David Lidsky's Blog, page 4815

This Earth Day, Avatar Comes to DVD, Without Special Features but With Disposable Packaging

Among Avatar's many messages (something about American Indians? Vietnam? Fern Gully?), an environmentalist overtone proved most important to the movie's plot and thrust. Fox will be releasing its first of three separate DVD and Blu-ray releases on Earth Day, as a tie-in. It's true, the theme here is green--just not the green you're thinking of.

As one of the most successful movies of all time and certainly the biggest money-maker of the year for Fox, the studio won't miss a chance to inject a...

Hot off the Presses: The Newspaper Club Produces--and Prints--a Newspaper at SXSW

Yesterday we reported on the Newspaper Club, who swept the recent Brit Insurance Design Awards with their masterful recapturing of a low-tech medium. We also hinted that they'd be bringing their newsprint ways to SXSW this week in order to hype their new newspaper-making tool ARTHR. But little did we know that the Newspaper Club was holding top secret meetings with a band of collaborators and actually produced a newspaper at and about the conference, which was printed on an...

Today in Most Innovative Companies

Daily news of note from our Most Innovative Companies, including Apple, Disney, Facebook, and Google.

Apple: With the iPad only weeks from release, news companies are finalizing plans to tap into the tablet's potential revenue streams. According to Media Memo, both National Public Radio and the Wall Street Journal are aiming to create apps and Web sites optimized for the iPad that are completely Flash-free. This is good news for Steve Jobs, whose iPhone/iPad presentations are often riddled...

Xobni's BlackBerry App Re-Thinks Contact List, Reorders by Importance, but Can It Save Blackberry?

[image error]San Francisco-based startup Xobni today introduced its first mobile product: Xobni for BlackBerry. It takes a different approach to contact lists than traditional systems, and integrates the new system deeply within the BlackBerry OS.

Instead of a traditional alphabetical list (the alphabet is so uncool these days), Xobni for BlackBerry scours through your emails, text messages, phone calls, and other communication to create a new contact list in order of importance. Even better, it can be...

Transportation Secretary Announces "Sea-Change" for American Transport: Bikes!

The much-admired Ray LaHood announces a new emphasis on better bike lanes.

Ray LaHood, the U.S. Secretary of Transportation, has just announced a "sea-change" in American transit planning: As he writes on his blog, "People across America who value bicycling should have a voice when it
comes to transportation planning. This is the end of favoring
motorized transportation at the expense of non-motorized."

LaHood's announcement has been bubbling for some time: The DOT is already funding...

Digital Lumens Cuts Lighting Costs With Networked LEDs

Oh, LEDs--so promising, yet so expensive. Digital Lumens, a LED lighting startup based in Boston, thinks it has a solution for commercial customers with a system of networked LED lights that communicate with each other via an on-board computer.

The startup claims that its system saves energy and cash because the whole thing is managed by powerful software. A single networked fixture features its own computer, Zigbee wireless networking chip, and sensors that detect people milling about...

Pentagon's "Contact Us" Button Yields Innovative Anti-Terror Ideas, Bear-a-troopers

There are many facets to what makes a good, innovative company, these days. Great products. Competitive prices. Top-notch service and support. A symbiotic relationship with one's customers. Even the Pentagon, it seems, is in on that last one. Go to the Defense Department's Web site and you'll find a contact us button--and, rather unsurprisingly, you'll find it gets used a lot.

As well as all the usual conspiracy theorists' twaddle, some people take it upon themselves to suggest ways that...

Want a DIY Netbook Built to Your Exacting Standards? Ask Guo Bang

How do you know when a device has moved from being the hot, must-have tech to a standard commodity, cheap at half the price? When you can buy a DIY mix-n-match version of it, like you now can for netbooks thanks to a chinese vendor.

The company in question is Guo Bang, and their offering is about as straightforward as you can imagine: Inside a pretty standard netbook case you can chose the precise flavor of Intel Atom CPU, motherboard and display screen tech you want. Guo Bang will deliver...

U.S. Industry Pulls Through a Frosty Month

Eight is not enough! That's the feeling right now among economy watchers as a new Federal Reserve report indicates that in February United States industrial production was up for an eighth consecutive month.

This despite the fact that a brutal month of winter storms dampened development in what had been a freshly robust manufacturing sector. In total the gains were modest--a 0.1% increase in production, led by mining's 2% uptick. And the improvements are more impressive when compared to...

Old Crown Vic Police Cars Being Replaced by Ultra Fuel-Efficient Ford Interceptors

Say goodbye to Ford's classic old Crown Vic police car; the auto giant's new Police Interceptor is set to replace the aging model. It's bad news for criminals looking for the old Crown Vic on the road, but good news for everyone else--the Interceptor is 25% more fuel-efficient than its predecessor thanks to an EcoBoost-powered V6 engine.

Ford elaborated in a recent press release:

Ford's Police Interceptor engine strategy will provide a V-6 lineup that performs equal to or better than V-8 e...