and people can write to it in parallel and not worry abut overwrites. It is both faster and can scale out.

For more details, we can turn to the six patents that DSSD has filed. In mid-March Storage Mojo unearthed patents affiliated with the company that imply it is building a type of faster object-level storage using Flash that’s more durable. From the Storage Mojo article:

So what are they building? They are taking a radically different approach to the problem of high-performance transaction processing storage. The use of flash is a given in TP, and the extra durability, scalability and guaranteed read latency would be very attractive in large TP applications.

The most surprising piece is the object storage-like characteristics suggested by the patents. But handling billions of small objects at high-speed in a flat namespace would make it easy to distribute object indexes among hundreds of users, reducing file system I/O latency. The 3D RAID could eliminate the encoding overhead inherent in advanced erasure codes while providing similar robustness, enabling way-beyond-RAID6 availability.

For those who aren’t storage or computing buffs, the problem here was well explained in a fireside chat that Bechtolsheim had with my colleague Om Malik at our Structure:Data 2011 conference. In it Bechtolsheim outlines the problem that the network causes for access to big data around the 6-minute mark and the need to build new interfaces that can take advantage of the parallelism inside flash chips compared to hard disks. If you do that, you can expand the capabilities of flash beyond just density because you can write data to it faster, meaning the network no longer gums up the works.

Of course, when talking about using flash in more places, there’s always the question of whether this architecture will offer enough of a performance gain to justify the higher price per gigabyte of flash over a hard drive, but for that information we’ll just have to wait.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• AWS Storage Gateway jolts cloud-storage ecosystem
• Dissecting the data: 5 issues for our digital future
• Flash memory: the continuing disruption of enterprise storage

Russian search leader Yandex announced a redesign of its homepage today. The goal, according to the company, was to make the most relevant information more visible and more easily accessible.

The page is less cluttered than previous versions (you can see them all here), and has less text. They’ve replaced images with blocks of text, and placed related items together. News from big media outlets, for example, are now placed with news from blogs.

“We have moved the most popular services to a more visible position and our specialist services went to the background – for example, Yandex.Mail is now in a more prominent spot, while Yandex.Direct and Yandex.Metrica have moved down to the bottom of the page,” the company explains. “The Yandex.Maps feature has been expanded, so that users can now find the nearest pharmacy or cafe with one click, along with taxis, public transport routes and panoramas. As a result, the homepage is both simpler and more functional.”

According to Yandex, the new page is up to 50% faster than the previous one.

“Yandex is both a search engine and the gateway to the internet for millions of people,” said Vera Leyzerovich, head of desktop and mobile products at Yandex. “On the homepage, besides the search bar, users are accustomed to seeing information that they need every day – news, weather, exchange rates, the traffic situation. But the more data it includes, the harder it is to navigate. On the new version, we have retained the emphasis on search and kept the page informative and familiar for its users, but at the same time we have made it clear and uncluttered, so people will enjoy visiting it again and again.”

A report came out earlier this year that Yandex had surpassed Bing in search queries.

To expand on its Big Data platform, IBM has announced new technologies for data acceleration and new Hadoop System advancements, including an industry-first innovation called “BLU Acceleration,” which combines a number of techniques to dramatically improve analytical performance and simplify administration.

“Big data is about using all data in context at the point of impact,” said Bob Picciano, general manager, IBM Information Management. “With the innovations we are delivering, now every organization can realize value quickly by leveraging existing skills as well as adopt new capabilities for speed and exploration to improve business outcomes.”

IBM BLU Acceleration delivers key information to users faster by extending the capabilities of traditional in-memory systems – which allows data to be loaded into Random Access Memory instead of hard disks for faster performance – by providing in-memory performance even when data sets exceed the size of the memory. Innovations in BLU Acceleration include “data skipping,” which allows the ability to skip over data that doesn’t need to be analyzed, such as duplicate information; the ability to analyze data in parallel across different processors; and greater ability to analyze data transparently to the application, without the need to develop a separate layer of data modeling. Another industry-first advance in BLU Acceleration is called “actionable compression,” where data no longer has to be decompressed to be analyzed.

Optimized for Hadoop

IBM also announced a new IBM PureData System for Hadoop, designed to make it easier and faster to deploy Hadoop in the enterprise. The new system integrates IBM InfoSphere BigInsights, which allows companies of all sizes to cost-effectively manage and analyze data and add administrative, workflow, provisioning and security features, along with best-in-class analytical capabilities from IBM Research. Kelley Blue Book, the leading provider of new and used car information, will be evaluating the new PureData System for Hadoop to analyze click stream data created by users on its website.

“Kelley Blue Book collects all kinds of data from various sources, so managing the efficiency of data is critical to grow our business,” said Steve Chow, vice president of technology and data intelligence for Kelley Blue Book. “We see many opportunities to leverage the IBM’s offering as a strategic platform to expand on our analytic ecosystem and tap the value of social media, text and machine data to get a better view of our consumers and customers to improve their overall experience on KBB.com.”

Stream Computing

Two additional big data announcements from IBM include new versions of InfoSphere and Informix.  An update to its enterprise-ready Hadoop offering, InfoSphere BigInsights make it easier to develop applications using existing SQL skills, also features compliance security and high availability features vital for enterprise applications. A new version of InfoSphere Streams, unique “stream computing” software that enables massive amounts of data in motion to be analyzed in real-time, with performance improvements, and simplified application development and deployment. A new version of Informix including TimeSeries Acceleration for operational reporting and analytics on smart meter and sensor data.

IBM held a Big Data Summit Wednesday to announce the new innovations, and will provide a free broadcast event April 30th to dive deeper into the announced solutions.

Nearly 100 years ago, the Anderson Carriage Company produced and sold one of the most popular electric vehicles of the time: The Detroit Electric. With production peaking at 1,000-2,000 cars in 1910, the company eventually renamed itself after its popular model and sold nearly 13,000 electric vehicles during its 32 years of production. The company never recovered from depression, producing its last EV in 1939.

Detroit Electric is back. Meet the first car to wear the historic nameplate in over 70 years: The SP:01.

The brand was revived in 2008 by Albert Lam, former Group CEO of the Lotus Engineering Group and Executive Director of Lotus Cars of England. Now headquartered in Detroit’s historic Fisher building, the company is set to restart Detroit Electric starting with the SP:01 electric sports car.

The SP:01 is just the first from the Detroit startup. More family friendly vehicles are in the works, with two new models in the pipeline for 2014. The company is also setting up its production shop somewhere in the Detroit area where it expects to have a yearly production capacity of 2,500 vehicles. This facility will create 180 new jobs.

Detroit Electric only plans on making 999 examples of the SP:01. That’s well under the 2,400 Tesla Roadsters produced during its four-year run. With a starting price of $135,000, the SP:01 also has a starting cost higher than the Roadster. But at least it’s just as fast.

Detroit Electric claims the SP:01 is the fastest pure-electric production car on the market. And that’s true since the Roadster is no longer available. It’s claimed, although yet verified, performance numbers puts the SP:01 on the same level as the limited edition Tesla Roadster Sport. Plus, with a claimed top speed of 155 mph and 0-62 mph time of 3.7 seconds, it’s quicker than just about every other car out of Detroit including the new Corvette Stingray.

Propulsion is provided by an air-cooled, asynchronous AC motor powered by dual 37-kWh lithium-polymer batteries. The system is good for 201 horsepower and 166 pound-feet of torque — not bad for a car that weighs just 2,403 pounds. Strangely enough, unlike the dead-simple Tesla Roadster, the SP:01 features a four-speed manual transmission or an optional two-speed automatic. Since the electric engine is either on or off, there is no need to use the clutch when stopping or starting.

Detroit Electric claims the SP:01 has a driving range of 180 miles based on the New European Driving Cycle, but as Autoblog notes, while the official calculations haven’t been released, that likely results in about 150 miles on a U.S. cycle.

It’s no secret that the carbon-fiber shell comes from a Lotus Exige. Interestingly enough, the Tesla Roadster is based largely on the Lotus Elise platform.

Per Detroit Electric’s press release, it takes 4.3 hours to fully charge the SP:01 from a 240 volt outlet with 32 amps. It takes 8 hours on a 13-amp sources. But like the Chevy Volt, the SP:01 can output its electrical charge, serving as a sort of $135k electric generator in a pinch.

Here’s hoping that Detroit Electric finds the same level of success as its forebearer. The EV market is wide open for new players. Tesla, while Detroit Electric’s main competition, has a large head start but by no means a monopoly. Fisker is dead in the water, GM and Toyota are pursuing hybrids, and Nissan is seemingly content selling low-end electric vehicles.

The SP:01 will hit the production lines this August. The price starts at $135,000.

T-Mobile on Thursday reported its subscriber figures for the first quarter of 2013, when it managed to grow its branded subscriber base for the first time in four years. The nation’s No.4 carrier added 579,000 net new customers in Q1, 3,000 of which were branded customers. In the same quarter last year, T-Mobile lost 349,000 net subscribers. The carrier’s postpaid subscriber count still dropped by 199,000 last quarter, though that figure represents a significant improvement compared to the 510,000 net postpaid customers T-Mobile shed in the first quarter last year. The carrier’s full press release follows below.

Continue reading…

Once we have a home full of connected devices do we really want to individually manage all of them? Mike Kuniavsky, a principal in the Innovation Services Group at PARC, explains in this weeks podcast how we’re going to have to think differently about programming devices for the internet of things. Devices will need to know what they contain and how those elements might contribute to a certain scenario in the home.

For example when you want to watch a movie, you shouldn’t have to program 6 different devices in your home to tell them what they should do when you toggle on your movie setting, your devices should have some sense of what they are capable of and how to enter a set mode. As he did in his chat in February at our San Francisco Internet of Things meetup, Kuniavsky, likened this device behavior to video games like Minecraft or Lemmings, where preset general behaviors determines how the game unfolded as opposed to rigid and specific actions. He explains all this and more in the podcast. Check it out.

(download this episode)

Subscribe to RSS

iTunes

Stitcher Radio

Show notes:
Host: Stacey Higginbotham

• How many connected devices will we need and how do we choose the ones we want?
• Information processing is now cheap enough that it’s just another line item to consider when building a physical product.
• What does the future of programming for the internet of things look like?

PREVIOUS IoT PODCASTS:
Podcast: How IBM uses chaos theory, data and the internet of things to fix traffic

Electric Imp aims to make the Internet of Things devilishly simple

IoT podcast: When devices can talk, will they conspire against you?

Internet of things Podcast – Almond+’s nutty idea: Making sensor connectivity a snap

Podcast: Why the internet of things is cool and how Mobiplug is helping make it happen

OTHER GIGAOM PODCASTS:

Call in podcast: T-Mobile iPhone and the best Android keyboard

Podcast: How Indie Game stayed “indie” and became a hit

Call in podcast: T-Mobile iPhone and the best Android keyboard

Samsung Galaxy S 4 blasts off, RIP Google Reader

Call-In: Galaxy S 4 predictions, Chromebook Pixel cloud storage

Podcast: Facebook’s feedin’; Lean In’s meanin’; and everyone’s Hadoop-in

Call in podcast: Galaxy S 4 predictions and Chromebook Pixel cloud storage

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013
• Analyzing the wearable computing market
• The Internet of things: creating tomorrow’s health care

Pesticide chemicals are usually derived from petroleum, and some of them are based on fluoride. Pesticides are, of course, sprayed on crops to kill insects. But an overwhelming mountain of scientific research shows that pesticides remain intact on foods, and when they’re…

Has your family doctor or GYN ever talked to you about “breast thermography”? This is a simple, non-invasive way of accessing your risk for breast cancer – yet most conventionally-trained physicians have no idea about its benefits. Although a surprising fact to most…

In the name of “science,” our world has built a network of deadly, unstable nuclear power plants that quite literally threaten the very future of human civilization. As the Fukushima accident shows, all these “scientists” who think they’re so smart are actually incredibly…

Of all the threats to humanity today, none is more destructive than modern-day “evidence-based science.” And by the word “science,” I don’t mean the humble pursuit of knowledge using genuine scientific methods. What I mean is the dogmatic, corporate-driven brand of distorted…

Plastics have long been heralded as a “scientific” breakthrough, and in many ways, plastics really are amazing materials. For cars, prosthetics, computers and industrial uses, plastics offer enormous advantages over other materials. But when it comes to health and…

While a case could be made for “clean” vaccines that are manufactured without mercury, aluminum, MSG and formaldehyde, no such clean vaccines are offered to the public. All vaccines offered at pharmacies, health clinics and hospitals contain brain-damaging metals and…