Category: Mobile

As computer-makers like Dell get ready to launch their first handset in the U.S., Lenovo has started considering acquisitions in order to beef up its mobile operations.

In November, the world’s No. 4 PC brand, bought back Lenovo Mobile, a mobile handset maker it founded in 2002 and spun off in 2008. Lenovo paid $200 million in cash and shares in order to get the group back together. At the time, the company said it doesn’t intend on competing internationally, but rather will focus on China, where Lenovo Mobile primarily operates. But Lenovo’s CEO told a German newspaper over the weekend, that it’s considering further acquisitions, Reuters reports. “Let’s say, we are keeping an eye out. We will make an acquisition if a company really fits, if the price is good and if we think we will be able to integrate it into our group.”

Names frequently dropped as likely buy-out candidates are Palm (NSDQ: PALM) and BlackBerry’s Research In Motion. But Lenovo wouldn’t necessarily have to buy a OS and handset maker in order to be more aggressive in the space. It could purchase an OEM, and then rely on open-source operating systems, like Google’s Android, Symbian, or LiMo. It could even work with Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), like it does on the PC side.

Related

• Lenovo Buys Its Old Handset Division Back For $200 Million
• What’s Palm’s Next Move?

Ever needed to know how strong you cell signal is or will be while on the go? Sensory, a French company that gathers and shares network coverage data, recently added more than 600,000  Verizon Wireless data points to its free service. This data is in addition to 5 million informational bits previously captured around the world on various GSM networks — and inclusion of Sprint’s network is coming soon as well.

Crowdsourcing cellular data isn’t exactly new — I recently examined a similar service offered by Root Wireless. There are a few key differences between the approaches of Root Wireless and Sensorly, however. While Root Wireless offers similar software for handsets, you can’t yet view data within the app — coverage maps are only available through a web site. After spending time with the Sensorly application on my Google Nexus One, I find that viewing network coverage in the same app that collects data is far more desirable than switching to a clunky mobile browser. Sensorly leverages the mapping service on my phone, making it easier to navigate, pan and zoom.

And Sensory beats Root Wireless in coverage areas since the latter is limited to U.S. networks at the moment — Sensorly’s data, meanwhile, currently covers networks in nine different countries. One other nice touch is Sensorly’s reporting on Wi-Fi networks in addition to cellular voice and data.

Sensorly is only supported on Android phones, but an iPhone application and possibly one for Microsoft Windows Mobile devices are forthcoming. Additional maps for other countries and networks will be added as the crowd continues to feed coverage data to the service.

Images courtesy of Sensorly

Related research on GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

Everybody Hertz: The Looming Spectrum Crisis

Whether you like or hate it, it is hard not to be astonished by a Hollywood-blockbuster style opening day enjoyed by the iPad. Apple just announced that it sold 300,000 of these devices. At a base price of $499 (for the 16 GB model), that makes it about $150 million on day one.

Add to the fact that Apple says nearly a million apps and 250,000 eBooks were downloaded — we are looking a nice little chunk of change here. Some analysts estimated that Apple would  sell more than 600,000  iPads over the weekend. Clearly that didn’t happen. From the Apple release:

Apple today announced that it sold over 300,000 iPads in the US as of midnight Saturday, April 3. These sales included deliveries of pre-ordered iPads to customers, deliveries to channel partners and sales at Apple Retail Stores. Apple also announced that iPad users downloaded over one million apps from Apple’s App Store and over 250,000 ebooks from its iBookstore during the first day. “It feels great to have the iPad launched into the world — it’s going to be a game changer,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “iPad users, on average, downloaded more than three apps and close to one book within hours of unpacking their new iPad.” (Apple Press Release).

In comparison, Apple sold just over 250,000 units during the first weekend iPhone became available in July 2007. In July 2008 when the 3G iPhone first launched, Apple sold 1 million of those phones over the weekend after its Friday launch, and folks downloaded 10 million apps from the four-day old app store. That’s an average of 10 apps per phone as compared with 3.3 apps for the iPad, although we have had fewer days of sales to measure the success of the iPad.

However, the iPad is supposed to sell  7.1 million units worldwide in 2010 according to research firm iSuppli, whereas our GigaOM Pro analysts estimate that the conservative sales of the device will be around 6.1 million in 2010. (Forecast from GigaOM Pro: Tablet App Sales to Hit $8 Billion by 2015.)

Wade Roush wrote:

In the 15 months since its launch, Boston-based Apperian has won a reputation as a leading creator of sophisticated business-to-consumer iPhone apps such as Timberland Expedition, Intuit’s TurboTax TaxCaster, and American Greetings’ e-card app. But the startup didn’t set out to be just another mobile app studio: the real vision of founder and CEO Chuck Goldman, a former Apple exec, has always been to bring the power of the iPhone (and now the iPad) to the enterprise and business-to-business worlds. And this summer, his company is going to make the leap.

Apperian won’t stop building custom apps for clients, “because that’s such a great learning environment for us,” says Goldman. But at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in California this June, Apperian will launch a software platform meant to help big companies create, deploy, and manage iPhone and iPad apps on their own. Called the Enterprise Application Services Environment, or EASE, the platform could fill a huge gap left by Apple—namely, the lack of any framework to help companies experiment with internal applications for the iPhone and iPad. It could also put Apperian in position to dominate the nascent market for enterprise iPhone/iPad application development tools.

Goldman says EASE will supply software components that Apple doesn’t put into its own software development kits—for example, “connectors” that let apps tap into enterprise databases. (Imagine, to use a hypothetical example, a FedEx iPad app that lets drivers access the company’s package-tracking database wirelessly.) But just as important, EASE will provide a way to distribute apps to employee’s iPhones or iPads, and keep them updated once they’re installed.

Right now, there’s no way within Apple’s iTunes ecosystem to do those things. Getting enterprise apps onto iPhones is an entirely manual process—which is obviously a problem for companies that might want to deploy the devices to thousands of employees. Goldman says EASE, which will be sold to companies on a subscription basis for about $2 to $3 per device per month, automates the distribution process by communicating with each employee’s copy of iTunes, in effect creating a kind of enterprise app store.

Once EASE is launched, Goldman says, Apperian will turn its attention to raising a proper Series A funding round. So far, the company has been subsisting on $1.5 million in seed funding from Lexington, MA-based CommonAngels, supplemented by $1.2 million in services revenue from its first year of app-development work. “We’ve been using the services business to go out and learn the market and be talking with the big brands,” says Goldman. “That was always the strategy. Now we’re probably looking to raise $3 million to $5 million, in July or August.”

On Wednesday, Goldman walked me through the details of the EASE platform and the company’s vision for the future of enterprise applications on Apple’s mobile devices. Below is an edited transcript of our conversation.

Xconomy: Most people see the iPhone as a consumer device. What makes it attractive for business?

Chuck Goldman: It’s true, the more enterprise-level, transformative apps haven’t really hit the mainstream yet. When I say transformative, I mean moving the business process to a mobile platform. We’ve started doing that with clients like Progressive in the area of mobile claims processing and roadside assistance with AAA. But the next wave of apps, I think, is going to come from mobilizing sales forces, from internal apps that transform the way workers work. But the first challenge is …Next Page »

UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS

Thea Chard wrote:

It was just after 10 a.m. on a hazy spring morning as Ed Shadle drove a trailer the size of a semi-truck to the far end of the Spanaway Airport, a quarter-mile active airstrip located 15 miles south of Tacoma, WA. A handful of his 44-person crew, which includes his son Cam and eight-year-old grandson Alex, had already arrived and were busy setting up for the day—a table of coffee and donut holes for the crew and onlookers, a Subaru converted into a mobile data acquisition center, and several barrels of fuel at the ready.

For Shadle, 68, and his partner and co-owner of the North American Eagle, Keith Zanghi, 55, the day’s engine test was just one stop along a more than 11-year journey to build the fastest land vehicle in the world. The goal: 800 miles per hour.

Shadle and his crew, all based in Washington state, were busy lowering the Eagle, a 56-foot-long tubular car forged out of the fuselage of a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter, from the trailer. The nose and tail cones had been removed for transport, reducing the car to 48 feet in length—just short enough to fit inside the trailer. Other crew members busily prepared the steel cables that would anchor the car to two gravel-filled trucks, weighing 80,000 lbs in all, and to a nearby tree with deep roots—a “safety precaution,” the crew said. This setup procedure was nothing new for them.

“We’ve probably been out to this airport maybe 25 times, and we tie up to our favorite tree back there,” Zanghi said. “Luckily it’s not raining. It could be worse.”

For both Shadle and Zanghi, the thirst for speed was born out of a love of drag racing at an early age. And naturally, like any “typical teenager of that era,” as Shadle calls himself, drag racing led to more racing at higher speeds, and eventually, flight.

“For me, it started back when I was just a kid back in the late ‘40s, early ‘50s. My uncles were all back from World War II and they got into stock car racing—the old jalopies running on dirt tracks. And of course we used to go to the races, so I’d hang out in the pits and watch my hero uncles,” Shadle said. “My first drag race on a real strip was at an airport. We raced on Friday nights for 50 cents and you could race all night.” Later, in his 20s, Shadle joined the Air Force and developed his career as a pilot.

“Just like Ed, we all grew up with the space program. The Mercury astronauts were my heroes—the Gemini and Apollo [as well]. All I did was build model airplanes when I was a kid,” Zanghi said.

The shared passion for flight, speed, and all the machinery behind them brought Shadle and Zanghi together in the 1990s when they both found themselves on a team working to build a vehicle that could break the land speed record. They were beat out, however, by Great Britain’s Richard Noble and Andy Green, who in 1997 achieved the current record of 763.1 mph with the ThrustSSC.

“At that time, the record was 633 mph, which is about 140 mph below the speed of sound, so we were building a car that was designed to go sub-sonic.” Zanghi said. When the British team broke the record, their car went supersonic. “As soon as that happened, we knew our car was obsolete,” he said.

When their project folded, Shadle and Zanghi decided to team up on a brand new endeavor, and in 1999 they bought the Eagle’s junked F-104 fuselage, without wings, for $25,000. The single-engine supersonic interceptor had its heyday flying with the U.S Air Force from the late 1950s to the late 1960s.

According to Zanghi, the F-104 had the ideal shape for land speed racing. The body was …Next Page »

Android is growing like crazy on smartphones — and stagnating everywhere else. That’s because Google is keeping its app store off all Android devices that aren’t smartphones. Such an approach is understandable only in the sense that it gives the company more control over the Android experience, but it will ultimately serve to send consumers in search of devices that offer them more freedom.

Take the ARCHOS Internet Tablet that debuted in September of last year. The 5-inch slate device offers a mobile web experience powered by the Android platform, yet doesn’t offer access to the Android Market — preventing its owners from making use of even the most basic Google apps, like Gmail.

So how does Google deem a device worthy of the Android Market? Wired reports that the Market won’t appear on a device if it’s missing key hardware elements that could hamper the full experience, such as a camera, persistent data connectivity or integrated GPS radio. I can understand such an approach — to a point. After all, it’s a downer to install a video-capture-and-upload app to a device that has no camera. In this case, the end user is no better off than if he or she didn’t have access to the Market in the first place.

I reached out to Google myself, expecting to be pointed to a simple list of what it takes to gain market access — Android is an open approach, right?  Not so much. Here was the response I got from a company spokesperson:

“We ask our partners to build compatible devices, and we provide handset manufacturers with a Compatibility Test Suite. This tests devices on a range of factors to ensure they are compatible with the Android platform. Only devices that pass this test will be allowed access to Android Market, which ensures only compatible devices can download apps from our market.”

And what, exactly, makes a device “compatible”? According to the same spokesperson:

“The Compatibility Test Suite tests the device on a number of different factors and covers a majority of the APIs to see if anything inadvertently got broken. Sometimes merely porting Android to a different processor platform reveals issues with the port. This test suite makes sure all the APIs are present and behave as expected.”

Hardly an illuminating answer, and precisely the sort of approach that needs to change if Google wants to move beyond smartphones.

One way to mitigate this issue is for Google to open up access to the Market but manage software installation at the application level. Google already has the tool set to do this — when you install an Android application, the Market provides a list of device functions the software will have access to (see image). If the Android Market already knows what hardware a given program requires, why not let that mechanism work at the application level? For example, if an application requires the presence of a camera, simply don’t allow for installation of it on a non-camera device. I’m sure there are technical issues I’m not addressing here, but from a strategic directive, this ought to be possible.

If Google did this, then consumers wouldn’t have to worry if their device meets an esoteric list of hardware requirements — they could enjoy the software for which their device is equipped. Developers could gain a wider audience and earn more revenue in this scenario because of more potential customers. Hardware makers could offer devices with more appeal and functionality through software titles. And Google would come out ahead by offering a better experience with fewer restrictions on a potentially larger range of devices.

Access to the Android Market doesn’t have to be an either-or scenario. And given the open nature of Android, I don’t think it should be.

Related research on GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

• Google’s Mobile Strategy: Understanding the Nexus One
• Forecast: Tablet App Sales To Hit $8B by 2015
• Company Profile: Google (free)

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Twitter creator Jack Dorsey (right) sets up his new product, the Square mobile payment system, on an iPad at Sightglass coffee in San Francisco. Dorsey is also an investor in Sightglass.

Availability on the iPad represented Square’s official public launch (our initial review). Some people see big potential in iPad Point of Sale systems but others question the form factor and argue that mobile phones will make better mini-cash registers. Square has a product that works with iPhones as well.

Click here to see ReadWriteWeb’s full coverage of the iPad’s launch.

Photo used with permission from Eddie Codel.

Discuss

Ever since Steve Jobs first announced iBooks for the iPad, pundits have been wondering about the future of the Kindle and similar e-book readers in the face of this new competition. Now that we actually have access to an iPad, we had a chance to take a closer look at both the iBooks and Amazon’s Kindle for iPad apps. We are still waiting for the B&N iPad app, but both iBooks and iPad for Kindle already highlight the iPad’s potential as an e-book reader.

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iBooks

It doesn’t come as a surprise that Apple managed to develop the prettier e-reader app. Switching from the iBooks store – which looks a lot like the App Store – to your bookshelf is done through a nifty animation. Newly downloaded books and samples smoothly slide into the bookshelf and thanks to a faux 3d look and a page-flip animation, the app itself mimics the look and feel of a book. When you click on a book in your shelf, it flips open and zoom to the page you left off.

Flipping the iPad to landscape mode switches iBooks from displaying on page per screen to a more book-like two-page view. Given how wide the iPad’s screen its, this makes it a lot easier to read as the individual lines are much shorter.

With regards to customization, iBooks allows its users to change the size of the font, but also the font itself (Baskerville, Cochin, Palatino, Times New Roman and Verdana). You can also set the screen brightness right from within any book, which is great for reading at night. As far as we can see, however, you can’t switch to white text on a black background.

Another neat feature is the search function that feels a lot like Spotlight on OSX. This search feature is extremely fast – though sadly it only works for the book that you are currently reading. You can’t search through all of your library, though you can initiate a Google and Wikipedia search from within any book (these open up Safari, however).

The iBooks app can also read DRM-free ePub texts. You simply download the e-book to your computer, drag it into iTunes and after your next sync, it will appear in iBooks.

iBooks Store

The iBooks store mostly features books between $9.99 and $14.99 (with a few outliers). There are currently about 30,000 free books in the store (courtesy of Project Gutenberg) and about 60,000 books from most major publishers – though there are still some holdouts. Every book in the store allows you to download a free sample (sometimes more than 50 pages long).

Kindle for iPad

Amazon, of course, offers a far larger store than Apple. With close to 450,000 paid and free books. It’s worth noting that the Kindle store also launched with slightly more books (about 88,000).

Compared to iBooks, Kindle for iPad feels a bit more pedestrian, as it doesn’t feature fancy animations. Pages just slide left and right and instead of two-page view when you flip the iPad to landscape mode, you just get a single page with a very wide layout. The Kindle app also doesn’t allow users to customize the font of a book, though it does offer the standard screen brightness and font size settings.

Update: we originally reported that the iBooks app doesn’t allow users to highlight text. We were wrong. Just select any part of the text in a book and select “bookmark.” You can even change the color of these highlights. As far as we can see, there is no annotation feature in iBooks, though.

As with its other mobile apps, Amazon forces its readers to download apps from the Kindle online store. The only way to access this is through the browser. Here, Apple’s ability to integrate the store into the e-reader application is a big plus.

Verdict: iBooks is the Better App; Kindle is the Better Platform

In terms of functionality, the choice between the two apps depends on your needs. If you need to highlight and if you want to take notes, then the Kindle app is the only way to go. If you just want to read, the iBooks apps is just fine. Prices in both the iBooks and Kindle store are likely to be very similar – especially now that Amazon is slowly giving up on its idea of selling all e-books at $9.99.

The real advantage of the Kindle app is that you can read and sync books with more devices. You can start reading a book on the iPad at home or on the plane, for example, and then continue reading on your iPhone while you are waiting in line at the post office. Chances are that Apple will launch an iBooks app for the iPhone sooner or later, but until then, investing in Kindle books seems like a smarter decision as you don’t lock yourself completely into Apple’s smaller ecosystem.

Discuss

After a surprisingly short wait in line at our local Apple Store, where about 100 people lined up for their reserved iPads – and another 100 who didn’t have a reservations – we finally took possession of our very own Apple tablet. We will take a closer look at all the apps, hardware and iPad-optimized web sites over the course of the next few days, but here are our first impressions after spending some quality time with the iPad.

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It’s Very Fast, A Little Bit Heavy and a Little Bit Magical

Without a doubt, the first thing you will notice is the sheer speed of the iPad. Web pages render very fast, switching from landscape to portrait mode only takes a second – even in image and video-heavy apps like the Popular Science app or the ABC Player – and apps open extremely fast.

The device itself is light for its size, feels very solid, but still feels a bit heavy when holding it with one hand. Most of the time, we don’t think this will be and issue as you will probably hold the device with two hands, but if you have wrist issues, this is definitely something to keep in mind.

A More Intimate Experience

Apple uses the word “magical” whenever the company talks about the iPad. After using the iPad for a while, we can’t quite call it magical, but it’s definitely a huge step forward for personal computing. Being able to manipulate the web with your fingers directly on the screen, browsing through the New York Times or Popular Science app on the couch and checking up on your Twitter friends in the TweetDeck app just takes on another dimension when you are using the iPad. It is indeed, as Apple calls it, a more intimate experience.

Yes, the iPad doesn’t do multitasking, chances are that you won’t want to use it for heavy content creation tasks and the iPhone was more revolutionary than the iPad, but if you already use your iPhone to surf the web on the couch and keep up with email, the iPad is better at all of these tasks than the iPhone and more comfortable to use than a laptop or netbook.

Read on for more detailed impressions of some of the iPad’s hardware and software features.

Screen

Apple wasn’t kidding when it said that the screen on the iPad would be gorgeous. It’s not just that the extra screen estate allowed developers to build easier to use apps, but the screen really makes colors pop and the viewing angle is close to 180 degrees.

At the end of the day, though, it’s really the size of the screen that makes all the difference when compared to an iPod touch. While some developers have only re-purposed their iPhone apps for the iPad so far, some apps like the Epicurious cooking app are already making good use of this extra screen estate by putting tabs on the side and bottom of the screen.

We should note, though, that running iPhone apps that haven’t been optimized for the iPad isn’t a very magical experience. Regular iPhone apps work just fine, but the blown-up fonts look fuzzy and using those apps just isn’t a lot of fun.

Of course, we don’t have any hands-on experience about the iPad’s battery life yet, but we will update this post later today with more info once we get some more real-life data.

Virtual Keyboard

The iPad keyboard takes some getting used to. On a lap or on a table with the iPad in Apple’s nifty case, typing with two hands is easy. If your hands are big, you can probably use both of your thumbs to type in portrait mode. Typing in landscape mode with the iPad in your hands means that you can only use one hand, however, and the iPad can quickly feel a bit heavy if you are holding it with just one hand.

Apple’s Own Apps

We haven’t had a chance to fully appreciate Apple’s own email, contacts, calendar apps, but our first impression is that they are all well designed, work as advertised and – thanks to making use of the bigger screen – are generally much easier to use on the iPad than on the iPhone. Safari, of course, is the highlight here, where web sites render just about as fast as on a notebook and browsing even non-mobile optimized sites feels perfectly natural (though, of course, without Flash some sites just don’t work very well).

The iPod app now looks a lot more like iTunes, with a sidebar on the right (in portrait and landscape mode). Interestingly, Apple did not include cover flow here.

iBooks

iBooks, Apple’s e-book app, is a very capable e-book reader. Prices in the iBook store are typically between $9.99 and $14.99 (we also found a few books for $16.99 and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged retails for $27.99). It’s worth noting that the store also features a huge selection of free books from Project Gutenberg. We will take a closer look at the iBooks app and compare it to the other e-readers on the iPad later today.

Discuss

Wade Roush wrote:

I’ve returned home victorious after my morning adventure at the Apple Store in Boston’s Back Bay. As I write this, my new iPad is synching with iTunes–a process that takes some time, if you have a lot of apps, music, and photos that you want to transfer over to your iPad. So I haven’t yet really tried it out.

Being at the local Apple Store opening on the day some fantastic new product comes out is a ritual no geek can forego. So I set my iPhone to wake me up at 5:00 a.m. this morning, chugged some coffee, and rode my bike over to Boylston Street. The line was short at that point, which gave me time to stop at Dunkin Donuts for more coffee. Starbucks was still closed—a sight I rarely see, as I’m not a morning person. When I finally rolled up to the store at 6:19, I snagged the 20th spot in line, which I felt was a credible showing. Hey, I’m no Scoble. (The uber-tech-blogger was first in line at the Palo Alto Apple Store, just as he had been for the launch of the iPhone 3G.)

Though it’s a gorgeous warm day in Boston, it started out chilly, and the section of Boylston Street in front of the Apple Store, being so close to the Prudential Center, was a wind tunnel that my fleece wasn’t built to weather. So I shivered along with my line buddies. One was a guy named Nick, a Boston University sophomore studying computer science. Nick explained that he actually works at the Apple Store—in fact, his shift started at 11:00 a.m. today—but that Apple employees weren’t allowed to pre-order or reserve iPads for purchase. He wanted to make sure he got one, so he decided to come out and stand in line with everyone else. Nick is studying all the languages you need to build iPhone and iPad applications, and he was bubbling with anticipation.

I was, too, and we had a great conversation about what it’s like to work at the Apple Store. At this point I should confess that I actually did pre-order an iPad, but it’s the 3G version, which won’t be delivered until late April. I realized at some point this week that there was no way I could wait that long, and that I’d just have to buy a Wi-Fi iPad this week, use it until the 3G version comes, and then sell the used one. (I’ve already got potential buyers lined up, so don’t bother making me an offer!) When I explained this plan to a friend a couple of days ago, her reaction was, “You know you’ve got a problem, right?”

Yeah, me and the thousands of other people who camped out in front of Apple Stores around the country this morning. Anyway, right behind Nick was a woman named Tina who lives in rural Connecticut and happened to be staying at a nearby hotel in Boston this weekend because her teenage kids are attending Anime Boston, the giant Japanese animation convention going on at the Hynes. (With the PAX East gaming festival last weekend, Anime Boston this weekend, and the Comic Con comic book convention next weekend, you’d think that somebody would have figured out a way to offer a three-for-one discount.) Tina didn’t know much about Apple gear, but she though the iPad sounded cool, and she said there wasn’t much else to spend her money on in the Connecticut farmlands.

Around 7:00 a.m. Apple folks came out and set up the crowd-control barriers, dividing us into two lines—those who had reserved an iPad for pickup at the store today, and those who hadn’t. At that point both lines started growing fast, up the street and around the corner. Before long I started running into people I knew, including Greg Raiz and his crew from Brookline-MA-based mobile app development studio Raizlabs; they were picking up iPads today so that they could test their new iPad-only game, Ploid (more on that below). I also got a visit from …Next Page »

UNDERWRITERS AND PARTNERS

In a press release detailing plans for its Bremen, Germany, plant, Mercedes-Benz let slip that it will build a C-class coupe there, starting in 2011. We don’t currently have any other information, but we hope the new car doesn’t look as dorky as the last C-class coupe, which debuted stateside in summer 2001 (a 2004 model is pictured above). We’ll bring you more information as soon as Mercedes buries it in another release.

Related posts:

1. The Shape of the Next Mercedes-Benz C-class and E-class – Car News
2. Next-Generation Mercedes C-class to be Built in Alabama from 2014
3. 2009 Mercedes-Benz C-class / C300 / C350 / C63 AMG – Review

Yesterday, the Department of Transportation and Environmental Protection Agency released new fuel-economy standards for model years 2012 to 2016. In short, fuel economy is going to improve. Under the new rules, combined fleet fuel economy will have to increase to 29.7 mpg for the 2012 model year, ramping up to 34.1 mpg by 2016. The passenger-car slice of that number goes from 33.3 (2012) to 37.8 mpg (2016) while light trucks increase from 25.4 to 28.8 mpg. The current standard is 27.5 mpg for cars and 23.5 mpg for light trucks.

It’s not quite that simple.

Keep in mind that these are unadjusted fuel-economy figures, based on the raw numbers from the old CAFE test (this is done in order to keep comparisons to old standards relevant). The EPA fuel economy you see on the window sticker of a new car represents the adjusted number, which takes into account newer tests and some standard fudge factors to come up with numbers that represent real-world fuel economy. Based on the raw numbers, some automakers already exceed the 2012 standard.

No, really, it’s not that simple.

Further complicating these new standards is the use of a vehicle’s footprint—the area bounded by the wheelbase and track—to calculate a specific fuel economy for each model. In short, smaller vehicles will have to get better fuel economy than larger vehicles based on footprint size, although there are upper and lower limits for these footprint sizes.

A further wrinkle is the fact that the EPA decided that carbon dioxide (CO2) is a greenhouse gas and is thus allowed to regulate those emissions. Under the EPA rules, vehicles would have to achieve an average of 35.5 mpg. That figure is an equivalent, however, because credits can be earned for making improvements to air-conditioning systems. With respect to the EPA rule, it looks like automakers will be faced with the choice of changing the A/C system or meeting a higher mpg standard. As before, fuel economy is averaged over an entire fleet, so that a fuel-sipping Chevy Volt will offset the thirstier Corvette. In addition, fuel economy figures higher than the standard will earn credits that can be sold to other automakers.

Unintended Consequences

In general, these new standards have been carefully planned and will definitely make cars more efficient. Some of that efficiency will be achieved with higher-cost technology that may or may not be offset by fuel savings. And if fuel prices do not dramatically increase, these new standards will actually make driving less expensive per mile, which will actually encourage more driving and fuel consumption. Finally, automakers have an incentive to continue making larger cars since they will have lower fuel-economy targets.

No related posts.

Matt Silk is the SVP of Waterfall Mobile, a San Francisco-based digital-messaging company.

Location-based services are getting an enormous amount of attention lately, with the launch of Google’s Near Me Now for mobile and other high-profile announcements. As a mobile executive, I am thrilled that this idea – once literally the stuff of science fiction – is finally coming together. But as a mobile consumer, I have the same concern as everyone else: privacy. I want to know that any messaging I receive is opt-in only; that I will only be contacted when and how I want to be; and that whatever communications come my way will be 100% spam free.

One of the not new areas of mobile marketing is “geofencing,” or the idea of tracking people on a mobile subscriber list based on proximity to a particular retail store, and then sending out tailored messaging alerts. It sounds great in theory, but I just can’t get behind it. Geofencing involves knowing the location of individual customers at all times so you can “ping” them anytime they are physically near individual stores. 

Constantly tracking and watching where consumers are would involve checking location every few minutes. That could get ridiculously expensive (carrier lookups for messaging, draining your battery for smartphones, etc.) and feels a little too big brother for me. It’s like an electronic dog collar that buzzes every time I hit the fence.

Not to mention the fact that, if you are looking to hit someone with a message every time that person gets within a certain distance of your store, then you need to be constantly ready to provide engaging content. National retail chains are already buried trying to track all of the different channels where their customers are with the social-media explosion. Are they really ready to sign up for this task? I don’t think they have the staff or budget to deliver on the hype that is being marketed.

Here is a great and simple use case for location that makes sense to me. Let’s say your mobile list has 20,000 people on it and you want to send a marketing message on Wednesday at 3 p.m. Eastern Time.  At the appointed time, do one check on location, and then ping everyone within a set distance of those stores – with a highly relevant message. Everyone else on the subscriber list will get a different message, with a generic, non-location-based coupon offer. You could have 50 different messages each targeting specific locations.

Real-time location data is inherently, and extremely, personal. Brands should respect this access and never abuse it – lest it be taken away, either by the user or by wireless carriers. A rule of thumb that applies to all digital messaging, and particularly applies here, is this: if you don’t have something compelling to say, don’t text your customers. If they get annoyed and reply “STOP” to a text, then that customer is gone forever. 

Let users have the option to choose when and where you can contact them and to divulge as much or as little information as they want. This ensures your contact is relevant and desired. Give them clear options to select from when they are setting up their profiles. If people want to input their sex, age, gender, marital status, time of day to contact, number of messages, give them that option.

Any brand manager pondering an LBS program should walk through the opt-in and -out protocol personally. If the rules aren’t extremely clear, consider a redesign. Whatever that costs, it’s better than the potential blowback of a mobile campaign gone awry. A process should also be in place to allow for users to report abuse of their information and a way to have reports handled in a timely matter. 

In many ways, this is the same set of rules that marketers should be following on the web—but not all of them do. Consumers, rather than making brands pay for that privacy breach, are more apt to just delete the email and move on. Mobile phones are different. They are more sacred and personal to their owners, and if marketers cross the privacy lines with mobile marketing, consumers won’t let them off the hook so easily.

Subaru U.K. recently posted these teaser photos of a Cosworth-tuned STI to its Facebook page. Dubbed CS400, the car is tuned to deliver 395 hp (the 400 in the name refers to the oputput in PS) and will reportedly cover the 0-to-62-mph sprint in 3.7 seconds, which beats the pants off of our 5.1-second time in the standard, 305-hp STI. Indeed, Subaru says the CS400 will offer “supercar-humbling pace.” The car will use AP Racing brakes, with four-piston calipers gripping 14-inch front discs, and Subaru promises upgrades to the suspension, exhaust, and styling. Oh, and the pictures show some cool Cosworth-branded buckets.

The CS400 will only be offered as a hatchback, and production will be limited to just 75 units. It’ll reach dealerships this June, with more photos and info set for release closer to that time. Our fearless prediction is that, like the Impreza R205 and STI spec C, this hot Subie isn’t intended for American buyers.

Related posts:

1. 2008 Subaru Impreza WRX STI
2. How to Throw a Subaru Impreza WRX STI into the Atmosphere – Feature
3. Subaru Impreza WRX STI Carbon – Auto Shows

Below is a timeline of the Toyota recall fiasco. In the (highly likely) event that there are more events, we’ll update this post.

For more about the recalls, see our roundup of information.

August 28, 2009 – A Lexus ES350 crashes at over 100 mph and bursts into flames, killing an off-duty California Highway Patrolman and three members of his family. The cause of the crash is determined to be a throttle that stuck open. At the time of the crash, the officer’s brother-in-law, a passenger in the car, is on the phone with police frantically reporting that the car won’t slow down.

September 29, 2009 – Toyota announces floor-mat “customer safety advisory,” saying the floor mats can become entangled with the accelerator and cause it to stick. The company advises people to remove the floor mats from their cars and says it will provide “safe” replacements.

November 25, 2009 – Toyota recalls 3.8 million vehicles for floor-mat issues. The company also announces that it will redesign its floor mats and install brake-override systems in its new cars. This functionality, standard across some automakers’ lines, cuts the throttle when the brake pedal is pressed. This is helpful for people afraid of what will happen if they press the brakes hard, but our instrumented testing proves that hard application of the brakes will overpower full throttle in pretty much any car, including a 540-hp supercharged Roush Stage 3 Mustang.

January 21, 2010 – Toyota announces recall for non-floor-mat-related accelerator-sticking issues. This covers millions of vehicles.

January 26, 2010 – Sales of models affected by the recall are suspended. Fear begins to simmer in the psyches of thousands of Toyota drivers.

January 27, 2010 – The recall is widened to include Toyota-built vehicles such as the Pontiac Vibe, which doesn’t need an official stoppage to not sell.

January 29, 2010 – The recall is further widened to include European models, none of which have been reported as suffering from any problems. Their ability to find the appropriate pedal and do more than panic in a moment of confusion is the firmest evidence yet that the average European driver is superior to their American counterpart.

February 1, 2010 – Toyota announces accelerator-pedal fix, which involves a shim inserted into the pedal assembly to prevent the throttle from becoming stuck open, and foolishly believes this will cap public paranoia.

February 3, 2010 – Transportation Secretary Ray McCarthy—er, LaHood—tells Americans that they should stop driving their Toyotas immediately. Nothing like a good, old-fashioned government freakout to throw people into a panic.

February 5, 2010 – Toyota president Akio Toyoda apologizes for the “problems,” bows deeply.

February 8, 2010 – Recalls for braking issues are extended to 2010 Prius and 2010 Lexus HS250h because of “inconsistent pedal feel” under braking on slick or uneven surfaces. More than 437,000 vehicles are involved, bringing the total to more than 8.5 million Toyotas recalled. We get apoplectic, readers accuse us of “kissing Toyota’s butt.” We direct those readers to any article we’ve ever written on a Toyota vehicle other than the RAV4.

February 12, 2010 – Toyota recalls Tacoma trucks for prop-shaft issues; mainstream media latches onto another “broken Toyota,” fails to notice the hundreds of thousands of vehicles recalled every year by every other automaker.

February 22, 2010 – A professor from a Podunk university looking to make a name for himself teams up with ABC News to dupe the populace into believing their Toyota has a ghost in the machine, a.k.a. an electronics glitch that can cause acceleration independent of pedal involvement. The process by which he rigged the car to accelerate is shown later by Toyota and a team of researchers from a real college—Stanford—to work on vehicles from virtually any maker.

February 24, 2010 – Toyoda testifies at his own witchhunt in Congress, apologizes again, and gets scolded. The whole thing is a circus sideshow with little to no value to the American public.

March 8, 2010 –A California man calls 911 from the freeway and reports that he can’t stop his Prius. California Highway Patrol is dispatched and coaches him to a stop. In the following weeks, neither Toyota nor NHTSA can reproduce any of the problems he reported, and Toyota says the car’s data logger shows the driver shifted from gas to brake multiple times during the incident. No one outright accuses the man of anything unsavory, and the cause of the incident remains a mystery.

March 9, 2010 – Some woman in New York drives her Prius through an intersection and plows into a wall. She blames unintended acceleration, but her car’s data logger shows she was on the gas the entire time and never pressed the brake.

March 24, 2010 – CNN bites on reports that Toyota knew about Camry accelerator problems in 2002, which turns out—surprise!—to be false. While it is true that there were complaints about surging acceleration, the occurrences were caused by the torque converter, were fixed with a simple recalibration, and, taking place solely between 38 and 42 mph, had absolutely nothing to do with sustained, uncontrollable acceleration.

Related posts:

1. Shift into Neutral, Dummy: The Toyota Recall Fiasco – Feature
2. Toyota Recall: Scandal, Media Circus, and Stupid Drivers – Editorial
3. Toyota Adds 1.1 Million Vehicles to Floor-Mat Recall, Now Includes Pontiac Vibe

Daimler and Renault-Nissan could soon form a partnership that would see the two companies sharing future vehicle platforms and engine technologies. According to Automotive News and The Wall Street Journal, a partnership could be announced on April 14.

The plan would be to share vehicle components among the Daimler, Smart, Renault, and Nissan brands. The primary focus is expected to be on building a Smart Fortwo successor that would also serve as the basis for the next-generation Renault Twingo, and possibly an updated Mercedes-Benz A-class.

The groups would also work together on fuel-efficient powertrains, probably gasoline and diesel engines no larger than 1.8 liters. It also seems likely the two will share electric-drive technology, given that both companies are developing electric cars: Nissan will soon launch the Leaf and Daimler is developing an electric Smart Fortwo. Daimler also recently announced a  partnership with Chinese company BYD to build a Chinese-market electric vehicle.

Related posts:

1. 2009 Renault Clio RS Renault Sport – First Drive Review
2. Daimler and BYD Partner to Build Chinese-Market EV
3. Renault to Revive Gordini Badge

The app announcements have been rolling out all morning in anticipation of tomorrow’s iPad release. Among the initial iPad apps now in Apple’s online store is the WSJ’s app, which is free to download, but costs users for $3.99 per week for access—compared to the $2.69 a week charge for online and print subs. While that iPad app charge could be off-putting to some consumers, the Dow Jones (NYSE: NWS) paper’s current subscribers can get access for “a limited time.” The WSJ isn’t just relying on paid content to support the effort. The paper’s iPad app launch also comes with a wide range of advertisers, including Buick, Capital One, Coca-Cola, iShares, FedEx and Oracle. Whether the app price will hold—a WSJ rep tells us that the app will cost “$17.29 plus tax if/where applicable” per month—is something that will likely be determined quickly.

A jumpin’ orange flash that needs no gas, gas, gas.

Watch the Video: 2010 Tesla Roadster Sport – Video

Related posts:

1. 2010 Tesla Roadster Sport – Short Take Road Test
2. Tesla Adds Lease Program for Roadster and Roadster Sport
3. Name That Exhaust Note, Episode 30: 2010 Tesla Roadster Sport

Three race-prepped versions of the Chevrolet Cruze will compete in the 2010 World Touring Car Championship. The season features races on 11 tracks in locations as diverse as Japan, the Czech Republic, and Spain.

While it is based on the European car that will come to the U.S.—Cruze Eco and Cruze RS variants of which were shown alongside the racer in New York— the WTCC car differs a bit from the roadgoing version. The Cruze’s interior is gutted and a roll cage is fitted, helping bring overall weight down to 2535 pounds. The engine is still a 2.0-liter four-cylinder, but tuned to produce 285 hp and 145 lb-ft of torque and mated to a six-speed sequential transmission. Chevy says the car’s top speed is 158 mph.

The Cruze rides on 17-inch wheels wrapped in nine-inch-wide Yokohama racing tires. Brakes are upgraded to four-piston calipers with 13-inch discs in front and two-piston calipers with 11-inch discs in the rear. The suspension retains its twist-beam rear axle, but presumably with upgraded springs and dampers.

Related posts:

1. 2011 Chevrolet Cruze Eco and Cruze RS – Official Photos and Info
2. 2011 Chevrolet Cruze – Official Photos and Info
3. 2011 Chevrolet Cruze – Video

Safest. Year. Ever.

Traffic fatalities in 2009 were the lowest recorded according to preliminary data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Last year’s fatalities are projected to total 33,963, down 9 percent from 2008’s figure of 37,261. We’re not exactly sure how they can estimate fatalities—there’s a brief and vague explanation of the process at the link below—but the numbers are good news. The end of 2009 also marks the 15th consecutive quarter of declining deaths; the last time quarterly fatalities went up compared to the previous year’s quarter was January–March 2006.

Even more encouraging is the fact that the rate of fatalities has declined. We could all stop driving and laud the savings of lives, but then it would be really difficult to get pizza delivered to your door (not that we advocate pizza delivery over personal safety). Total miles driven increased 0.2 percent to 6.6 billion miles. That means there are 1.16 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles driven, down from 1.25.

NHTSA doesn’t speculate in its preliminary summary about why fatalities are down, but a logical guess would be that increased safety standards and safety features like stability control and airbags are continuing their spread throughout the entire market.

The full report, sans gory details, can be seen here.

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