Author: Serkadis

Filed under: Detroit Auto Show, Coupe, Performance, Cadillac

Back in 2008, Cadillac threw down the gauntlet against its German competitors in an attempt to show that it could build the best high performance mid-sized luxury sedan. The result was the CTS-V. Even if the recent CTS-V Challenge proved to be somewhat less than authoritative in establishing the current car’s dominance, it did show off its capabilities. Now Cadillac is expanding its CTS-V range by adding all of the V goodness to the coupe bodystyle that was revealed last month at the LA Auto Show.

The CTS-V coupe will debut at the Detroit Auto Show next week with everything that makes the CTS-V one our favorite super-sedans, albeit in a sexy new two-door shell. Aside from the sleek yet thick-of-beltline new suit, the only other real difference from the existing V is the one-inch wider track at the rear axle, which may or may not be noticeable when driving, and a marginally lower mass. The 556-horsepower supercharged LSA V8 engine and the choice of a manual or automatic six-speed gearbox carries over. We highly recommend that anyone considering a V regardless of bodystyle check the option box for the Recaro seats, they are worth every penny.

Carryover or not, we can’t wait for a crack at the V coupe this summer. Now if only Cadillac would hurry up and build a V-wagon.

[Source: Cadillac]

Continue reading 2011 Cadillac CTS-V Coupe muscles in with a quickness and a thickness

2011 Cadillac CTS-V Coupe muscles in with a quickness and a thickness originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 05 Jan 2010 00:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Given a bleak year in 2009, where is the biodiesel industry headed in 2010?

For quite some time, we’ve been noting how ridiculous UK libel laws are (and, by the way, we still have not been sued by the person in the UK who insisted we had libeled her), and there have been ongoing efforts to change those laws. While it’s not much, it’s a start to find out that the UK government has set up a panel to review the law. Hopefully this isn’t just a panel to make the issue go away. It does sound like a fairly comprehensive review, however. The panel is expected to present its findings in early to mid-March, with a plan to try to implement any recommendations relatively quickly.

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The Red Green Show officially went off the air in 2006, but the indelible legacy it left on DIY gearheads lives on and to this day, duct tape is second only to Bondo as the destitute crowd’s favorite repair tool. Among those most heavily influenced by Red Green’s jury rigging is a member of RideLust’s own staff (who shall remain nameless) that attempted a half-assed repair job of their own on an aging Volvo. Hilarity later ensued at the inspection station (followed immediately by a rejection sticker) and in honor of the laughs they elicited we’ve assembled an assortment of our favorite moments in Possum Lodge engineering.

I don’t think this is one driving school anyone would recommend, but Peter Griffin’s wife apparently thought Grand Theft Auto will teach him a thing or two about city driving. And what do you know, it sure

One of my favorite French cat style websites OhMyCat posted these beautiful photos of a traditional Japanese cat bed known as neko chigura. Based on a design for an infant cradle, each neko chigura is handcrafted using rice straw, which keeps kitty warm in the winter and cool in the summer.

This video shows how the beds are made, with help from some gorgeous feline assistants:

If you can’t see the video above in your email, click here to watch it on the site.

Neko chigura beds are available in five sizes ranging from 4,000 Yen ($43 US) to 17,000 Yen ($184 US). I’ve never seen these in the US, but would love to find one.

Congratulations to Juanita from Washington, D.C., winner of the December Moderncat giveaway! Juanita’s cats Tasha and Squirrel will have a blast on their new mahogany Catemporary Cat Tower and matching shelf from The Refined Feline. Have fun kitties!

With the clock ticking on tomorrow’s unveiling of the Nexus One, it seems most of the focus has been on the hardware and plan details (see below). But looking at the Nexus One as just another Android phone that Google happens to sell is to miss its potential significance as a hardware platform for Google’s increasingly popular software offerings. Specifically, the Nexus One could have big implications for Google Voice and Google Apps.

One of the ways that a Google-branded phone makes the most sense is as a platform for the company to expand the functionality and user base of Google Voice. With the Nexus One launch, we may see Google Voice open up to more users, and we might also see the introduction of long-awaited number portability to the service.

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Ok – so in addition to the Boulder events, I also go to Bay Area events.  I’ve got a Return Path board meeting on 1/21 in the Bay Area and that evening Matt Blumberg – Return Path’s CEO – is going to be presenting at the great Startup2Startup series that Dave McClure puts on with the help of his glorious sponsors.

I’ll be there along with a bunch of other great folks (I even paid my $90 for my ticket).  Matt’s got a fascinating story and Return Path is another company in my world that had an awesome 2009 and is poised for a phenomenal 2010 (how’s that for adverbs adjectives.)  Matt will be talking about the history of Return Path (dating back to 1999), lessons he’s learned, and best practices in email deliverability.

If you don’t know Matt, he’s got a great blog titled “OnlyOnce” (since you can only be a “first time CEO once and this is Matt’s journey.”)  Some special secrets about Matt – he was on the FeedBurner board so he can tell you funny stories about Twitter’s COO and he’s run two marathons with me so he can tell you funny stories about things I say after 4+ hours running.

January 21st, 6pm – 9:30pm at the Garden Court Hotel on 520 Cowper Street in Palo Alto.  Sign up now.  Be there or be forever destined to have email deliverability issues.

Enough with the calendar stuff.  I promise my next post will be a long essay about some obscure topic that will generate a lot of controversy.  Or maybe I’ll just list out the marathons I’m going to run in 2010.

Ed and Jillian
Jillian says they are a real-life couple, so if that’s true, that’s cool. Ed comes out and they smooch and it looks more real than a lot of couple reunions on this show. Ed says he’s extremely glad that he came back and he’s so happy. He says he knew he was going to propose in Spain. They talk about the proposal and smooch some more, but Jillian seems to be kissing him weirdly. Am I alone in this?

Chris asks them about the future and they say that Jillian is coming to Chicago for awhile and move in with Ed. They have family reunions and weddings to attend this summer and then she’s moving on September 1st. They say they will probably get married in the next 12 months. Wow, bold.

Audience question time. The first girl asks about the mankini shorts. Seriously, dude. It looked like he stole Jillian’s bikini bottoms. Second question is about bedroom problems and they say there are no more bedroom problems. Chris then gets the line of the night in, “A great country & western singer once said, ‘Love, it don’t come easy.’” Snerk. I heart Chris Harrison.

There is no announcement about the next Bachelor, which is interesting. I hope it’s Reid or Jake. You can vote at ABC.com. Thanks for reading, gang! See you back here in the fall!
Newsweek even goes so far as to ask that loaded question: Is The Bachelorette rigged? One need only look at this spring’s Bachelor finale to see similar soap opera-ish antics: the show’s star dumped the winning girl for the runner-up.

Speculation like this is to be expected when real-life seems so much like drama. Perhaps that goes to show that people who watch soap operas aren’t missing as much real-life as we think. Nah, I don’t know anyplace where everyone has been married or involved with everyone else at one time, as in a soap.

Here’s how the Jillian Harris and Ed Swiderski moment unfolded: first, Jillian had to reject Kiptyn. Then Jillian had to reject Reid, in a surprise return. Then Ed came on for the ultimate question.

“I want to be with you forever. I want a family with you. I want you to give me a hard time when we’re 80-years-old. Jillian, will you marry me?”
Ed said tonight “There’s nothing that would prevent me from getting down on one knee” that may not be the case.

And when Jillian rejected Kiptyn saying “In the mean time, I’ve fallen in love with somebody else.”

Unfortunately there is no post Finale interviews from Bachelorette , so we have to wait and see the direct reactions form Jillian Harris and Ed Swiderski (if any) to prove whether they are still together.

Related posts:

1. Jillian And Ed, Jillian And Ed Swiderski Still Together Ed and Jillian Jillian says they are a real-life couple,…
2. Jillian And Ed, Jillian And Ed Still Together Newsweek even goes so far as to ask that loaded…
3. Jake Pavelka, Jake Pavelka Biography Jake Pavelka: I didn’t go in pushing. The show does…

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Just a quick PSA: if you’re rocking a ContourHD, you should head over and update the firmware. The configuration options available on the ContourHD 1080p (mic volume, EV +/-, autofocus mode) are now available for your 720p version. If Peter convinced you to buy one back before the 1080p was available, now you will no longer feel left out from our exposure value changing parties.

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It’s always great fun to watch shows like CSI enhance video surveillance footage. Sometimes it’s the most entertaining part of the hour-long show. But those clunky systems used by American police forces have nothing on the Chinese equipment featured in the video above. This shit is amazing. It could probably read the serial number on the Hubble Telescope.

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You’ve probably never heard of Matt Mireles and Bjorn Liljequist but with a $4000 dollar budget and an engineering team paid in iPhones, the two already have Meebo founder Seth Sternberg as their advisor and praise from VC Fred Wilson. The duo’s filtering service Speakertext will launch at tomorrow’s New York Tech Meetup and the concept is a simple one – to make video interesting.

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Like Tubechop, Speakertext allows users to omit the boring parts of a video; however, the service’s transcription component offers a new and important twist. Says CEO Mireles, “At some point, longer videos become useless. It’s the metadata and the fact that we’re allowing it to be indexed that make this a great tool.”

The service uses the YouTube API and replaces the YouTube player with a Speakertext player. Users can search video text for relevant quotes and embed the linked quote or the Speakertext player and video into their blogs. To index your own video with the system, you can either transcribe it yourself or opt into a Mechanical Turk package. For $20 dollars per hour of video, you can have speeches, events and podcasts transcribed. The company plans on creating a premium service and launching on additional video platforms in the months ahead. For now, Speakertext offers the following benefits:

Attribution & Monetization: Says Mireles, “Video piracy often happens because users can’t get the clips they want from the original publisher. We’re building a monetizable search strategy for video publishers.” Because Speakertext just sets the original video to a new start point, there is no need for a new file to be uploaded by a secondary publisher. In this way, the secondary publisher highlights the content they want and the original publisher maintains credit, links from search and potential revenue channels.

Accuracy: Stop for a moment and think about the quagmire of misinformation swimming across the web right now. From religious figures to political candidates to CEOs, there is no shortage of misquotes in the media today. If you want to be a transparent company, government or influential entity, video transcription is a great way to dispel myth from fact. The company will also crowdsource transcription accuracy in a method similar to that of the Worldwide Lexicon Project.

Education and Research: Video has been a boon for visual learners. Now, rather than simply searching titles and descriptions, transcription will allow users to find valuable educational resources. The company is already speaking to open courseware proponents to increase access to quality materials.

Mireles points out that Google is currently in the process of automating captions for YouTube. Says the startup founder, “We have no doubt whether searchable video like this will be the standard in 5 years. We just want it to be us that does it.”

Speakertext will launch to the public at 5pm PST tomorrow evening at speakertext.com.

Thanks to David Cohn for the tip!

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[Thanks, Gavin]

Viliv’s HD5 PMP leaked ahead of CES, packs Windows CE, 32GB of storage originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 04 Jan 2010 23:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sony just expanded the Alpha DSLR with the new A450. It’s got the same 14.2 sensor and BIONZ processor as the A550, but it doesn’t have the fast-AF live view focus system or flip-out LCD screen — you’ll be looking at relatively small 2.6-inch fixed screen. Price doesn’t seem to be official yet, but we’re hearing it’ll come in under $1,000, so it could deliver some decent bang for the buck. Great — but we’re hoping we’ll hear some more about those rumored 3D Alphas later this week. Hit the read links for some more pics.

Sony launches Alpha A450 DSLR originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 04 Jan 2010 22:48:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s CES again kids and that means it’s time to pump out as many iPod / iPhone peripherals as possible. Most are lame reworks of designs we’ve seen over and over and over again. iLuv’s App Station, however, is a refreshing update that combines a few old designs: as a rotating iPhone speaker dock, the device can be shifted into vertical or horizontal positions for movies or music. But there’s also a free downloadable iLuv App that turns the device into a big ol’ alarm clock. The App Station is expected to go on sale in February for 130 beans.

iLuv App Station speaker dock rolls with its own Alarm Clock App originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 04 Jan 2010 22:39:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Well, the world is back at work (as evidenced by the 327 new emails I got today).  And my friends at Silicon Flatirons at CU Boulder are cranking up the head with Crash Courses, Entrepreneurs Unplugged, and Workshops.

1/13/10: 6-8pm @ Wolf: Crash Course: How to Build a Company by Jason Mendelson followed with a “Start-up Internships” networking event for local startups looking for CU students interested in internship opportunities. 

1/25/10: 6:15-7:15pm @ Wolf: Entrepreneurs Unplugged With Ryan Martens (Founder/CTO) and Tim Miller (CEO) of Rally Software.  I’ll be interviewing Ryan and Tim about their experiences with Avitek (their first company together), BEA (which acquired Avitek in 1999), and Rally Software – their second company together which had a spectacular 2009 and is poised for an even better 2010.  Don’t forget to ask them about the really cool thing that they announced between the time I wrote this blog post and 1/25/10.

1/27/10: 6-7pm @ ATLAS: Workshop: Your Market: Connecting with your Customers by Tom Keller.  Tom was most recently the CEO of Intense Debate (a TechStars 2007 company that was acquired by Automattic, the makers of WordPress).  In addition to talking about marketing, Tom might drop a hint or two about his next gig which he’s getting started with the new year.

There is plenty more coming, but don’t miss these – I think they’ll all be great ones.

Ed and Jillian
Jillian says they are a real-life couple, so if that’s true, that’s cool. Ed comes out and they smooch and it looks more real than a lot of couple reunions on this show. Ed says he’s extremely glad that he came back and he’s so happy. He says he knew he was going to propose in Spain. They talk about the proposal and smooch some more, but Jillian seems to be kissing him weirdly. Am I alone in this?

Chris asks them about the future and they say that Jillian is coming to Chicago for awhile and move in with Ed. They have family reunions and weddings to attend this summer and then she’s moving on September 1st. They say they will probably get married in the next 12 months. Wow, bold.

Audience question time. The first girl asks about the mankini shorts. Seriously, dude. It looked like he stole Jillian’s bikini bottoms. Second question is about bedroom problems and they say there are no more bedroom problems. Chris then gets the line of the night in, “A great country & western singer once said, ‘Love, it don’t come easy.’” Snerk. I heart Chris Harrison.

There is no announcement about the next Bachelor, which is interesting. I hope it’s Reid or Jake. You can vote at ABC.com. Thanks for reading, gang! See you back here in the fall!
Ed said tonight “There’s nothing that would prevent me from getting down on one knee” that may not be the case.

And when Jillian rejected Kiptyn saying “In the mean time, I’ve fallen in love with somebody else.”

Unfortunately there is no post Finale interviews from Bachelorette , so we have to wait and see the direct reactions form Jillian Harris and Ed Swiderski (if any) to prove whether they are still together.
Newsweek even goes so far as to ask that loaded question: Is The Bachelorette rigged? One need only look at this spring’s Bachelor finale to see similar soap opera-ish antics: the show’s star dumped the winning girl for the runner-up.

Speculation like this is to be expected when real-life seems so much like drama. Perhaps that goes to show that people who watch soap operas aren’t missing as much real-life as we think. Nah, I don’t know anyplace where everyone has been married or involved with everyone else at one time, as in a soap.

Here’s how the Jillian Harris and Ed Swiderski moment unfolded: first, Jillian had to reject Kiptyn. Then Jillian had to reject Reid, in a surprise return. Then Ed came on for the ultimate question.

“I want to be with you forever. I want a family with you. I want you to give me a hard time when we’re 80-years-old. Jillian, will you marry me?”

Related posts:

1. Bachelorette Jillian And Ed Still Together, Jillian & Ed Swiderski Ed and Jillian Jillian says they are a real-life couple,…
2. Jillian And Ed, Jillian And Ed Still Together Newsweek even goes so far as to ask that loaded…
3. Jake Pavelka, Jake Pavelka Biography Jake Pavelka: I didn’t go in pushing. The show does…

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