CNN ran a news segment on a new protype car, the XH150, that was unveiled yesterday at the Detroit auto show. AFS Trinity Power Corp built its car using existing battery and electronics technology to show what the Big 3 could conceivably deliver to the market: a car that drives 150 miles per gallon. If you drive like many folks, under 40 miles a day, you won’t have to pay for gas. The only ergonomic hitch is that you do have to plug the car up everynight to charge it up. After you’ve driven more than 40 miles, the car converts to gas; it can drive highways too. Estimated cost is still TBD, but they only expect to charge a premium of about $8,700 over the price of hybrid cars that start at $25K. Very promising. If none of the Big 3 move to license Trinity’s patented technology, they will move to raise VC funding. If that’s the case, I hope they relocate to the San Francisco Bay Area so the company can build upon the new auto manufacturing hub taking root in Silicon Valley (ie: Tesla Corp.). Nevertheless, this car could be available in as little as 3 years and if gas today in CA cost $3.50/gallon, I believe this type of benefit would be widely embraced like the Prius.
What’s old is new again; Cloud computing (a.k.a. grid computing, utility computing, computing on-demand) which was talked about nearly ten years ago, is once again the horizon (pun intentional).One of the December cover stories of BusinessWeek did an in-depth series of cloud computing and spelled out several lofty initiatives that IBM and Google have underway. It appears Microsoft, Yahoo and Amazon are quickly following suit to tap into a potential goldmine for data storage and access services.
Google is betting that cloud computing will support a 300-year plan to make everything – and possibly everyone – online and searchable.Recently, Google teamed with IBM to bring cloud computing into academia with a six university pilot program.An increasing number of businesses are looking at cloud computing as a foundation for their business processes.Gartner Group picked cloud computing as one of its Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2008, noting that companies must evaluate the positive impact of SaaS and web platforms that provide “access to infrastructure services, information, applications, and business processes through ‘cloud computing’ environments.”We’d like to respectfully add online databases to this list as well.
Last week our client, LongJump, made an announcement that put them at the forefront of startups offering online databases on-demand.LongJump announced its powerful new “cloud database service” that presents several potential advantages for a web startup. LongJump’s DaaS is a fully managed infrastructure and administered relational database architecture that includes: SAS 70 Type II data protection compliance, enterprise-level security, flexible access and control, real-time mirrored database replication, and 99.999% application uptime.
In spite of announcing in the throes of CES, LongJump’s DaaS announcement was able to rise above the noise and land in some prominent publications, news venues and blogs. Here’s a brief snapshot of some of those news stories:
Never mind that it’s supposed to be Year of the Rat. Basex recently picked Information Overload as its 2008 Problem of the Year.
Email, phone calls, IMs, twits and tweets, LinkedIn Questions, Facebook pokes… Interruptions such as these contribute to the Information Overload problem that research firm Basex pinned at $650B in loss productivity.We take pleasure in Basex’s prediction but not because we’re gluttons for punishment.Rather their call to attention is an indication of how serious the problem is and perhaps a prelude of better things to come.
As we get ready to ring in 2008, I challenge myself and all of you out there to make email and IM etiquette part of your New Year’s resolutions.Check out a few tips that Basex suggest to help manage information overload. These include:
-“I will not e-mail someone and then two seconds later follow up with an IM or phone call.”
- “I will read my own e-mails before sending them to make sure they are comprehensible to others.”
- “I will not overburden colleagues with unnecessary e-mail, especially one word replies such as “Thanks!” or “Great!”, and will use “reply to all” only when absolutely necessary.”
