Bernie Ecclestone is known as a person who often speaks his mind about a certain matter, and seldom changes his opinion about things; or favorite drivers. Although admitting his enthusiasm over seeing Michael Schumacher back in Formula One, the commercial rights holder of the series is not shy of naming Sebastian Vettel as his personal favorite for the world title.
I predict Vettel will be the next Formula One champion, Ecclestone was quoted as saying by the German newspaper Bild…. (read more)
Ever since two friends and I staged a two-week jaunt around the Midwest to attend a great new conference earlier this year, I’ve been more and more aware of a growing trend: the social media road trip.
While on the road this year, I’ve come upon long-term social media road warriors such as Mark Simonds of the Twitter Road Trip, brand ambassadors such as Sara Lopez and conference-hoppers such as Dave Delaney. I think we’ve all heard about Tara Hunt’s widely publicized karaoke/book promo tour. There’s even a SxSWi session about the phenomenon this spring. For folks intent on packing up the hardware and hitting the road, here are ten tips for success.
Sponsor
These road trips are great for making new connections with interesting people and forming mutually beneficial relationships, as my RoadTwip gang did in Nashville. They’re great for finally meeting up with longtime (or not so longtime) online friends in real life, as we did in Toledo. They can give a person some perspective on tech “scenes,” especially in terms of engendering respect for non-Silicon Valley communities.
Even better, it’s great for brands, as our friend Sara Lopez has learned this year while tripping around for soymilk company 8th Continent. Ford recognized the public’s fascination with road trip-related media with its highly successful Fiesta campaign this year, which involved mini-trips and missions documented on YouTube. These trips capture a great audience, both regionally with one-on-one interactions in communities and internationally as curious and amused Internet users stumble upon and share related content. More on that later.
As promised, here are ten must-haves for planning and executing a successful social media road trip.
Remember the part where I told you that social media road trips are great for brands? These days, brands are often more than willing to help a geek out with gas money, hardware, goods and services in exchange for a little light plugging now and then. If there’s a good fit between your trip and a brand, from soft drinks to software, don’t hesitate to ask for a partnership.
This might be your biggest challenge. Whether you’re using Bluetooth, a MiFi device, a USB-connected wireless modem or simply tethering to your mobile phone, make sure your preferred method works and that you have a backup. We also recommend downloading WeFi in case your plans fail and you need to find emergency coffee house WiFi in a strange place.
One great piece of advice my road team got from NorthStar Manifesto founder Duke Stump was to define our purpose before our itinerary. Another important part of these trips can be a geographical highlight, such as a conference, a hometown or a tech hub. It’ll solidify your position and help you focus your content.
Part of the excitement of a social media road trip is accepting unexpected invitations and discovering friends in strangers. Entering into situations with an open mind is the best way to use your trip as a learning experience. While on the road, I met up with just about everyone I could, and I got to see amazing new hardware, apps, innovators and entrepreneurs as a result.
Power is up there with WiFi as one of the primary pain points of being on the road. We recommend packing extra battery units and chargers (you lose them at home, and you’ll most certainly lose them on the road). Definitely invest in a 12V adapter so you can charge devices while mobile, but know that one adapter may only charge a certain number or type of device. E.g., mine can handle a laptop, an iPod, and a curling iron, but on two laptops, it blows a fuse. And yes, you’ll want to pick up a pack of fuses for your 12V adapter, too.
More tech and media tips coming right up on page two.
First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes Danielle with a baby carriage?
Pop star Kevin Jonas tied the knot with former hairdresser Danielle Deleasa, 23, in a Disney-esque ceremony — complete with glass slippers and fairy tale themes — at Oheka Castle in Long Island, New York on Dec. 19. (We all know The JoBros have ties to Mickey & The Gang, so it should come as no surprise that the ceremony looked like something you’d see at The Magic Kingdom……) Now that’s he’s a married man, the no-longer-a-virgin Jonas Brother, 22, is eager to get an early start on fatherhood, according to a new tabloid report.
“They’re planning to start a family very soon and it could even be a honeymoon pregnancy,” a friend spilled to The Sydney Herald this week. “They’re basically putting it in God’s hands and even though they’re young, they are both ready to start having children.”
Care to get up close and personal with Niihau? How’s about an overview of Tuvalu? Surely you need a helicopter shot of Pakatoa Island to get your morning started right, yeah? If so, and you’re too lazy to hit up the World Wide Web, there’s a better-than-average chance that an older National Geographic magazine has exactly the elixir you’re searching for. Problem is, sifting through every single issue since 1888 takes a fair bit of time — time you’d rather be spending in an obnoxiously long security line as you await your flight to Ushuaia. Thanks to “modern technology” and “storage innovations,” said quandary can now be resolved quite simply. Nat Geo is offering every last piece of information it has ever published on a portable 160GB HDD, and amazingly 100GB is free for you to manually add to the collection. Too bad this $199.95 device wasn’t available before Christmas, but hey, at least you’ve now got something to blow those Santa Bucks on.
National Geographic shoves every morsel of its collection onto 160GB HDD originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 30 Dec 2009 03:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
Permalink 
Download Squad | 
National Geographic | Email this | Comments
Buy This Item: [Click here to buy this item]
Despite the huge problems it encountered in 2009, Opel’s new registrations grew 31 percent in Germany during the current year, which means that GM’s unit reached the highest level in four years. Basically, it all happened thanks to government incentives, Reuters wrote, which encouraged buyers to migrate towards fuel efficient and smaller cars.
In Germany, Opel’s sales were up 31 percent to 339,000 units in 2009, a market share increase to 8.9 percent.
Meanwhile, Ope… (read more)
It’s not like we needed any confirmation for it, but the motor racing website that announced two days ago that Brazilian driver Nelson Piquet Jr. will sign a 3-year deal with Campos Meta Formula One team admitted the report was a hoax.
The aforementioned report linked the 3-year contract Piquet would have signed with the Spanish team with his father purchasing as much as 15 percent worth of share of Adrian Campos’ team. In addition, the report suggested several Brazilian sponsors … (read more)
Article Tags: Met Office, UK Winter Forecast 2009/10, World Temperatures
Pressure on the water supply network in Northern Ireland is at an all-time high because of burst pipes and running taps caused by the freezing weather.
The cold snap has taken its toll on the water supply, leaving thousands of householders and businesses struggling to get by without mains water.
And there is no sign of an end in sight to the province’s ice storm as the Met Office predicted that high winds in the next few days will make it “bitterly cold”.
Northern Ireland Water said a major incident team was co-ordinating response teams across Northern Ireland to find and fix burst water mains.
Source: belfasttelegraph.co.uk
TenYears: Unexpected Success Stories
TenYears: Biggest Losers in Tech
Japan’s $2 million rescue robot is a hummingbird
It’s a pen! It’s a bullet! It writes upside down and underwater! It’s a bullet pen!
For men on trains: Japanese company sells anti-groping gloves
Buy This Item: [Click here to buy this item]
Comedy Central has pulled the plug on The Jeff Dunham Show after just one season.
The sketch comedy starring the nation’s premier ventriloquist will not be returning next season despite its debut as the most-watched series premiere in the cable network’s history, drawing 5.3 million viewers, The Hollywood Reporter learned on Tuesday.
‘We have no plans to renew the series at this time,” a Comedy Central spokesperson said.
The network will continue to work with Dunham — the ventriloquist who is one of the highest-grossing standups in the country — as part of a development deal. He will star in another special for the network targeted for fall 2010, following his blockbuster 2008 special seen by 6.6 million viewers.
By Jon Stokes, Senior Editor, Ars Technica
All signs indicate that the e-reader is to CES 2010 what the razor-thin LED-backlit TV was to CES 2009—a technology whose time in the commercial spotlight is now at hand, and which will make a huge, multi-vendor push into the market in the coming year. A whole raft of e-reader devices and technologies will be on display at next week’s CES—were I to cover all of them, this article would run for many pages. This being the case, in this short preview I’ll offer a quick look at three of the most promising e-reader efforts that we’ll be watching closely for this year’s CES coverage.
Read the rest of this post on the original site
Buy This Item: [Click here to buy this item]
By Benjamin Sarlin, Contributor, Daily Beast
While Avatar may represent the future of filmmaking, a current Star Wars-related Internet phenomenon signifies how the Aughts’ DIY mashup approach has changed popular culture.
On paper, the viral video making the rounds recently is bizarre even by Internet standards: a 70-minute review of 1999’s Star Wars: The Phantom Menace delivered by an elderly schizophrenic who talks like a cross between Dan Aykroyd in The Blues Brothers and The Silence of the Lambs’ Buffalo Bill.
“Star Wars: The Phantom Menace was the most disappointing thing since my son,” the narrator begins. “And while my son eventually hanged himself in the bathroom of a gas station, the unfortunate reality of the Star Wars prequels is that they’ll be around forever.”
Read the rest of this post on the original site
Buy This Item: [Click here to buy this item]
By Liz Gannes, Blogger, NewTeeVee
Over the past two years, developer Ron Ilan built a site called Totlol that features a moderated selection of YouTube videos appropriate for kids. He hoped to build a business on it — and actually started charging membership fees earlier this year to avoid shutting the site down for lack of money. This week Ilan is crying foul, saying YouTube prevented him from his preferred business model, advertising, by changing its terms of service.
Read the rest of this post on the original site
Buy This Item: [Click here to buy this item]
By Jade Colbert, Writer, thevarsity.ca
On November 13, Cory Doctorow spoke to a crowd of about a hundred librarians, educators, publishers, authors, and students on “How to Destroy the Book,” as part of the National Reading Summit held at the ROM.
Doctorow has a pretty impressive bio: co-editor of Boing Boing, former Director of European Affairs for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Fulbright Chair at the Annenberg Center for Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California, visiting Senior Lecturer at Open University, and New York Times bestselling author.
Read the rest of this post on the original site
Buy This Item: [Click here to buy this item]
By Chris Ziegler, Editor, Engadget
The year is 1999. Bill Clinton is the President of the United States, gas is 94 cents a gallon, Bondi Blue iMacs are a staple in dorm rooms across the country, and Microsoft (MSFT) is trying to bring the desktop Windows experience to the pocket, pushing its Palm-size PC concept (after Palm had quashed the original “Palm PC” branding) on a world still feeling jilted by the failures of the Apple Newton.
3Com (COMS) subsidiary Palm and its heavyweight licensee Handspring have figured out something interesting about the still-nascent PDA market, though: people like simplicity. If an electronic organizer does what it says it’s going to do, keeps your information in sync with your PC, runs for forever and a day on a single set of batteries, and does it all with a minimum of fuss, people will buy.
Read the rest of this post on the original site
Buy This Item: [Click here to buy this item]
By Eric Savitz, Blogger, Barron’s, Tech Trader Daily
Motorola (MOT) may be planning to announce a pair of new phones at next week’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, according to Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry.
Read the rest of this post on the original site
Buy This Item: [Click here to buy this item]
The lithium ion technology is gaining impetus with the release of such batteries by a whole lot of companies. Panasonic is now working on its 3.1 Ah 18650 lithium ion cells. Panasonic’s newly acquired company, Sanyo, recently released the Eneloop Music Booster, a 9V lithium ion battery made for on-stage use. Panasonic has now planned to produce 3.4 Ah cells having a carbon anode unit in 2012 and 4.0 Ah cells the following year. The 4.0 Ah cell however, uses a new silicon-based alloy for an electrode. These cells will have nickel oxide positive electrodes that are commonly used.
Due to this, the energy density is popped up to 800 Wh/L as compared to the 620Wh/L of the 2.9 Ah cells available today. The capacity also increases from 10.4 Wh to 13.6 Wh. The cell voltage drops from 3.6 V to 3.4 V and gains weight from 44 to 54 g/cell. This may act as a drawback however. Panasonic is sure striving hard to make its lithium ion technology more widely applicable.
Google’s Nexus One phone will evidently have a couple of interesting features, according to new documents leaked to the Gizmodo blog.
Google plans to sell the Google-designed, Android-based phone by itself. The unlocked and unsubsidized phone will sell for $530. Meanwhile, T-Mobile plans to sell a subsidized version for $180 with a two-year service contract. The phone service with 500 minutes of airtime per month, text messaging, and data is $79.99.
Details are being closely watched since the Nexus One it uses Google’s Android operating system and it is the first such phone designed by Google itself. The strategy reflects Google’s desire to take the entire design of the phone into its own hands in order to ensure a quality experience and to make sure the phone is unlockable, a key feature that users want in the name of greater consumer choice.
Those who use Family plans, Flexpay, SmartAccess and KidConnect subscriptions must buy the phone unlocked in order to use those plans still. You can have up to five Nexus One phones per Google account. Google plans to sell the phone at Google.com/phone.
If you cancel the plan before 120 days, you have to pay the subsidy difference, or $350. For some reason, Google made sure in its terms of service agreements that buyers knew that the maker of the phone was HTC, not Google itself. TechCrunch also noted in a post that Google may be planning an automated backup service for the Nexus One phones.
Earlier today, we noted that T-Mobile and Google are expected to announce the Nexus One on Jan. 5. [screenshot credit: Gizmodo]
Buy This Item: [Click here to buy this item]
Article Tags: ClimateGate, Letter, World Temperatures
The science behind the theory that CO2 is driving so-called anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is a sham. It cannot be scientifically proven.
Let us pretend that the UN’s central estimate of equilibrium “global warming” caused by CO2, allowing for all temperature feedbacks, is correct. In that case, temperature change, in Celsius degrees, is equal to 4.7 times the logarithm of the proportionate increase in CO2 concentration.
First, check that this equation is correct by working out how much warming would occur if we doubled CO2 concentration. The warming would be 4.7 ln 2 = 3.26 Celsius degrees, exactly the central estimate given by the UN’s climate panel in its 2007 assessment report.
For the past 10 years, according to the U.S. National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, global atmospheric CO2 concentration has risen at just two parts per million by volume per year, reaching 388 ppmv this year.
Source: edmontonjournal.com
Accused of being a ‘green hypocrite’ for using a private jet to fly to the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit and giving the world a sermon on global warming, Prince Charles has decided to have his place of dwelling go green. The Prince has planned to install solar panels on roof of the 180 year old mansion, the Clarence House in London. These panels are anticipated to fulfill the heating and lighting energy needs of the building. However, officials state that no such modifications will be done if they harm the appearance of the century old building. This change would burn a £150,000 hole in the Prince’s pocket.
According to Jerry Stokes, president of the firm SunTech Europe, the Prince is excited and eagerly awaits the installation of these solar panels that will enable him to do his part to save our environment. Hopefully, the people of Great Britain look up to this example set by the Prince, and go green themselves.
Robins has time and again been considered as a pioneer in testing alternative energy technologies. Recently they have installed a solar panel which is a matter of curiosity. Their installed solar panel assumes the dimensions of a drive-in-movie screen. It is the shining example of the state-of-the-art technology. At peak hour it generates 25 […]
Posted in: Inventions, PhotoVoltaics, Solar Power
