Eideard

As the second size extension of the Toyota Prius family tree, the 2012 Prius+ adds a healthy dose of roominess to the well-known fuel-sipping hybrid equation, and it’s making its world debut at the 2011 Geneva Motor Show. There’s seating for seven occupants inside, but the multi-purpose vehicle shares a clear design language with Toyota’s standard-bearing Prius. What’s more, it manages a low 0.29 drag coefficient thanks to its extended roofline and carefully designed front fascia.

Equally as notable is the battery. This is the first lithium-ion battery pack to be incorporated within a non-plug-in Toyota full hybrid. Toyota has found enough room underneath the center console between the driver and the front passenger to fit the battery, which helps maximize interior space for occupants and their cargo.

As you would expect from a Prius, there are three drive modes: A zero-emission EV mode that relies on electric motor power alone, an ECO mode that maximizes efficiency and fuel economy and finally a somewhat ambitiously named POWER mode that is said to boost overall performance.

Toyota is saying that the Prius+ will be on sale in Europe in the first half of 2012, but it’s coming to the U.S. around the same time in the form of the Prius V, which we previously saw at the 2011 Detroit Auto Show.

The 2nd model of an extended platform Prius from Toyota. We’re getting past DINKs who are early adopters. Families – with family activities – are being pressed by knowledge, acceptance and economics to move to intelligent transportation choices.

I hate to sound overly optimistic; but – like personal savings – as often as American gullibility trends economic and political habits back into same-old habits, it appears that a bit more knowledge seems to promote at least a small measure of intelligent self-interest that sticks.

The last revellers seem to have cleared up scrupulously after the final party at Marden Henge some 4,500 years ago.

They scoured the rectangular building and the smart white chalk platform on top of the earth bank, with its spectacular view towards the river Avon in one direction, and the hills from which the giant sarsen stones were brought to Stonehenge in the other.

All traces of the feast – the pig bones, the ashes and the burnt stones from the barbecue that cooked them, the broken pots and bowls – were swept neatly into a dump to one side. A few precious offerings, including an exquisitely worked flint arrowhead, were carefully laid on the clean chalk. Then they covered the whole surface with a thin layer of clay, stamped it flat, and left. Forever.

In the past fortnight, English Heritage archaeologists have peeled back the thin layer of turf covering the site, which has somehow escaped being ploughed for more than 4,000 years. They were astounded to find the undisturbed original surface just as the prehistoric Britons left it.

“We’re gobsmacked really,” said site director Jim Leary.

Giles Woodhouse, a volunteer digger who must return next week to his day job as a lieutenant colonel in the army bound for Germany and then Afghanistan, has been crouched over the rubbish dump day after day, his black labrador Padma sighing at his side. He has been teasing the soil away from bone, stone and pottery so perfectly preserved it could have been buried last year.

“It gives one a bit of a shiver down the backbone to realise the last man to touch these died 4,500 years ago,” he said. His finds, still emerging from the soil, will rewrite the history of the site…

So why did the site’s temporary occupants leave? Maybe with Stonehenge complete, the sarsens shaped into the giant trilithons that still fill the hordes of modern visitors with awe, their job was done. They tidied up nicely, turned out the lights, and left.

RTFA. Delightful. A word picture of discoveries taking us back 4500 years.

An enjoyable read. Makes you want to get your butt across the pond for some volunteer labor.

Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

Amazon, displaying a sense of urgency, perhaps driven by the pending launch of Apple’s tablet-style computer is turning its Kindle device into a platform. The Seattle-based company…announced that it will allow software developers to “build and upload active content” and distribute it through the “Kindle Store later this year.” Amazon will be giving out a Kindle Development Kit that will give “developers access to programming interfaces, tools and documentation to build active content for Kindle.” The company will launch a limited beta effort next month.

I would also like to see what developers come up with. An Electronics Arts’ executive in Amazon’s press release says that the company is looking to develop games for the Kindle platform. I wonder how much can you do with the limited hardware that is a Kindle. Screen refresh rates are low, the inbuilt processor is puny and of course no color. Unless Amazon is planning to launch a beefier and color version of the device, game developers are unlikely to be able to create great experiences on Kindle…

As I wrote back in March 2009…people are looking for a cheap, connected Internet device that is “not a laptop.” I was recently watching an interview with Amazon’s Jeff Bezos on “Charlie Rose” in which he talked about the Kindle being flexible enough to encourage new kinds of media consumption, including multimedia books and newspapers with immersive content and interactivity. I think he is spot on — and just from that perspective, Apple has to be thinking really hard about this looming opportunity.

There’s only one reason to make the announcement early. Trying to cop attention for the project before Apple’s launch party on the 27th.

I wish we could get KB into the official launch for a hands-on review.

In line to enter the World Wide Developers Conference 2009
Daylife/Reuters Pictures used by permission

A decade ago, San Francisco’s trendy South of Market district was the birthplace of hundreds of web design firms that have since gone under or been swallowed by rivals.

Now it is the turn of the “app army“, the scores of companies devoted to churning out small programs known as applications that run on Apple’s iPhone and rival devices, as well as on regular computers for users of Facebook and similar websites…

Indeed, veteran industry executives, investors and analysts are calling the shift to internet-capable devices and the apps that run on them a once-a-decade leap in technology, on a par with the great personal computing boom of the 1980s and the debut of the World Wide Web in the 1990s.

“The ramp [growth rate] of the iPhone and iPod touch in the first eight or nine quarters is more than five times the ramp for the internet,” says Kathryn Huberty, Morgan Stanley tech analyst. These devices, and faster wireless networks, are both now reaching about a fifth of the global population, she estimates, which will drive much more rapid development : “Globally,” she says, “2010 is the tipping point.”

No company is more central to the shift towards the mobile internet than Apple, which enjoys a wide lead in distributing applications. More than 100,000 apps are available on its App Store and more than 2 billion have been downloaded in less than a year and a half.

To keep that gusher flowing, Apple has sought to inspire more outsider developers with the rare rags-to-riches stories — like that of Steve Demeter, a bank programmer who earned $250,000 in two months of 2008 after launching a simple game called Trism…

The advantages the bigger companies have over the smaller developers — scale, expertise and marketing know-how — mean there may not be any “app millionaires” in the years ahead, says Matt Murphy of venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, who runs a fund devoted to backing iPhone developers.

But small groups that have multiple successes will be pursued by bigger companies. “There will be teams of people who get a hit franchise acquired for north of $1 million,” Mr Murphy says.

Useful article. Beaucoup information.

As visionary as their leadership may be, this is a phenomenon that, after all, even surprised Apple.

A new online video game distribution network hopes to free players from buying game discs or the console systems and high-priced computers needed to play them.

The OnLive Game Service, expected to launch later this year — was officially announced today at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco — lets subscribers choose from a on-demand catalog of new video games that can be played on Windows and Apple Macintosh computers or television sets.

Bypassing current console systems such as the Microsoft Xbox that play only games made for that specific platform, OnLive lets computers play games stored on its network of super-powerful data servers. These servers bounce game data back and forth from the player’s computer using proprietary compression technology to make the games run as if they are loaded on the computer.

To play over big-screen HDTVs, a small microconsole unit (the size of a deck of cards) that connects to home broadband networks is used. Game controllers and headsets can connect to the microconsole using USB or wireless connections…

The price of the microconsole needed for TV-based connectivity and monthly subscriptions will be announced later.

“Were providing you with the latest high-end titles, the exact same ones you would see at Target or Best Buy, in the same release windows. But what is really cool is you don’t need any high-end hardware to play them,” says OnLive founder and chief operating officer Steve Perlman. “There’s no physical media. It’s an all-digital platform. You never need to upgrade your equipment at home.”

I went looking for the most trustworthy person I can think of writing about gaming – Garnett Lee. At least at time of posting, he’s probably too busy crawling the booths at the GDC to get something in print about this. So, I’m adding a link from MTV Multiplayer – who interviewed Pearlman at the conference.

UPDATE: Wagner James Au has a good article over at GigaOm.

Saab has become an Opel/Vauxhall/Subaru with a Saab skin
Daylife/Reuters Picture

The board of the Swedish carmaker Saab, which is owned by General Motors, has filed for reorganisation, seeking to create a fully independent business. The announcement follows Thursday’s extraordinary board meeting in which bosses considered the company’s future.

GM took a 50% stake in Saab in 1989 and gained full ownership ten years later. Within 2 years, Saab ceased being profitable.

Despite turning down GM’s request for support, a senior Swedish government official has said the government has not ruled out providing loan guarantees to Saab following its restructuring…

Stephen Pope, chief global strategist at Cantor Fitzgerald, believes GM “oversaw the destruction of the Swedish car company’s soul. Just look at the current ’93′ [model] as an example,” he said. “The ’93′ is just a Saab body skin placed on top of the Vectra from Opel/Vauxhall.”

An illustration of how poorly GM understands the cross-platform concept. Along with everything else they do wrong.

Present-gen OMAP3 series in the Palm Pre

TI today unveiled a mobile-phone platform at the Mobile World Congress, capable of recording 1080p video, shooting 20-megapixel images, and playing MP3s for a week on one battery charge. The OMAP 4 platform is the first to use ARM’s multi-core Cortex-A9 processor, which can offer up to seven times the computing performance of today’s top smartphones, according to TI.

The OMAP4430 and 4440 chipsets will include the following processor cores: a dual-core Cortex-A9 main processor running at 1 GHz or higher, a DSP, and a dedicated graphics chip. The chipsets will support WUXGA screens—that’s 1920 by 1200 resolution, the ideal standard resolution for watching 1080p video. And they’ll record 4 hours of video on a single charge…

The OMAP 4 chipset will support Windows Mobile, Symbian, and all Linux-based OSs, including Android and Palm’s WebOS, Tolbert said. For an OS to take advantage of the OMAP 4′s power, it will need to support symmetric multiprocessing…

“The OMAP 4 platform lends itself well to a variety of equipment from smartphones to MIDs to netbooks,” Product Marketing Manager Robert Tolbert said.

OMAP 4 chipsets will go into production in the second half of 2010, so you should see phones based on these chips sometime in 2011. (The Palm Pre 3, perhaps?)

TI always raises itself from the ashes of whichever marketplace it chooses. Stellar R&D.

Since the announcement of the Chrysler-Fiat partnership last week, speculation has swirled about what models would come out of the American-Italian venture. Automotive News got the skinny on what’s on the way, and according to their unnamed sources, we can expect seven new vehicles in North America – four under the Chrysler brands and three as Alfa Romeos or Fiats.

The plan covers vehicles on four platforms, spanning from a micro-car to a mid-size sedan, with plants in North America being tasked with building most of the new models. Chrysler’s Toluca, Mexico plant, which current builds the Dodge Journey and not-long-for-this-world PT Cruiser, will begin producing the Fiat 500 under the alliance.

What’s on the way?

The agreement involves two new minicars (A-segment) that share the same platform. The first is the aforementioned Fiat 500 and the second, a five-door hatchback based on the Fiat Panda, will likely be badged as a Chrysler or Dodge…

Moving up to the B segment, Chrysler could get the next generation Fiat Grande Punto, Alfa could begin selling the MiTo and the same platform could be used to create a small crossover for Chrysler.

On the mid-size front, Chrysler – which is in desperate need of both C- and D-segment models to replace the Caliber/Compass and Sebring/Avenger, respectively – could utilize Fiat’s new C-Evo architecture to create a new sedan and a more respectable compact car.

And what’s Fiat get out of all this? An inexpensive entry into the North American market, manufacturing capacity and a sizeable distribution network. And if you think Chrysler is getting all the goods, Fiat plans to distribute the Dodge Journey and Dakota pickup in South America, and will be able to utilize Chrysler’s new Phoenix V6 in its own line of products. Not quite balanced, but hardly a bad deal.

Probably no need to even note this in the United States; but, NO mention of diesel power. Which predominates? Ignorance or stupidity?

I know we need a campaign to remove the unbalanced excise tax system which leaves consumers with diesel costing more than gasoline. I know we need a campaign to overcome consumers’ pictures of leaking, smelly cars – courtesy of GM. But, having more power and better economy is sufficient motivation for me to make the switch.

As the new Democratic majority prepares to take power here in the U.S., Republicans have become, as Phil Gramm might put it, a party of whiners.

Some of the whining almost defies belief. Did Alberto Gonzales, the former attorney general, really say, “I consider myself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror”? Did Rush Limbaugh really suggest that the financial crisis was the result of a conspiracy, masterminded by that evil genius Chuck Schumer?

The fault, however, lies not in Republicans’ stars but in themselves. Forty years ago the Republican Party decided, in effect, to make itself the party of racial backlash. And everything that has happened in recent years, from the choice of Bush as the party’s champion, to the Bush administration’s pervasive incompetence, to the party’s shrinking base, is a consequence of that decision.

If the Bush administration became a byword for policy bungles, for government by the unqualified, well, it was just following the advice of leading conservative think tanks: After the 2000 election the Heritage Foundation specifically urged the new team to “make appointments based on loyalty first and expertise second.”

Contempt for expertise, in turn, rested on contempt for government in general. “Government is not the solution to our problem,” declared Ronald Reagan. “Government is the problem.” So why worry about governing well?

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