David Lidsky's Blog, page 4729

Ford Unveils Adorable Would-Be Smart-Car Competitor

But the new design for the tiny-car market also looks tough at the same time.

At the Beijing Auto Show--where GM unveiled its new Volt minivan--Ford also announced an alluring departure from its typical lineup: The Ford Start, a super-compact car intended for city-dwellers.

You might remember the day when Detroit ran as fast as it could from small cars, because it couldn't make them profitably given terrible manufacturing efficiency. Which tells you something about how much better Ford...

21 Twitter Tips From Socially Savvy Companies

Adapted from his book Engage, Brian Solis presents his list of suggestions to help businesses learn how to engage customers on Twitter through the examples of those companies, from Dell to Zappos, already successfully building online communities.

 

Number 1. Special Offers

We live in a society that is as distracted as it is informed. People are making decisions on what to read, view, purchase, visit, and sample based on the information that filters through their attention dashboards. At best...

Knit Rider: Woven Car Is Part Overstock, Part Recycled Materials, Part Etsy

There is a certain regalness to the Woven Car, a picnic basket-like vehicle constructed from recycled and overstock materials. The car, designed by artists Ann Conte and Jeanne Wiley, is made out of a rusted MG Midget. "I thought that we could take this eyesore and push the boundaries of
where it's going by bringing together other elements that are also
discarded," explained Wiley.

The Woven Car features pale gold seatbelts woven to create a checkerboard pattern
around the body of the car...

B&N Tweaks Nook E-Reader to Get You Back in Real Bookstores

Barnes and Noble has just released new firmware for the Nook e-reader, and it's no run-of-the-mill tweak--it adds in some neat extra functionality including a browser. Better yet, there's a clever trick to get you back into the real bookstores.

The new software is version 1.3, and it's out now. The obvious performance tweaks are still there of course, and B&N promise that it has boosted the Wi-Fi connectivity of the device. On the strength of the improved Wi-Fi powers, there's a browser (in...

How IBM's World Community Grid Is Helping Cure AIDs, Cancer, and World Hunger

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VOLUNTEERING: When Lauren Moran isn't typing on her laptop, it's busy with heavy-duty computations for medical research projects. | Photograph by Joao Canziani

IBM's virtual supercomputer is tapping the unused processors of half a million people to speed up critical scientific research.

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AT GRID HQ: "We're opening up the field of bioinformatics," says IBM VP Robin Willner. Photograph by Reed Young

For the past four years, Lauren Moran has devoted herself to groundbreaking cancer research...

John McAfee Redux

Belize is a wonderful country, and a great place to enjoy a vacation. Personally, I admire John McAfee for his sense of adventure and his enthusiasm at identifying and taking on challenges. And I found aerotrekking to be a hoot. But let's not lose sight of the central issue: Did McAfee invent, market, and implement a sport that was fundamentally dangerous, and which caused the death of one of his customers? If so, and a court orders him to pay damages, should he honor that obligation?

It...

T. Boone Pickens' V-Vehicle Isn't Dead Yet

Oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens has a knack for picking underdog projects. The plan to build the largest wind farm in the U.S.fell through and was downsized to a few wind farms in Minnesota. And V-Vehicle, Pickens and Kleiner Perkins' secretive auto startup, had its request for $321.1 million in federal loans rejected by the Department of Energy's Advanced Technology Vehicles Manufacturing
(ATVM) loan program just last month. But V-Vehicle, at least, is still trucking along--the startup...

Ford Unveils Adorable Would-be Smart-Car Competitor

But the new design for the tiny-car market also looks tough at the same time.

At the Beijing Auto Show--where GM unveiled its new Volt minivan--Ford also announced an alluring departure from its typical line-up: The Ford Start, a super-compact car intended for city-dwellers.

You might remember the day when Detroit ran as fast as they could from small cars, because they couldn't make them profitably given their terrible manufacturing efficiency. Which tells you something about how much better...

The 10 Greenest Buildings of 2010 From American Institute of Architects

This week, the American of Institute of Architects and its Committee on the Environment announced the 10 best green buildings completed in the past year. It's filled with all manner of green technologies--from passive heating and cooling using heat pumps, to man-made wetlands, to reclaimed materials. Here's a slideshow of all ten.

Philips Creates a Garden of Mechanical Flowers

This one's hard to explain. Just watch the video.

The last we heard from Philips's experimental Lumiblade team, they tapped rAndom International to create You Fade To Light, a magical pixel "mirror." Philips was back at the 2010 Milan Furniture Fair, this time working with Jason Bruges Studio on a Mimosa, a synthetic garden made of mechanical "flowers" that bloom when anyone draws near. Maybe this is just easier to watch rather than explain:

The installation is meant to show-off Philips's a