Category: News

Filed under: Recalls

By this point, we are all familiar (if not overly familiar) with Toyota’s troubles with floor mats, unintended acceleration, biggest-ever recall, etc. And if you’re not familiar with Toyota’s woes from reading this site, perhaps you’ve heard about Consumer Reports’ investigation into ToMoCo’s troubles. Well, guess what? The gang over at Car and Driver decided to launch their own inquisition into FloorMatGate.

Here’s how they set up the tests. C/D took a V6 Camry, a Infiniti G37 Convertible and a supercharged, 540-horsepower Roush Ford Mustang. The Camry is identical very similar to the Lexus ES350 that crashed in San Diego and set off the current brouhaha. Similar in that it has an electronic throttle and push button start. Same brakes, too. The Infiniti also has electronic throttle and push button start, though it’s more powerful and has bigger brakes. Also, the Infiniti has a throttle interrupt that cuts fuel when the brake is applied. The Camry – and as far as C/D knows, all Toyota models – does not. As for the Roush, why the hell not? No, actually the reason is to see if a mega-power engine can overwhelm a car’s brakes at high speeds.

Here’s the methodology: First they recorded each car’s 70-0 mph braking distances with a closed throttle (i.e. foot off the gas). Then they recorded 70-0 mph braking distances with an open throttle (foot on the gas). Next, they upped the ante to 100 mph for both closed and open throttle tests. The results are actually quite interesting, and we will share with you that a Toyota Camry under wide open throttle can stop from 70 mph one foot shorter than a 2010 Ford Taurus under normal braking. Also, it’s best to take your foot off the gas in a 540-hp Roush when you’re going 100 mph and want to stop. Unless you have 903 feet to spare. Just sayin.’

[Source: Car and Driver]

C/D does its own Toyota unintended acceleration tests, compares Camry with Infiniti, Roush?! originally appeared on Autoblog on Wed, 06 Jan 2010 16:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Convertible, Coupe, Performance, Europe, Mercedes-Benz, Rumormill

Out here in the eastern part of Los Angeles, there exists an infamous Mercedes-Benz 190SL. Why infamous? Because its rotting corpse is chained to a rock in a semi-sketchy part of town. No really. It’s been there for at least a decade, and if you try and take pictures of it (guilty!) a large angry woman comes hauling out of her front door screaming and cursing at you. This might be a little too James Ellroy-ish to some of you (as if there is such a thing!), but we mention the mostly dead 190SL because in the owners mind, it’s every bit as awesome a full bore, hardcore 300SL. Even though it’s clearly not. For one thing, the 190SL lacks gullwings.

Speaking of gullwings, who here doesn’t love the new SLS AMG? On second thought, keep it to yourself if you’re a hater. But if the new AMG-built SLS has one flaw, it’s the price. €177,310 to be exact, which would be $265,500 is U.S. dollars. Only the Euro price has little to nothing to do with the U.S. price. Still, even if it’s only around $200,000 in the States, that’s still a lot of scratch. Well, looks like the folks at Daimler might possibly have a solution.

Australia’s Drive is reporting that the previously rumored baby SLS will likely be called SSK AMG, and it is said to be coming in 2014. Should it see the light of day, Drive says that the SSK AMG will roll on a shortened version of the SLS’s chassis. It will come as both a coupe and a convertible, but will lose the SLS’ trick gullwing doors. Power should come from some sort of forced-induction V8 that should be good for about 500 horsepower. The engine will not be – and will be smaller than – the 6.2-liter, 563-horsepower slugger found in the SLS. Figure the little SSK car should cost close to half what the larger car does. All the better to do battle with the Porsche 911 – even without the gullwings.

Photos by Chris Paukert / Copyright (C)2009 Weblogs, Inc.
[Source: Drive.com.au]

Rumored Mercedes-Benz “Baby SLS” to be called SSK AMG, get its gullwings clipped? originally appeared on Autoblog on Wed, 06 Jan 2010 17:27:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Research in Motion has announced that it is launching a mobile PowerPoint presenter, a device that completely does away with the need to carry around a laptop when you need to give a presentation with slides — consultants rejoice!

Able to store up to 100 presentations, the presenter only requires you to own a compatible Blackberry and have access to a projector. It’s like a Mac Mini dedicated just to the dreaded task of PowerPoint, only even more mini.

Blackberry phones have always been the popular choice for professional use. Users who need to stay up to date with emails and frequently access documents find it preferable because its physical keyboard is better for high-volume typing. It seems like adding PowerPoint capabilities would make the phone even more celebrated among this crowd.

But the iPhone and now Android phones are giving RIM a run for its money in the enterprise smartphone space, and Blackberry’s dominance is shakier than ever. While the other two prominent smartphones have gained more traction for personal use, both platforms are making inroads into the enterprise audience with slick user interfaces and more professional-friendly features.

This could be bad news for RIM, which needs to stay on top of this market, despite strong earnings in the last quarter of 2009. The launch of the Blackberry Presenter is clearly meant to solidify its leadership position, making it even more helpful and versatile for large companies that issue hundreds or even thousands of smartphones for their employees to stay connected.

As useful as it could be, the device costs about $200, and you still need a projector. The iPhone has the upper hand when it comes to an ecosystem of third-party developers and OEMs in this area — evidenced by several third-party devices such as this video projector made by MiLi, a small devices that eliminates the need for not just a laptop, but also for a separate projector. The only thing bogging it down is its hefty $399 price tag.

All in all, while the Blackberry Presenter will be a welcome addition for enterprise users who already use and love Blackberry, it probably won’t be enough to make someone switch from the iPhone. If, however, RIM can turn out a device that is small and affordable enough that also operates without a projector, then it could start chipping away at some real market share.

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Even before the first Chevy Volt — General Motor’s hyped plug-in vehicle — has rolled into the showroom, the green car already has a smartphone application to go along with it. Using the Consumer Electronic Show as its springboard, the automaker has unveiled apps for the iPhone, Droid and Blackberry Storm, allowing drivers to tap into sources of information and even a vehicle remote control via the OnStar System.

Let’s say you are the average Chevy Volt driver, having gotten the car sometime this year after its launch. When you download the app, you will instantly have the ability to see how charged your car’s battery pack is at any given time; to tell the car only to charge during certain off-peak times of day to save money on electric bills; to receive text messages or emails if your car isn’t plugged in or has reached a full charge; to program the car’s interior temperature using its heating and air conditioning systems; and to view historical data about your Volt’s mileage and distance traveled. This is pretty swanky stuff.

The application, officially released by OnStar, is all part of a fairly genius marketing campaign devised by GM. The car’s success depends largely on the automaker’s ability to not only ramp up the publicity, but to make the car seem like the futuristic, holistic, thoroughly green masterpiece its most avid followers expect it to be. Launching a smartphone component accomplishes both these goals — demonstrating that the car and the company are web 2.0 savvy and serious about demonstrating its mileage and electric engine specs.

A few other cool features: Taking a page from car-sharing service Zipcar’s playbook, the app will also be able to lock and unlock car doors remotely, as well as flash the headlights and blow the Volt’s horn. This should make it much easier for people to locate their cars in dark parking garages, not to mention check whether their doors are locked or not after they’re already far away from the car (always a frustration).

It’s unclear whether the app will work on the Nexus One, the iPod Touch, other Blackberries or the Palm Pre. We’re guessing not, since the announcement was very specific about the iPhone, Droid and Blackberry Storm. But these iterations are probably forthcoming.

This is the second big Volt-related announcement this week, and it’s only Tuesday. Yesterday, General Motors announced that its Michigan plant dedicated to manufacturing Volt battery packs has officially come online — making GM the first major automaker to jump into the advanced battery business so far.

You can download a trial iPhone version of the OnStar app here starting today, and view demos of all the different handsets here. Apparently, the real deal will be launched by OnStar at the same time that the Volt finally goes to market late this year. In the meantime, here’s a walkthrough of the application on the Motorola Droid:

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Casio is kicking off the new year with a Digital Art Frame that can take an ordinary photo and transform it into a work of art. It resembles a digital picture frame that you can use to display photos. But this one has a new twist: you can use it to create photo images or original art works.

The Japanese camera maker says the frame is part of its quest to transform cameras from mere photo-taking instruments into creative digital imaging devices. You can display snapshots on the device and transform one photo into eight different artistic images using a “snapshot-to-painting” automatic conversion function.

The device, unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, also has face recognition technology that allows you to delicately alter human faces and expressions in a photo. That means they aren’t just photos anymore, but creative works that look realistic. Users can upload these masterpieces to a blog or social network via a built-in wireless network in the frame. You can also create your own images to adorn a digital clock or calendar.

The art styles include: Water Color Painting, Color Pencil Sketch, Pastel Painting, Pointillism, Air Brush, Oil Painting, Gothic Oil Painting, and Fauvist Oil Painting. The frame uses Adobe’s Flash Lite playback technology, which lets users display preset Flash content, such as clocks and calendars.

The product will be available in the spring. It has a 10.1-inch screen, two gigabytes of memory, an SD memory card slot, stereo speakers, and a power-saving display that turns on when someone approaches the screen.

Casio is also introducing a new line of high-power zoom digital cameras. The point-and-shoot, compact digital cameras have 10X optical zoom lenses to shoot distant subjects. The EX-H15, EX-Z550, and the EX-Z2000 all feature the ability to combine different moving images into a single video or image, right on the camera. The company calls this Dynamic Photo, where one photo can be like a cut-out image that can be pasted into another photo that forms the background. The cameras can easily upload videos to YouTube and have faster engines that increase image processing speed by 30 percent.

Casio also has a high-speed model, the EX-FH100 (pictured above), capable of taking 40 shots per second. The 10X zoom camera can also record a video at a rate of 1,000 frames per second. The latter is capturing images at a rate that is faster than the human eye can see. One of the models has a dynamic photo function that can combine one set of moving images with another set, creating a composite image.

The company is also introducing a new mercury-free high-brightness data projector family. The projectors are thus more environmentally friendly and energy efficient. The Green Slim projectors (pictured) can produce images with 2,000 lumens brightness, which means they can compete with other kinds of projectors on image brightness and quality. The projector is about the size of a standard 8.5 x 11 piece of paper, is 1.7 inches high, and weighs five pounds. It can connect wirelessly with a PC.

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The often misunderstood symbiote can poison wolves, break down rocks, and live for thousands of years.

Remember Formspring.me, the service we covered two days ago that makes it easy to conduct your own online Q&A with the web at large? Popular microblogging service Tumblr has just launched a new feature called “Ask Me” that does the exact same thing.

The new feature is simple: if you have a Tumblr blog, you can now add a form that lets your readers ask you whatever they want. They can leave their questions anonymously or submit them alongside their account name. Then, you can pick and choose which questions you want to answer and post your responses to your blog.

Of course, that’s exactly what Formspring.me does. Tumblr users have actually been building their own Q&As for a while using generic HTML form builders, which is what drove Formspring (a form builder itself) to build a dedicated service for Q&As called Formspring.me. Formspring.me has since gained quite a large following on Tumblr, so it isn’t all that surprising that the blog platform decided to bake it in. CEO David Karp says that the feature was “inspired by the Q&A posts that our community had been hacking together with Tumblr Submissions, Wufoo, and Formspring.”

All is not lost for Formspring.me, though. CEO Ade Olonoh says that while Tumblr served as a good incubator for Formspring.me, the service has since grown well beyond that site. He says that in the past few days only around 3-4% of questions answered on Formspring.me were syndicated to Tumblr. I suspect those figures are skewed by the fact that Formspring.me has been covered by a number of large tech blogs recently, but the appeal of these Q&A services clearly extends beyond Tumblr.

Tumblr hasn’t exactly shied away from ripping off other sites before. Back in August the site launched a StumbleUpon-like toolbar called TumblUpon (seriously).

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

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As we’re all well aware, Google released the Nexus One yesterday, the first supposed “Google Phone.” But it’s hardly an iPhone killer. For that role, Google has something much more sinister in mind. Meet the “Fuck You iPhone” Phone.

I don’t even know where to begin. The best bits: ”The fastest processor ever in a mobile device. Also, it fucks with iPhones and the tools that own them.” ”This phone will fuck with any iPhone’s shit. Hard.” The “Optimized Urination Interface.” And yes, the phone used as the new Google Phone is an iPhone. Great stuff from LandlineTV.

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Stylesight, a company that specializes in trend forecasting and product development tools for professionals in the fashion and style industries, has raised $5 million in funding according to an SEC filing. The company previously raised $16 million in series A funding from Fidelity Venture in 2008.

Stylesight allows designers, manufacturers, and retailers to access the latest fashion data and images, which can then be used in online advertising campaigns, design plans, and merchandise displays. Stylesight hosts a library of millions of images from runway shows and other sources, and will give retail operations and designers reports on trends and product ideas.

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A Montadora Coreana Kia acaba de anunciar que vai aumentar a garantia de seus modelos vendidos na Europa para sete anos iniciando já com os modelos vendidos em 2010. A empresa já havia feito o mesmo para seu modelo Kia Ceed e agora está estendendo essa garantia para seus outros modelos.

Essa garantida da à empresa o status de maior cobertura mecânica da Europa podendo aumentar a confiança e melhorar a imagem da marca no velho continente.

O detalhe é que a garantia é valida por sete anos ou 150.000 km o que será suficiente para conquistar novos clientes.

Fonte: Kia

Right before we rung in the New Year, we heard rumors that Lamborghini is planning a hardcore version of the Gallardo, known as the Gallardo LP570-4 SV (Super Veloce). We now have some photo renderings of what the LP570-4 SV could look like courtesy of Lamborghini Cars.

According to sources, Lamborghini plans on showing dealers and customers the car later this month. A public unveiling is scheduled for the 2010 Geneva Motor Show with deliveries to begin in May.

After the Gallardo LP570-4 SV Lamborghini plans on offering a hardcore rear-wheel-drive version of the supercar in early 2011.

Lamborghini Gallardo LP570-4 SV (Photo Renderings):

– By: Kap Shah

Source: Lamborghini Cars

Bad news, Netflix customers: Warner Bros. and Netflix have just made an agreement to delay all new release rentals by 28 days so people will keep buying DVDs. Or, as is more likely, turn to piracy.

The upside of the deal is that Warner is offering up more movies for streaming on Netflix to make up for the lack of new releases. But don’t expect this to be the only studio that makes this deal. Now that one has shown that Netflix is willing to play ball, the rest should follow. Weak, Netflix. Weak.

I guess if you want to see a new release without buying the goddamned movie, you’re stuck heading to the torrent sites. You did this to yourself, Warner Bros. [Mashable]

An estimated three in 1,000 people suffers from the mysterious affliction chronic fatigue syndrome. Those people were probably enthusiastic in October when a team of U.S. medical researchers released a study arguing that not only is the syndrome real (some doctors dismissed it as purely psychological “yuppie flu”), but also that they’d connected it to a specific virus. DISCOVER covered the hubbub after the paper came out in the journal Science.

But now, in a study in PLoS One, a British research team has cast doubt on the American team’s findings, saying there’s no conclusive link between the virus and chronic fatigue syndrome, which is also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis.

The U.S. team’s findings sounded robust when they came out. They found the murine leukaemia virus-related virus (XMRV) in blood samples of 68 of 101 patients diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome. Just eight out of 101 healthy “controls” drawn at random from the same parts of the US also tested positive, suggesting that XMRV played a key role in triggering the condition [The Independent]. When the scientists from Imperial and Kings colleges in London attempted to replicate these findings, however, they found nothing of the sort. Of the 186 people with the syndrome that this team tested, not one showed signs of XMRV, or of any related virus.

Study coauthor Myra McClure of the Imperial College also criticized the U.S. team and the journal Science for rushing the findings into print in October. “When you’ve got such a stunning result you want to be absolutely clear that you are 1,000 per cent right and there are things in that [previous study] I would not have done. I would have waited. I would have stalled a little” [The Independent], she said.

As for the new study conducted in London, McClure declared: “We used very sensitive testing methods to look for the virus. If it had been there, we would have found it…. We are confident our results show there is no link between XMRV and CFS, at least in the UK” [The Guardian]. But the U.K. team says its contradictory findings could have resulted from differences in patients. According to the new study, the discrepancy “may be a result of population differences between North America and Europe regarding the general prevalence of XMRV infection, and might also explain the fact that two US groups found XMRV in prostate cancer tissue, while two European studies did not.”

Though McClure and her colleagues can’t say for sure how they and the Americans came to such different results, they wanted to put a stop to the rush of patients who started seeking antiretroviral treatments for chronic fatigue after the Science paper came out in October (XMRV is a retrovirus, like HIV). They say potent antiretroviral drugs should not be used to treat CFS because there is not enough evidence that this is necessary or helpful. The drugs may do more harm than good, they say [BBC News].

This might throw a wrench into the plans of Judy A. Mikovits, the lead author of the U.S. paper, to go ahead with antiretroviral testing. But the “avalanche of subsequent studies” that one medical researcher predicted to The New York Times after Mikovits’ paper is sure to continue.

Related Content:
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Image: Whittemore Peterson Institute

Over at Wired, Ryan Singel writes an ode to what Google’s new Nexus One smartphone could have been, and may still one day be. In a far more detailed manner than I did yesterday, he explains why Google doesn’t need to dominate the market — just have a presence there in the years to come in order to shape mobile data access in a meaningful way. I agree that his imagining must be what Google has in mind.

He wonders when Google will be content exiting the hardware market and focusing on its main business of software and advertising. He says:

Here’s the scenario that might get us there — Google convinces HTC that it’s not suicide to create a phone that can be used on any U.S. 3G network (maybe two — one GSM and one CDMA) and then sells it unlocked. It’s a great phone, and lots of people want it and there’s lots of great apps that run on it.

Users then could then take it to whichever carrier they like, and get a data plan a la carte. The carriers will hate this, perhaps create unfairly high prices and very annoying “device registration fees” — trying to protect the money they make offering phones at an initial discount in exchange for a two-year contract.

But the FCC will have passed a rule forcing carriers to accept any device that doesn’t hurt their network — much as Ma Bell was forced to open its lines — and Google, regulators and consumers will break down those barriers. Or the market could simply take care of it, with a desperate Sprint breaking ranks with the other large US telecoms and accepting a Nexus or any other device with no registration fee and a fair price for users.

And that’s when Google will stop making phones, and you’ll know that the Nexus One actually meant something.

And I think that’s exactly right. One thing I noted yesterday was Google’s decision to offer an unlocked version of the Nexus One — something that Apple has no intention of doing with its iPhone. Of course, this particular unlocked version is pretty weak. Sure, you don’t have to use T-mobile. You can use another GMS network instead. Which means AT&T. But you can’t use AT&T’s 3G data network. You can only use T-mobile’s. In other words, pretty much everyone who buys a Nexus One will be using T-mobile anyway!

But by offering the phone unlocked, I think this shows Google’s future intent. If this were an unlocked phone that could be brought to more networks, then it could start a meaningful revolution. That has to be the next step for Google’s vision to be realized, as Singel explains. Otherwise, it’s hard to see why the company would bother selling smartphones. The Nexus One and its future generations are a means to an end — a different kind of mobile world.

It’s just over 50 years since the shipping container took its first trip. Though it has changed little in the subsequent half century, standardised containerisation has dramatically reduced global transportation costs and supercharged international trade. Containerisation remains a beacon of efficiency only because it exists within the obscenely inefficient, environmentally irresponsible and otherwise resistant-to-change shipping industry. Now a new collapsible composite container is being trialled which is ingeniously more efficient, lighter, cheaper, more easily trackable, more accountable in terms of its contents and more environmentally-friendly. Despite a raft of advantages, it might not go into service because …..

Tags: Cargoshell,
Environmentally-friendly,
GPS,
Shipping,
Transport

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