Speedy Kiwi…
Ok, so Kiwis are a slow moving nocturnal bird…. Not this Kiwi though:
Ian Wright has a car that blows away a Ferrari 360 Spider and a Porsche Carrera GT in drag races, and whose 0-to-60 acceleration time ranks it among the fastest production autos in the world. In fact, it’s second only to the French-made Bugatti Veyron, a 1,000-horsepower, 16-cylinder beast that hits 60 mph half a second faster and goes for $1.25 million.
The key difference? The Bugatti gets eight miles per gallon. Wright’s car? It runs off an electric battery.
Wright, a 50-year-old entrepreneur from New Zealand, thinks his electric car, the X1, can soon be made into a small-production roadster that car fanatics and weekend warriors will happily take home for about $100,000 – a quarter ton of batteries included. He has even launched a startup, called Wrightspeed, to custom-make and sell the cars.
Ian, if you need a test driver, I’m in Silicon Valley as well… 🙂
New Version Of Zoundry Out
There is a new version out of my fave blog posting tool for Windows – Zoundry.
Loving My PSP
I got a Sony PSP for my birthday last year. It is a stunning device. As gorgeous as the iPod and does some things much better. Many things hamper the PSP though – lousy content, incredibly punitive pricing, expensive storage.
It’s a little rich though reading studio execs pointing the finger at Sony. The pricing for a movie ($20 bucks and upwards) is a joke when it really only works on a PSP – same for games. The PSP should be packed with mountains of cheap storage and I should be able to download movies to watch (I can here, but still at crazy prices). It should be a combination of Tivo and NetFlix to go.
Studio execs probably have better market research than I do, but here is a fact – three of us on a recent international flight were watching movies on our PSP. My Powerbook’s battery life sucks that much. I want to watch more movies on my PSP – and TV – so, rather than telling us what you think we’re doing, enable us to do what we want to do.
What hampers the Sony PSP is old thinking and proprietary ecosystems. I think Sony is just starting to get the PSP’s potential as a network device. iPod’s success comes from its inherent simplicity as a network device – and bear in mind it has no network functionality but the PSP does. Without iTunes, it’s pretty much useless. Ironically I can connect my PSP via WiFi and other means directly to the network but the lack of cheap masses of storage and the complexity of downloading and ripping stuff is a serious drawback.
Apple commoditized content and built a community around that content – it then made buying and storing it incredibly compelling. Until Sony does the same, PSP can’t succeed on the same scale – and success is nothing to do with UMD.
Spotlight Entourage
If you are using Microsoft Entourage (Outlook for the Mac) take a look at the latest update. Quite a few upgrades but most importantly “with the new 11.2.3 Update installed, you can now use Apple’s Spotlight feature to execute searches against your Entourage database contents. Spotlight can find any item inside your Entourage database; it does not matter, where that item is.”
Interestingly, I didn’t find out about this from any official source – rather from bouncing around blogs after two weeks of abstinence.
Oragami Ugly
Looking at the new Wintel Origami device – one I was looking forward to looking at… I can’t help but get straight to “butt ugly” as a description. It looks like one of those remotes I needed to operate my home audio jalopy. If this is somehow meant to resemble origami, somebody in Redmond is doing origami with concrete.
