Author: Serkadis

Toyota announced earlier this week that it expects its global auto sales to increase 6 percent in 2010, hoping to maintain its lead over Volkswagen and General Motors as the world’s biggest automaker. However, around eight years from now, Volkswagen AG’s CEO Martin Winterkorn believes his company will become the worlds biggest automaker, outpacing Toyota and General Motors.

Winterkorn predicts that the group’s seven car marquees – VW, Audi, Skoda, Seat, Lamborghini, Bentley and Bugatti – will together account for more than 10 million car sales a year by 2018. He said that the company plans on revealing 60 “new models and new model revisions” this year alone.

Winterkorn said that half of the new models will wear Volkswagen badges, including the new Passat, Jetta, Phaeton, Touran and others. Audi has plans to reveal the new A1, A6, A8 and A7.

– By: Omar Rana

Source: AutoCar

Daily U-Turn: What you missed on 1.27.10 originally appeared on Autoblog on Wed, 27 Jan 2010 19:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Aftermarket, SEMA Show, Truck, Videos, Chevrolet, Humor, Off-Road

Oh dear. See that big bad truck up above? It’s about to jump over some dirt. The landing is not going to go well. How not well? According to our sources you are looking at $350,000 worth of truck. We’re not modified truck experts, but we’d be willing to guess that the truck is worth substantially less than $350,000 after said jump. Speaking of jumps, you should make our jump to watch the video and then read the world’s quickest technical break down of exactly what went wrong. Tip of the desert flap hat to Brad!

Continue reading Video: Leaping SEMA truck proves the meek and well engineered shall inherit the earth

Video: Leaping SEMA truck proves the meek and well engineered shall inherit the earth originally appeared on Autoblog on Wed, 27 Jan 2010 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I honestly didn’t have very much to say about Apple’s introduction of the iPad, which seems like something of a non-event, really. However, it’s fascinating to see some, such as Nick Carr, react to the device by suggesting that it’s the beginning of the end of the “PC era” in favor of specialized proprietary devices that allow companies to lock things down, act as gatekeepers and, perhaps more importantly, tollbooths:

The transformation in the nature of computing has turned the old-style PC into a dinosaur. A bulky screen attached to a bulky keyboard no longer fits with the kinds of things we want to do with our computers. The obsolescence of the PC has spurred demand for a new kind of device — portable, flexible, always connected — that takes computing into the cloud era.

Suddenly, in other words, the tablet is a solution to a problem everyone has. Or at least it’s one possible solution. The computing market is now filled with all sorts of networked devices, each seeking to fill a lucrative niche. There are dozens of netbooks, the diminutive cousins to traditional laptops, from manufacturers like Acer and Asus. There are e-readers like Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook. There are smartphones like Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Nexus One. There are gaming consoles like Sony’s Wii and the Microsoft’s Xbox. In some ways, personal computing has returned to the ferment of its earliest days, when the market was fragmented among lots of contending companies, operating systems, and technical standards.

While it’s true that all of those offerings exist, with some being more successful than others, I still wonder how sustainable most of those really are in the long term. We’ve said before that limited, locked-down proprietary solutions often win early on, but over time they quite often get surpassed by more open offerings. This isn’t always true, but it does happen quite frequently. The locked down offerings may be better initially due to a benevolent dictator — and the open solutions may be quite messy at first due to the design-by-committee nature of the crowd, but over time the crowd gets better (or, more accurately, those who are better within the crowd begin to shine and take over), while the benevolent dictator has trouble keeping up.

Instead, I think Tim Lee’s analysis of the iPad makes a lot more sense, noting that Apple is making a mistake in simply trying to funnel people into a proprietary setup with a tollbooth and controls:

The [iPhone App] store is an unnecessary bottleneck in the app development process that limits the functionality of iPhone applications and discourages developers from adopting the platform. Apple has apparently chosen to extend this policy–as opposed to the more open Mac OS X policy–to the iPad.

With the iPhone, you could at least make the argument that its restrictive application approval rules guaranteed the reliability of the iPhone in the face of tight technical constraints. The decision not to allow third-party apps to multitask, for example, ensures that a misbehaving app won’t drain your iPhone’s battery while it runs in the background. And the approval process makes it less likely that a application crash could interfere with the core telephone functionality.

But these considerations don’t seem to apply to the iPad. Apple is attempting to pioneer a new product category, which suggests that reliability is relatively less important and experimentation more so. If a misbehaving application drains your iPad battery faster than you expected, so what? If you’re reading an e-book on your living room couch, you probably have a charger nearby. And it’s not like you’re going to become stranded if your iPad runs out of batteries the way you might without your phone. On the other hand, if the iPad is to succeed, someone is going to have to come up with a “killer app” for it. There’s a real risk that potential developers will be dissuaded by Apple’s capricious and irritating approval process.

Furthermore, the same two pieces seem to differ on the ability of Apple to really significantly create such a world where Apple gets to act as the tollbooth for all content. Carr notes:

Today, Jobs’s ambitions are grander than ever. His overriding goal is to establish his company as the major conduit, and toll collector, between the media cloud and the networked computer. Jobs doesn’t just want to produce glamorous gizmos. He wants to be the impresario of all media.

Which suggests a rather forward thinking position of Jobs. Lee, on the other hand, sees it in exactly the opposite manner:

Apple seems determined to replicate the 20th century business model of paying for copies of content in an age where those copies have a marginal cost of zero. Analysts often point to the strategy as a success, but I think this is a misreading of the last decade. The parts of the iTunes store that have had the most success–music and apps–are tied to devices that are strong products in their own right. Recall that the iPod was introduced 18 months before the iTunes Store, and that the iPhone had no app store for its first year. In contrast, the Apple TV, which is basically limited to only playing content purchased from the iTunes Store, has been a conspicuous failure. People don’t buy iPods and iPhones in order to use the iTunes store. They buy from the iTunes store because it’s an easy way to get stuff onto their iPods and iPhones.

Certainly, both Carr and Lee seem to agree about Jobs’ ambitions and plans over the iPad, but where they seem to differ is the likelihood of it actually happening in any real way. If I could bet on either prediction, I’d go with Lee’s.

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Singlehood is really bringing out the animal in Susan Sarandon. The sexy sixtysomething hopped on stage and spanked a bunch of guys in pig costumes while attending an Of Montreal concert at Manhattan’s Highland Ballroom Tuesday evening.

While Apple is being lamented here and there for not supporting Flash on its shiny new iPad – boy does Cupertino have a strong dislike for the platform – Adobe has already responded to the news on the official Flash Platform blog.

The blog post, unambiguously titled “Building iPad Applications with Flash”, is mostly just to remind people of the company’s Packager for iPhone product, which will enable developers to make Flash apps function on the iPhone / iPod Touch through a work-around whereby Flash apps can be easily converted into iPhone apps using Creative Suite 5 (CS5).

We’ve written before that this could turn 2010 into the year when approximately 2 million Flash developers could potentially start cooking up stuff for the iPhone en masse. You can now add the iPad to that, it seems.

The company notes:

We announced the Packager for iPhone at MAX 2009 which will allow Flash developers to create native iPhone applications and will be available in the upcoming version of Flash Pro CS5. This technology enables developers to create applications for the iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad (though applications will not initially take direct advantage of iPad’s new screen resolution). It is our intent to make it possible for Flash developers to build applications that can take advantage of the increased screen size and resolution of the iPad.

For that latter part, Adobe points to this article by Christian Cantrell, Product Manager and Application Developer on the AIR team. The article goes in depth about how developers can build apps using Flash with authoring with multiple screen sizes and resolutions in mind.

You won’t be able to fire up, say, Hulu through your browser on the iPhone or iPad any time soon, but Adobe appears determined to show the world that Flash has its place on Apple’s products one way or the other.

And it’s also sending a message to Flash developers that they can and should stick to the platform rather than look at other ways to join the App Store goldrush.

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Editor’s note: This a guest post written by Joff Redfern. Redfern is the co-founder of FlattenMe.com, a site for creating personalized storybooks. He was formerly a vice president of product at Yahoo, where he managed Yahoo Buzz and Toolbar.

Amazon Kindle: The Road Ahead

I’m a recent Kindle fan boy. I like the instant access to earth-friendly books, the paper-like display and the way it fits in my hand like a paperback. I’ve also deeply admired the crispness of the Kindle vision—“any book, any language, in minutes”. But with Apple’s iPad announcement the playing field on which the Kindle competes shifts and the disruptive technology itself gets disrupted.

If I were running the Kindle I would answer this question today: “Are we innovating the publishing or the entertainment industry?” Is the Kindle just for my reading entertainment or is it for watching, listening, gaming, browsing, sharing photos, and communicating with friends & family too? Ultimately the answer is shaped by consumer preference, competitors and time measured in years.

As a product guy this is a really intriguing question to try to unravel—which path should Amazon choose? Over time this is what may push the Kindle into being more than just a reader . . .

For the same price, more is better

Will consumers prefer a multi-purpose entertainment tablet over a single-purpose reading device as their prices converge? This is a religious question; sides will be drawn. I look to the evolution of my own personal technology habits for the answer.

When I wanted to manage my contacts I started with a paper-based Address Book, upgraded to a Digital Rolodex, upgraded to a Palm V, upgraded to a Blackberry, then upgraded to an iPhone. Fundamentally I was trying to solve how I manage and communicate with my contacts. With each upgrade I got more functionality yet the price point for each device was not radically different.

If consumers can eventually get an entertainment tablet that also has the core features of a great reader (screen, content catalog, ease of purchasing) at under $200 they’ll want more.

Prices drop. Over time, price won’t be a factor in the purchase decision.

Today, Kindle enjoys a price advantage over the iPad. It is nearly half the price, starting at $260 versus $500 for the iPad, although the cheapest Kindle DX with an equivalent 9.7 inch screen is $489.  That is pretty close already.  What happens when the price of iPad-like devices trend down to a point of consumer indifference?

Moore’s Law and business model innovation will drive the iPad-like devices to sub-$200 pricing. Unrealistic? The retail price of the iPhone 8GB dropped ~83% in 3 years from $599 to $99.

Also keep in mind that entertainment tablets are using different math from the Kindle. The device pricing will be “subsidized” by multiple revenue streams—downloads of books, music, movies, games, apps, advertising, and more. Today I can get a cell phone device for “free”, will my iPad be “free” some day?

Competitors are playing a platform war. Is Kindle?

Apple, Google and Microsoft have massive investments in their respective mobile platforms. In particular, Apple is king of the mobile mountain. As Jobs declared today, “Apple is now the largest mobile device company in the world”.

This Apple sizzle has drawn 100,000+ developers and publishers to its iPhone (and now iPad) ecosystem. These apps are already available to entertain us in all sorts of ways on the iPad beyond what Apple exec Scott Forstall showed today.

Amazon knows this. Last week they announced a developer API is coming. So the question remains how robust is the API and will the developer community bite, or is it game over?

What would you do if you ran the Kindle?

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Perhaps Apple was just being extremely careful not to draw any attention to the widely speculated name of its new multimedia device prior to this morning’s announcement, but one simply cannot overlook the fact that the company doesn’t have ownership over any domain names related to ‘iPad’.

For now, that is.

Apple does not own iPad.com, as you may have noticed. Others have, in any case, and some even suggest that the person who registered the domain name (one Martine Bejasa) sell it to the Cupertino company to become an instant millionaire. Unlikely to happen, IMHO.

But what else doesn’t Apple own? Well, they don’t have control over even a single domain name that has iPad followed by a country or generic TLD. Out of Cupertino’s hands, at least for the time being: iPad.net, iPad.biz, iPad.info, iPad.fr, iPad.de, iPad.es, iPad.eu, iPad.se, iPad.cn, iPad.be and iPad.jp. To name but a few.

They also don’t own iBook.com, iBooks.com or iBookstore.com or anything like that, in case you were wondering.

It’s not that Apple doesn’t care about domain names. It paid heavily for iPhone.com back in 2007, and it owns iPod.com, iMac.com, iWork.com, iTunes.com etc. (but not MacBook.com, curiously). Run a search on UDRPsearch and you will find that Apple regularly fights to (re)gain control over relevant domain names that carry one of their trademarks – which it doesn’t have for ‘iPad’ (yet), just to be clear.

Just a couple of weeks ago, Apple moved to seize 16 domain names from a single individual. There’s no doubt in my mind that they’re going to be aggressively targeting the owners of the domain names listed above, once they secure or license use of the ‘iPad’ trademark.

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“The book will never die. But the textbook probably will,” says Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis. Inkling is working directly with textbook publishers. First, they’ll port their existing tomes onto Apple’s iPad as interactive, socialized objects. Then, they’ll create all-new learning modules — interactive, social, and mobile — that leave ink-on-paper textbooks in the dust.

The ten-person San Francisco startup, stacked with pedigreed veterans of Microsoft and Google, Harvard, MIT and Stanford, came out of stealth mode after this morning’s iPad launch. Funded with about $1M in seed money led by Ram Shiram and Mitch Kapor, Inkling is working with McGraw-Hill, Pearson and other top textbook makers.

Textbooks are different animals than e-book novels and business books, in ways that current e-readers can’t handle. For starters, you don’t read a textbook’s pages serially from first to last. You need to be able to jump around, skip, skim, and flip back and forth between chapter review and chapter content. A textbook’s content should ideally be dynamic from year to year, not frozen in time like a novel.

The iPad makes it possible to replace static images with interactive puzzles that MacInnis says burn important concepts in to students’ brains better and longer. He showed me a demo learning module that explained the biological concept of cellular mitosis. It starts with a real microscope image of a cell. A caption, simultaneously spoken by a voiceover (They call this karaoke mode. It turns out to help memory better than either text or speech by itself) instructs me to tap the cells nucleus three times to simulate its breakdown. Further steps in the mitosis process require me to pinch, drag or swipe components in the cell after identifying them. When I’m done, I have a memory of having walked through the process physically, rather than just scanning an illustration with my eyes.

Existing texts can be embellished with tooltips, talking text, and interactive quizzes.

Besides the interactive color format, Inkling’s technology goes beyond the Kindle and other readers by making it possible to hop around a book, to hand out individual chapters as assignments, and to take notes in highlighter yellow right on the text. The notes are sharable among a social network of students and instructor.

But the real breakthrough is in pricing. Instead of a $180 textbook, learning modules built with Inkling will be priced individually on iTunes, just as music and TV shows are. Instead of buying all 50 chapters of a 1,200-page biology book, an instructor can create a customized bundle of only the modules students will actually use. Pricing hasn’t been determined yet, but it’s likely to be a few dollars per unit — much cheaper than current textbooks. (Apple’s cut of book sales is said to be 30 percent.)

Technically, Inkling’s content format is a mix of HTML5, Cocoa and Java, depending on what content is being run on what platform. The iPad’s A4 chip is even faster than the Android G2 that gets geeks so excited, so rich layouts and interactive illustrations run quickly.

MacInnis says he half expected to be surprised at today’s Steve Jobs show by the unveiling of a competing technology. But for now Inkling is the only game outside the book publishers’ own much less advanced CourseSmart e-textbook format. “I think no one else did it because everyone else thought everyone else would be doing it,” he told me. “Nope, looks like it’s just us for now.”

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Check out our video of the iPad tablet computer that Apple announced today. This video shows off the photo app capability of the device. You can see that the 9.7-inch screen is great at changing the screen fast when you swipe it. And the screen can accomodate multi-finger gestures. The iBook app also shows that the device is very cool at displaying books in color or black-and-white. Notice the cool animation when you change the page. Lastly, the video looks great at 720p resolution.

iPad video in action from Dean Takahashi on Vimeo.

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These days, everyone is trying to go local. Yelp has cornered the market on local business reviews, Google is attempting to integrate similar functionality in Google Maps with “Place Pages,” and it’s also at the heart of promising services like location-based game Foursquare. Now AT&T wants in with a new service of its own called Buzz.com.

Before the rise of the web, AT&T was already entrenched in local advertising and information with its Yellow Pages. Then came YellowPages.com, which offered the same information as the Yellow Pages print edition, but also allowed you to search. AT&T also purchased YP.com a year ago, which seemed to be a slightly fresher take on bringing the Yellow Pages online, but that site still remains in beta.

With Buzz, AT&T is trying something new. According to Forbes, the site helps people “ferret out the best local businesses using recommendations from friends and family.” AT&T realized that it’s sitting on lots of valuable information with the Yellow Pages properties and came up with Buzz as a way to make local searches “deeper and more relevant.”

As opposed to sites like Yelp and Google Maps reviews, Buzz focuses on local business love. Users will be able to “favorite” a business and leave a few comments, but there’s no place for negative reviews. It’s a shift that local businesses will most likely appreciate, even though it keeps potentially useful information out of the hands of users.

Instead of having users build a collection of friends on Buzz, AT&T is planning to leverage existing contacts via e-mail or Facebook accounts. On the surface, this isn’t much different from what any fresh startup does by letting you import your Gmail contacts — so it remains to be seen how exactly this will be different for Buzz. But users looking for, say, the best pizza place in their area will be able to query friends on the site for their preferences.

Buzz differentiates itself from other local services by also suggesting users who may be “experts” in certain topics (in the above example, pizza) based on their “favorites” and comments. On mobile devices, the site will also be able to offer suggestions based on your location using GPS.

If Buzz was a typical startup site, I’d say it’s not unique enough to elbow into the market. Besides Yelp and Google, the local reviews market is pretty packed, with players like Angieslist, Yahoo Local, and many others vying for mindshare. Conceptually, Buzz seems to be a dumbed-down cross between Yelp and Foursquare. But with the AT&T monolith behind it — which brings a wealth of data and prestige to the site — Buzz has the potential to be very useful. If AT&T markets it well, it could attract many mainstream users who typically ignore geeky social sites.

Buzz is currently in alpha testing with AT&T employees. In a few months it will move to beta and bring in users’ friends and family, and soon after that it will open to the public. I’m interested if only to see what an old-school corporation can do in the new local space.

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In quite a few ways, Apple’s iPad and iBooks announcement today was a shot across the bow of Amazon’s Kindle. Sure, Apple played nice, even saying that Amazon has done a “great job of pioneering” the e-book space, but you can’t help but think that Apple thinks of itself as the evolution of the Kindle, not mere competition. Steve Jobs says that Apple is going to “stand on their shoulders,” and that doesn’t sound quite as benign as perhaps he meant it. So, how do the devices stack up, specifically as book consuming devices? Well, for starters, one of these things costs a whole lot more than the other… let’s break it down after the break.

Continue reading iPad or Kindle: will our wallets decide?

iPad or Kindle: will our wallets decide? originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 27 Jan 2010 18:18:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Pink, sit’cho ass down! Pop star Pink — who rose to fame as an R&B star before adopting the pop-rock sound that would become her calling card — has hit a sore note with some fans after she seemingly-mocked music Golden Girl Beyonce during a concert in Europe last month.

In video footage taken during the December show, the “There You Go” singer is caught impersonating Mrs. Knowles-Carter — with a rendition of the infamous”Single Ladies Dance” — during a performance of her smash single “Stupid Girls.” The song, released in 2006, was accompanied by a popular music video that parodied Hollywood airheads, like Paris Hilton.

Apple spent a good deal of time today selling the world on the iPad’s ebook skills. It has a nice 9.7-inch screen, 10 hour battery life, and ebook store. But how does it stack up against the current reigning ebook king, the Kindle? It’s time to call in a massive chart.

Of course it’s not all specs and stats. There are a lot more to what will likely be a bloody battle. Click through to TechCrunch where Joff Redfern, co-founder of FlattenMe.com, explores the subject even more.

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Lucky reader Andrew S. was picked by our sophisticated random number generator as the winner of our show us your office contest! Andrew tells us that “the only work that gets done is usually fueled by caffiene and any random snacks I have on hand.” That pretty well describes my own work ethic, so good on yer, Andrew!

Most of the photos sent in to us were traditional office environments. Jung Hoon K. was the only person to submit a photo of an airport lounge (Incheon Airport), and Stephen W. sent us a lovely photo of his daughter riding her bike. Matt H. had the least computer-related photo submission:

Matt O. had the busiest “office” of all the submissions:

And finally, Jeremy C. had the most entertaining submission:

“Kohler makes the best seat,” observes Jeremy. So true.

Thanks to everyone who submitted. We love seeing where you all “work”. Stay tuned for more contests!

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Filed under: Sedan, Etc., Government/Legal, Safety, Ford

When we look at Motor Trend magazine’s golden calipers, we think of a prestigious trophy awarded each year to the publication’s top car and truck of the year. Apparently, the Transportation Security Administration officials at the Detroit Metropolitan Airport see a weapon of mass destruction. Or something.

The proud engineers at Ford have been taking their well-deserved 2010 Ford Fusion Car of the Year award all over town, taking pictures and having a little fun, mimicking what athletes do when they win Lord Stanley’s Cup in hockey or the Lombardi Trophy in football. Ford Research & Advanced Engineering employee Tony Phillips went as far as Disney World with the award, but apparently not before coming to the attention of the TSA at Detroit Metro airport. Phillips had rightly brought the sizable trophy onto the plane as a carry-on – after all, who would want to tell Allan Mulally that they lost the trophy at baggage claim?

MT’s shiny hardware was eventually let on the plane after “some interesting discussion, and it made its way to Orlando to ride some rides and hang with Mickey. Surprisingly, the Orlando TSA agents were more familiar with Ford’s award than were the security agents in the Motor City, and congratulations were given to them on the accomplishment. Just as an FYI for Ford, you can bring by your trophy to Autoblog headquarters any time you wish. We won’t even frisk you at the door.

[Source: @Ford Online]

Ford employees take Motor Trend calipers to Disney World, hit TSA snag in Detroit originally appeared on Autoblog on Wed, 27 Jan 2010 18:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Surprised that the iPad doesn’t have a camera? Yeah, so are we – and if these screenshots of the just-released iPad emulator are any indication, so is someone on Apple’s software development team.

Tucked away within the iPad’s contacts application is an “Add Photo” button, purposed with.. well, adding photos. Everyone likes having photos assigned to their contacts, and there’s more than enough space on this thing to sync photos of all your friends – so nothing too strange there. What is odd, however, is the prompt that pops up: do you want to “Choose Existing Photo”, or do you want to “Take Photo”?

So what’s going on here? Did the iPad once have a camera, and it was pulled on such short notice that they didn’t have time to strip it out of the software? Does Apple planning on stealthily adding a camera to the features list some time in the next 60 days, as some sort of super-late “One more thing..”? Or did Apple just port much of the iPad contacts app from the iPhone version, and forget to lop out one of functions? The last possibility seems most likely – but if it ends up being that second one, we’d be just fine with that.

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