Becuase Everything Else Sucks

This Week in Innovation: April 19

By SirJouge
Published Friday, April 20th, 2007, 11:28 am
Filed under: Science and Technology

  • I just found the next car I am going to buy, it’s a Tesla Roadster. Unlike my previous car, this roadster can do 0-60 in 4 seconds and gets 150 MPGs. Did I forget to mention that it is 100% electric. It looks like you can pick one up for somewhere between 30-50k, but since I am an avid blogger and friend to electric cars and the cleantech industry, they will give one up for half price. Well, not really… at all. For all of you car people out there, the electric motor has a big, fat, relentless 200 ft. lbs. of torque between 0-6000 RPMs before it trails off. Even your basic diesel engine can not compete with this spread. Basically, that is some high octane, top end torque…don’t forget to check out the full specs.
  • Internet radio has been one of the best ways to add a soundtrack to your life and have a wide range of music to listen to all throughout the day. Up until now, both large and small webcasters alike have been able to provide music to their listeners. The Copyright Royalty Board (CRB) recently denied a request to overturn their recent ruling to start charging royalties on a per song, per listener basis retroactive to Jan 2006 starting in May 2007. This ruling deals the death blow to small internet radio and will change the way all internet radio broadcasters provide us with music. Analysts predict increases between 300%-1200%. If you are into net radio, check out savenetradio.org for more details.
  • For those familiar with Microsoft Office, Google Docs is making huge strides to become the key competitor to the 15-year old MS Office Suite. Thus far Google is offering a free web-based word processing program similar to Word and a spreadsheet program similar to Excel. Online collaboration is the key competitive advantage over Office Suite; however, so far the Google products do not have all the functionality of Word and Excel and are missing a program for presentations and slides. Wait for it… This week, the spreadsheet program was upgraded to include a functionality to make charts amongst a host of other powerful add-ons. Most importantly, a powerpoint killer is soon to be released. With free web-based applications, Google Docs is quickly becoming an ubiquitous alternative to MS Office. It sounds like the good ole’ one two punch from Google is heading for that knockout punch for MS Office.
  • From the open source side of town, Thunderbird 2.0 was released this week with some upgrades and security. With MS Office under attack from everyone and their mother, Thunderbird 2.0 is a powerful open source competitor to MS Outlook. One new powerful feature is the ability to tag emails. Much like tagging for blogs, it allows a new way to group messages together and create a quicker way to search through them. With this feature added to the host of pragmatic add-ons built by “open sorcerers” from around the globe, Thunderbird gives you the ability to pretty much do anything with your email client. In the next iteration of Thunderbird, it will actually automatically download messages to your brain and store them in your frontal lobe for easy access. Beat that MS… now what?

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One Response to “This Week in Innovation: April 19”

  1. Yeah, that Tesla is pretty badass, but just like any top of the line sports car, it’s a little out of my range right now.
    Wasn’t always like that. Just 10 years ago the cost of leasing an EV in California was about the same as what I paid for my Saturn. Though, back then, one could only get about 60-80 miles on a single charge, (which is about 40-60 miles more than the average person drives in a day according to the 2000 US Bureau of Transportation Statistics report), battery technology today can take a driver over 250 miles on a charge! (This is included in the Tesla’s promo!) This close to the range of an average tank of gas, unless that tank is sitting inside an SUV, in which case the battery just whoops its ass!
    This is why Hydrogen, as an alternative to oil, is one of the most bone brained moves ever. We have the technology RIGHT NOW to break our dependence on oil, but these idiots want to put everything into a technology that’s still, by best estimates, 30 years off!

    Ridiculous.

    PS-for you Ivy: Some info links;

    http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2003/hydrogen-0305.html

    http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2840191.stm

    http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/001501.html

    PapaFigue
    04/20/07 at 3:16 pm

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