David Lidsky's Blog, page 4708

Chevy Volt Faces Its Uphill Battle With "Mountain Mode"

Still can't decide whether to buy the Chevy Volt PHEV when it goes on sale later this year? GM is offering a unique feature to entice customers that are skeptical of the EV's potential performance: Mountain Mode--an option for drivers who know that they are about to climb a big hill.

The Mountain Mode option gathers an energy reserve in the lithium-ion battery so that the car has the full power of both the gasoline engine and the electric powertrain behind it for, say, navigating a series...

8 Lessons for Creating Social Impact

Have "design thinking" and "social innovation" become permanently intertwined? You'd have to think so based on Tim Brown's book and the prevailing discourse at any major design/innovation conference (SXSW, PICNIC, GEL, GAIN, LIFT). There seems to be a firm belief that you can't establish any cred as a designer these days if you haven't applied design thinking to a major social issue of some sort (health, energy, education...). Similarly, it would seem that social innovation (or social...

Intel Takes Aim at Apple and ARM With New Atom Chips

Intel's revealed some details of its next-gen Atom CPUs, essentially extending the capabilities of the chips that powered the netbook revolution. Since this is over, Intel really wants the Atoms inside tablet PCs, to rival Apple's ARM relationship.

The chips are the "Moorestown" architecture we've been hearing about for a while, and it's been rebranded with a much sexier-sounding "Z6" label for the official launch. The earlier Atoms were revolutionary because though they were, in some sense...

Jill Tarter, Director of SETI

The Brainiacs

Jill Tarter

Director SETI

When astronomer Jill Tarter was awarded the TED Prize in 2009, she was given the opportunity to make a wish big enough to change the world, and she did: "I wish that you would empower Earthlings everywhere to become active participants in the ultimate search for cosmic company." Now Tarter is laying the groundwork to make her own wish come true, by reorganizing the way the scientific community works and how we Earthlings search for...

Google Chrome 5 Beta: Fastest Chrome Yet Brings Native Flash Support

Google's Chrome is one of the company's most successful and best new products. A recent data pull showed the browser making serious headway against its main competitors, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Firefox, gaining more than half a percentage point in marketshare this past month. 

With yesterday's release of the newest Chrome Beta, Google is pumping up the speed--impressive for a browser that's already known as the speediest around. Says the Goog:

Today's new beta release incorporates one...

The New York Times's Lackluster, Steve-Jobs-Disapproved iPad App: It's Amazon's Fault

Ryan Tate over at Valleywag writes that Apple's Steve Jobs has been "shunning" the New York Times iPad app. With any other app, this would be such unimportant gossip that not even the most Apple-crazy fan site would bother writing about it. But Jobs positioned the iPad as a savior of periodicals, and put the Grey Lady right up front. Ads feature the iPad's browser landed on the Times's site, and Jobs even brought a Times executive on stage when he introduced the tablet.

Yet, the NYTimes iPad...

TED Opens Its Video Library to Broadcast Television Worldwide

The TED conference ("Technology, Entertainment, Design") is responsible for some of the most fascinating speeches ever given, from the likes of Al Gore, Bill Gates, the Googlers, Richard Dawkins, and my personal favorite, Chef Dan Barber. They're sort of the innovative step-brother of PBS and NPR--the best of American public programming.

But while they've been able to achieve widespread acclaim and success through their Internet-only distribution, they're also limiting their audience to...

Threadsy Smooshes Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, and More Into a Surprisingly Clean Stream

Threadsy has been available in a private beta for a little while now, but today opened the service to the public. I hadn't used the beta, so this public release is my first exposure to Threadsy, and honestly, I'm a lot more impressed than I expected. That doesn't mean I'm going to use it, though.

There've been social networking aggregators before--FriendFeed comes to mind--but Threadsy is the best one I've seen yet. Instead of one Twitter-like stream a la FriendFeed, Threadsy smartly...

Ning Will Remain Free for Public Schoolteachers

Brain Trust: Ning chairman Marc Andreessen (he built Netscape back in the day), with Bianchini, at the company's HQ in Palo Alto. | Photograph by Art Streiber

Back on April 15th, Ning announced that they'd be moving from both paid and free offerings for their social network building service to paid-only. Ning was and is mostly used by those to whom the word "free" is most important--nonprofits. It's tricky and expensive to build a private social network, and even large-ish organizations like...

Cell Phone Networks Gang Up on Apple, Google

A is for apps--and agitated cell phone networks. They've formed a consortium in an attempt to fight back against the overwhelming dominance from Apple and Google in the smartphone market, and make some money from the mobile app market.

This week, the three-month-old Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) is to merge with the Open Mobile Terminal Platform (OMTP) and, with a little help from the world's handset makers, including LG, BlackBerry, and Samsung, try and put put the brakes on...