The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘excellent’

Here are some of yesterday’s stories: Video: Excellent hand-built, self-powered marble-lifting machine This Casio G-Shock looks like they dipped it in Pixy Stix (comes with robot) Canon weather-sealed 70-200mm L… coffee thermos? Will Valve revitalize Mac gaming with Steam for OS X? MIT’s teleconferencing robot can interact with, strangle you LED flashlight records nightvision video

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Daily Crunch: Teleconference Edition

When I saw the email talking about MOGMobile, I thought “yes, MOG is releasing a mobile app for their excellent new music service.”

But no. MOG still says a mobile app is coming sometime soon. But MOGMobile is this crazy car they’re having built to take to the SXSW conference in March.

From the guys creating it: “We are basically building out the van with foam which we will fiberglass over. Then we will give the bald bambino 24,000 beautiful blue hair plugs, add a psycko sound system and send her down south.”

That’s a conceptual drawing to the right. Below is the actual interior. I can’t wait to go for a spin in this thing. It just screams understated class.

I’ve been quite fascinated by electric car firm Better Place since I read up on how the company was founded by former SAP executive Shai Agassi in the excellent book ‘Start-up Nation’, which tells of Israel’s historical entrepreneurial DNA and tech success stories.

Basically, Better Place aims to reduce global dependency on petroleum through the creation of a market-based transportation infrastructure that supports electric vehicles, relying on renewable energy from solar arrays and wind farms instead of oil. The startup, founded just 2 years ago, is currently building its first electric vehicle network in Israel, and plans to deploy the infrastructure in other nations on a country-by-country basis with initial deployments beginning this year, and commercial sales beginning in 2012.

As of April 2009, it had already raised $400 million, with several countries offering tax breaks in favor of the ambitious venture. This morning, Better Place announced that it has raised a massive $350 million follow-up venture funding round to lay the groundwork for these deployments, valuing the company at a whopping $1.25 billion.

HSBC led the round with a $125 million capital injection (buying them approx. 10% of the company), with eight other investors participating, including Morgan Stanley Investment Management, Lazard Asset Management, Israel Corp., VantagePoint Venture Partners, Ofer Hi-Tech Holdings and others.

Better Place says it intends to expand into markets where the business model economics and investor returns are “optimized”, citing Europe and Asia specifically. The company also reaffirmed its original target to begin full commercial operations at the end of next year, when industry partner Renault plans to offer the first car with a replaceable battery.

Sportswear giant Nike has a nifty application in the App Store that allows you to create custom sneakers and order them straight away, with just a couple of taps. The app is in fact a mobile extension of NIKEiD, a program that allows customer to order personalized Nike shoes straight from the manufacturer. And an excellent extension it is.

The free app (iTunes link) has been available on the App Store since the beginning of this month, but surprisingly there hasn’t been a lot of coverage about it. Even despite this excellent video about it (embedded below).

AMD just revealed a processor for their “Mainstream Desktop Platform” that will be going for less than a bill. There are cheap processors out there already, but this is a full-featured, quad-core 45nm part, not some cut-rate piece of garbage. Sure, the Athlon II X4 620 isn’t going to set any speed records, but it’s part of the excellent AMD ecosystem

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AMD busts out a sub-$100 quad-core processor

Okay, it’s actually a golf cart that just looks like a car , but it’s still pretty uncool. Volvos are nice cars, but I wouldn’t call them cool — and putting the nose of one on a little cart takes it from not cool to actively ridiculous. Of course, I’d still love to race one around the course.

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Volvo introduces world’s least-cool electric car

Now, this isn’t scientific data, especially since we know that Microsoft hides that data from prying eyes, but it’s more than supposition. Game Informer did a poll and found that the 360 has the highest failure rate of any of the consoles at 54% — not exactly the most unexpected news, but putting a number on it is kind of sobering

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Oh my: the 360 has (or had) a 54.2 percent failure rate

When FriendFeed launched new themes back in June, I wanted but one feature: The ability to create my own. Today, I got my wish.

Despite being purchased by Facebook for close to $50 million earlier this week, FriendFeed is still rolling out new features. Today brings customizable themes, which allow you to tweak your template to make it as pretty or as ugly as you would like. Naturally, I’m going for ugly, as I stated my desire to mimic the excellent “Eggplant Orange Juice With Blood” theme I created for Gmail when that service launched customizable themes.

So far, my best effort (below) is called “Dictionary.com Cheer Carrot Theme” after my new favorite website. To FriendFeed’s credit, they make it pretty hard to make a truly ugly design, like you can easily do on Gmail. One reason is that theren’t are as many variables to change the colors of.

One interesting note about these themes is that by default, you will see other users’ themes when you click on their profiles. You will also see the themes that admin’s create in rooms that they manage. You can turn this off, and choose to only see your theme, in the settings.

And just for comparison sake, the old Gmail design I did:

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

I may not listen to a lot of Zappa but his section in this excellent video essentially describes what’s wrong with the music industry these days: presumed familiarity with the market. When there was no feedback and no real understanding of demographics, you were able to experiment. Now, with the granularity available from modern data gathering techniques you have a set of executives who know they don’t have to move too far off of a median of “music that sells” to make money

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Video: Why the music industry sucks and how to fix it

Apps on the iPhone are huge. We know that. As if we needed more proof, Apple moved its billionth app earlier this afternoon.

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Zero remains a popular app download count among non-iPhone owners