Last night I got an email from a one Daniel Odio, co-founder of a service called AppMakr. He told me a little bit about his service (they make turn-key iPhone apps) and paid a couple of compliments--ostensibly in hopes of ginning up some good press.
Then our tireless Executive Editor found this: a video Odio posted on his blog detailing how he has automated the process of tracking down and soliciting reporters for coverage. Lo and behold, the video uses me as the test case. In the video Odio Googles me, skims my beat, and finds my email address and fires up his email automator and delivers the pitch.
I don't hold this against Odio, of course; I know that getting good press for your startup requires an exhausting sort of hand-grenade diplomacy. And I really like email automation. But Odio's tutorial doesn't quite nail it; getting a reporter's attention takes a little more than just a captivating subject line. Naturally there was only one way to respond: below, my video riposte, a reporter's tutorial on how to get press.
by Chris Dannen (additional reporting by Zachary Wilson)
Image courtesy of Google
1. Google
Even with Apple's new releases, Android was the major newsmaker in 2009. In just over a year, Google's OS has been put on 20 phones with 59 operators, and the Android Market now offers 20,000-plus apps. And don't forget about Google's $750 million purchase of mobile advertiser AdMob and the release of the Nexus One smartphone. Top 50 No. 2
2. Apple
Now every smartphone wants to be an iPhone. An estimated 37 million of them (including the 3GS) were sold in 2009 alone, and more than 3 billion apps have been downloaded in the past 18 months. Top 50 No. 2
3. Amazon
The leader in mobile purchases, Amazon released shopping and Kindle apps for the iPhone and Android this year, and its new mobile-payment platform, which lets users move money and buy things with 1-Click, is beating PayPal. Top 50 No. 2
4. HTC
Arguably the most creative electronics firms implementing Android, the Taiwanese manufacturer was chosen by Google to design the Nexus One. Top 50 No. 31
5. Ford
The automaker has taken a great leap forward with its Sync in-car mobile-services platform by opening its car-computing platform to third-party developers. Its upcoming MyFord Touch platform can link mobile apps like Pandora with the car's digital screens and voice-control capabilities.
6. Evernote
The remember-everything notebook app is beloved by 2 million obsessive project managers and forgetful creatives everywhere. Evernote's breadth of ways to access your info is its best feature -- Mac, PC, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Palm, BlackBerry, iPhone, and Android are all supported. Everything is stored safely in the cloud.
7. Qualcomm
The chip maker's superfast 1-GHz Snapdragon chip set is used to power both netbooks and smartphones, including Google's Nexus One. And even though the company focuses on higher-end devices, it shipped 450 million 3G handsets in 2009.
8. Clearwire
The next-generation wireless network, with funding from Sprint, is already in more than 25 markets, including Atlanta, Chicago, and Las Vegas. In contrast, AT&T and Verizon are mired in the planning phases of a 4G buildout.
9. Foursquare
The location-based game won immediate geek love when it debuted at the 2009 SXSW. By this January, it had an estimated 200,000 users, with some telling their friends where they were every second. Unlike many of its Web 2.0 peers, Foursquare is rolling out a viable revenue model, with ads and offers based on where users are shopping or dining.
10. Intermap
Its AccuTerra app is one of the most ambitious pieces of iPhone software to date, winning an Apple Design Award in 2009 while in beta. The hyperdetailed GPS map app comes with elevation, hydrological data, trails, reviews, and weather, served up through an in-app shop that lets you download and store map data for a small fee, mostly between $1.99 and $3.99.
by Chris Dannen (additional reporting by Kevin Ohannessian)
Image courtesy of Harmonix
1. Apple
With the iPhone 3G S and latest iPod Touch, Apple upgraded its smartphone and media players into what may become the most mainstream gaming devices in history. The App Store's most popular category is games, which makes up approximately 20% of its total inventory and is one of the primary drivers of sales. The new iPad hints at Apple's even greater interest in fashioning new, more compelling gaming experiences. Top 50: No. 2
2. Microsoft
The continued expansion of Xbox Live has successfully blurred the console gaming experience with Internet entertainment. This full-featured network enables 20 million living rooms worldwide to play video games and chat with friends, update Facebook statuses, watch Netflix, create and sell games, even download entire Xbox 360 games. Top 50: No. 48
3. Ngmoco
It's one of the first successful iPhone-only game publishers, but Ngmoco's business model is what really sets it apart. After making millions of dollars on for-pay games, Ngmoco has decided to produce only free games and to integrate them with its Plus+ game-play network. Plus+ makes possible nearly frictionless in-app purchasing ("Buy this collar for your digital pet dog") and multi-user play. Top 50: No. 38
4. Infinity Ward
The maker of the violent, controversial, but hypersuccessful Modern Warfare 2 racked up $550 million in revenue in the video game's first five days on sale last fall and more than $1 billion in the first two months. Which makes Modern Warfare 2 the top-selling game of 2009 and already one of the most successful of all time. One key behind its success: Infinity Ward used feedback from its 60,000 Twitter followers to help shape game play.
5. Nexon
One of the Asian virtual-goods giants and the only one that's also making inroads in the United States. The company's online games, including Maple Story (more than 90 million players worldwide) and Combat Arms, are bigger than World of Warcraft. Today, more than 30,000 retailers -- including Target, Blockbuster, and Walmart -- sell prepaid cards with Nexon's virtual currency.
6. Adobe
Its Flash multimedia platform, which reaches more than 350 million computer users, has spawned an explosion in homemade games: roughly 14,000 of them across thousands of portals such as Kongregate and Newgrounds. Flash is also powering the very popular social games on sites like Facebook.
7. Harmonix
With The Beatles: Rock Band, the creators of the musical video-game genre reached what could be considered its artistic pinnacle: great gameplay, amazing songs, and a focus on music history. The Beatles' sales totaled 1.7 million units worldwide in 2009, relatively strong given the overall weakness in the music-video-game genre.
8. ATi
The Radeon Eyefinity, the flagship product of ATi, the graphics-card division of chip maker AMD, can power six widescreen displays for the ultimate in immersive gaming experience. Running high-resolution games on Eyefinity has become a key metric for such game design. ATi's next-generation Fusion chip, which cheaply combines a graphics chip and a CPU onto one die, could single-handedly make gaming possible on a whole host of inexpensive devices that were too slow before, such as netbooks, tablets, and low-end PCs.
9. Rockstar Games
To continue the momentum of Grand Theft Auto IV, this game developer created two downloadable add-ons that not only provided a variety of new game play, extending the value of the game, but also pushed the storytelling capacity of the medium. GTA IV has continued to be a sales juggernaut, selling more than 13 million copies worldwide.
10. Muteki Corp.
The model of the new game developer, Muteki is small, fast, and self-sufficient. Developer Ryan Evans and business partner Bryan Sawler are best known for building Topple 2, Ngmoco's Apple Design Award-winning game. Evans and other young game makers can build an entire iPhone game start-to-finish in about a month and make millions for a publisher.
Everywhere we look, we are surrounded by desktops.
Once it was merely our laptops and PCs, and then it was our companion netbooks, too. Then our Web 2.0 accounts: Facebook, MobileMe, Google apps. After that, our phones got smart with apps and files of their own, and then our car nav systems. CES showed our e-readers are incorporating them, and our TVs too; some of our computers, like Lenovo's new hybrid tablet/notebook, contain two distinct machines with, yes, two discrete desktops. Soon, we may add more, in the form of an Apple iSlate or Microsoft Courier.
When will it stop?
Oddly enough, few companies seem intent on coalescing all our many desktops into one central location. Apple tries halfheartedly with MobileMe--I can get my photos and my iDisk files online--but to keep my files in sync, I have to use a third-party tool like Dropbox or Evernote. Still, the clutter grows on both machines. Where did I download those attachments? What became of that torrent? What machine was I using?
Not only is the confusion growing, but companies like Microsoft are coming to consider this desktop confusion to be normal. Their FUSE social networking lab, created this fall, is building its Web strategies around a user model it calls "cloud-plus-three screens." In other words, they're taking for granted that you have a PC, a mobile device, a TV, and a Web account. That's like pulling your nice big steamship alongside the sinking Titanic and offering the flailing passengers SCUBA gear. What the hell, Redmond?
Somehow, we've become remarkably apt at sharing with others, but not so good at sharing with ourselves. If I want to collaborate with a colleague on a project, I can use SharePoint Workspace, or Google Docs, or subversion clients like Versions. But if I want to keep the same home movies on all my devices, then what? Sure, Windows 7 has its nifty HomeGroup feature, which lets me share certain directories and media, and iTunes' Home Share lets me transfer songs from MacBook to iMac. But the desktops remain, like so many cutting-room floors, full of the jetsam of my digital life.
There are plenty of utilities that give me more desktops, like Xilisoft Multiple Desktops for Windows or Spaces for Mac. But there aren't any that give me fewer. Back in the day, when the Graphical User Interface was a novelty, we weren't ready to abandon the metaphor of the actual desk. Gizmos that do--like Google's new Chrome OS--look oddly claustrophobic. Now, it seems, we're trapped inside a stupid 2-D concept that never made much sense to begin with.
There's at least one Flash game (aptly named Desktop Escape) that makes light of this plight--but that's cold comfort as I try to remember where I last dumped my photos.
Sometimes it takes a million square feet of gizmos to understand where humanity is headed. After all the pageantry and pixels, here's what the world learned about tech in 2010.
There Is No Such Thing as a Netbook
No one could stop talking about netbooks last year, and in 2010, you'll scarcely be able to find one. Why? Because netbooks have become tablets have become e-readers. With Pixel Qi's hybrid displays, which switch between e-ink and full-color LCD with the push of a button, there won't be any reason to have two dedicated devices for work and reading. Not to mention the gorgeous Spring Design Alex e-reader, which contains a fully-functional Android smartphone in its belly for Web browsing, email, and multimedia. (Image courtesy Gizmodo.)
Touch Rules
Blackberrys, Kindles, and G1 devices look mighty antiquated beside all the touchy-feely goodness at this year's show. Gone are the tactile keyboards of yore: Whether it's Dell's mini-tablet or Vizio's touchscreen HDTV remote, everything seemed to operate by touch. Even relative smartphone newcomers are expounding upon the trend that Apple and Android spawned, as evidenced by the ELSE Intuition, an Access Linux-based device being hawked in an unused conference room off the show floor.
Intel was on hand to show the world how walls make excellent HD multitouch computers, when hooked up to Core i7 chips and linked to Flickr and Facebook. Meanwhile, Israeli startup PrimeSense was across the hall demonstrating their software, which allows home theater buffs to control their Blu-ray players, TVs and set-top boxes with hand gestures akin to HP's TouchSmart technology. And you thought it was cool that Microsoft made a computer from a coffee table. Psh.
The look and feel of electronics always coalesces into "standards": the beige PC, the pyramid-backed tube TV, the two-button mouse. At CES this year, we're seeing a new decade of visual language emerge--and it's all about touch.
Sure, the iPhone has made touch-operation a gimmick often copied in the last couple of years. But for 2010, we're starting to see OEMs take touch seriously into their design philosophy with more refined enclosures and smarter software integration. (Sorry, stylus-lovers. Your era is waning.)
But the emerging phenotype isn't straight Apple-mimickry, no--in fact, most of the touchy gizmos we've seen recently look ever more like Android devices than iPhones, with several hard buttons to complement their screens.
The new Slingbox remote, called Sling Touch Control 100, does all the stuff you'd expect: you can search for shows, browse channels, and discover new stuff. How? Five hard keys and a touch interface for scrolling, selecting and so on. (Sling's new Sling Monitor, a small TV-like display, shares the same button-and-D-pad motif.)
New e-readers are falling in line as well, with new models like the Alex by Spring Design. The Kindle may be the e-book champion so far, but competitors aren't mimicking its UI. Instead, they're going with their own five- or six-button system of hardkeys, accompanied by a touch-screen. The B&N Nook (below at left, beside an Alex) and the Sony e-readers follow a similar layout, albeit with their own visual twist.
Interestingly, even companies that are most intently mimicking Apple's aesthetic in other products are opting to Android-ize them, too. Compare this Lenovo desktop PC, the IdeaCentre 300A, to an iMac. Country cousins--but one with hard buttons on the bezel.
Not everyone likes this. To touch purists (a group I'd personally call "people who know what they're talking about") the idea of a touch-screen with a panel of hard buttons is an abortive usability headache. Back when the G1 was shiny and new, for example, TechCrunch said:
And he wasn't just talking about the physical keyboard.
The G1 forces you to switch back and forth between hardware and touchscreen inputs all the time. It is annoying and jarring.
Loren Brichter, the award-winning developer of Tweetie for Mac and iPhone and a bona fide UI prodigy, had similar thoughts about Google's Nexus One.
Companies are following the format even when they're not making the hardware, leaving an absurd gallery of buttons when apps like Chevy's are viewed on some devices.
At least others are experimenting fruitfully. Light Blue Optics has been working on something like this for years, but they're finally close to production on a "holographic laser projection" keyboard that turns any surface into a touch-screen.
So much depends upon a reddish-brown bicycle: namely, the comfort of your ass on a rough trail. So how do modern mountain bikes take the grunt out of backwoods biking?
If we're talking about the Bionicon Supershuttle, above, the answer is pneumatics. The German-built Supershuttle is pursuing one of the modern fronts of bike technology: adjustable shocks that adapt to the terrain. I'm not talking about air shocks--bikes have been using air and oil shocks for decades. These are shocks that move--picture the air shocks that car gurus install on their old Chevys, and you'll get the idea.
Unlike this hoopty, the Bionicon has an air system that goes beyond stuntin' and flossin'. You see, the venerable mountain bike has always had a problem: There are lots of different types of "mountains" that a rider can choose from, and no bike can suit them all. The Bionicon system aims to fix this by combining several bikes in one, and getting thousands of your dollars that would otherwise be spent on a shealth of two or three mountain bikes for different terrains.
The problem is this: Old, rigid bikes (like this 1820 edition, below, called a "draisine") aren't so comfortable on unpaved roads. As you can see by the diagram below, these things were downright deadly to an unprotected crotch -- hit one cobblestone and kiss your future progeny goodbye.
The first solution to this problem was balloon tires, which sucked up bumps well enough. But in the 1970s, a bunch of Bay Area hippies began bombing down Mount Tamalpais with old Schwinns, and they realized that fat tires and coaster brakes just weren't going to cut it. Guys like Gary Fisher, now head of the eponymous bike company, started modifying their old Schwinns to take more abuse, adding hand-pull brakes, multiple gears, and eventually suspension forks pulled from old motorcycles. For a time, this worked well enough at protecting these riders' nuts and bolts.
Then Fisher and his hippy friends began to try to pedal these bikes back up the hill. They found that having a squishy suspension fork sucked all the juice out of their pedal strokes--every time they pressed down on the pedals, the fork bobbed up and down, like in the video below. They reacted by working out more, but engineering nerds weren't satisfied by this solution.
This problem became worse with dual suspension bikes, which had shocks on both the front and back of the bike; dual suspension bikes sucked up more rough stuff and let you go faster, but there were suddenly two shocks gobbling up all your pedaling energy. Now the engineering nerds had a goal: a full suspension bike that could pedal as well as a bike with no suspension at all. Companies like Fox addressed bob by developing shocks with complex dampening valves (below) that tried to deaden small shock strokes while remaining sensitive to big impacts.
Other companies like Manitou developed "platform" valve shocks that used directional valves to discern peddle-induced bob from impacts at the wheel. All these solutions worked well, but they made the shock a lot less sensitive to small, jittery bumps. Industry prodigies like Dave Weagle tried to out-engineer pedal bob with normal shocks and complex linkages that "cancelled out" the bobbing motion without sacrificing braking or shock-absorption.
On bikes meant for all-around trails, called cross-country bikes, all these solutions were pretty satisfying. But for heavy-duty bikes meant for bombing down the gnarliest of terrain, the problem of pedal bobbing remains. And as young invincible riders build and conquer more insane obstacles (and video them, and set them to fulminant indie rock), they want to be able to ride their huge gnarly bikes out into the woods and ride them back without throwing up from exertion. For the last few years, that hasn't really been possible; most of the bikes capable of taking serious abuse needed a ski lift to get to the top of a mountain.
The folks at Bionicon think they've got it all figured out, and indeed, they're slowly winning over skeptics. The Bionicon works like this: when you're climbing up a hill, you press a button on the handlebar and lean forward. That shrinks down the front shock til its short and stiff, making steep ascents easier. When you're ready to descend, you hit the button again and lean back; the bike becomes slack and squishy again. Check out this delightfully Saxon video that shows how it all works.
Provided you can remember to hit the button at the appropriate times, the system works; I've ridden one and it does indeed do double duty as a capable climber and a descender. The only problem is that having a multi-purpose bike leaves few excuses for buying yet more bikes--a popular pasttime for cycling nerds. But if you're of the minimalist ilk and you want a bike that can pedal all day and eat six-foot drops for dinner, then the Bionicon Supershuttle can be had for around $4,000; other models are less expensive. You can find local dealers here.
In the run-up to the Detroit Auto Show, there have been a lot of new hoopties sneak-peeked by luxury car companies, but perhaps none as truly hooked up as the new Audi A8. The A8 is arguably this year's torch-bearer for slick-but-attainable luxury cars: It rolls on an eight-speed gearbox, streams Google Earth maps into its nav system and even does 3-D terrain mapping.
Sure, I already talked about cars once in this Undead Tech series, but this is different. Computerized cars like the ones in that post are practical: the new Chevy Volt lets you pick when it charges the battery, for example, and new Fords let you set different privileges for different keys. Cars like the A8 (and competitors like the BMW 7-series) don't have to pay homage to practicality: they just do the most advanced stuff their engineers can think of, because, well, they can. And because it's badass.
Check out this thing, above--it's the A8's eight-inch, Google-enabled nav system. It contains an on-board graphics processor and a hard drive, streams music wirelessly from your smartphone, and does way more than you ever realized you needed a car to do. Not only is this thing connected to the Web via a cellular radio, but it lets you plan trips at home on Google Maps and upload them to the car. If you get lost anyway, you can use high-res 3-D images from Google Earth to find your way--all controlled by voice commands, a touchpad, and this multi-function knob (below).
BMW has had something sorta like this for a while: the iDrive system (below), which has been sucking pretty steadily since its introduction in 2001. (Mercedes also has a similar-looking system, without most of the functionality). The Audi serves as a mobile WiFi hotspot, recognizes fingertip handwriting on its touchpad and adds an anti-vibration motor in the steering column meant to cancel out road feedback. On top of all that, Audi has installed a massive 1,400-watt stereo system wired to 19 speakers, and has one of the better pedestrian-detection early-warning systems out there.
It used to be Cadillac that pulled these kinds of stunts. Back in 1910, they debuted the first "car with no crank" that included an electric self-starter. In the 20s, they were the first company to introduce different colored cars while competitors famously offered cars only black. A few years later, they were building 16-cylinder engines. In 1948, Cadillac introduced the first car with tailfins, inspired by the WWII-era P-38 Lightning (both below). At their height, tailfins were so popular that even the Germans were copying them; Mercedes called theirs "Heckflosse" and claimed they were merely practical "sight lines" that helped a driver sense the limits of the car when in reverse. Yeah, right.
In 1957, Caddy introduced the famous Eldorado Brougham, a sweet, swoopy sedan with suicide doors, adjustable air suspension, and--a first in the industry--power seats with programmable memory. In the 70s and 80s, Cadillac pioneered things like airbags, electronic fuel injection, and on-board microprocessors. In 2004, the company showed off this (below): a fighter-jet-like heads-up display (or HUD) for the Cadillac XLR, which projected speed and turn signals onto a specially-laminated DuPont windshield. (Cadillac also offered ambient night-vision on the HUD starting in 2000, and discontinued it after tepid sales.)
Sadly, all that went the way of the dodo with GM's bungling in the 80s and 90s. While Audi's advances might be perpetuating the tradition for now, the most hooked-up technology in the new cars of the future may exist outside the cars themselves--in the form of creative energy sources. One example: an environmental group in Brooklyn, New York, has just built itself the first EV charging station in New York City: a completely "off the grid" converted shipping container powered by 235-watt photovoltaic cells. It powers a BMW Mini E, that company's first electric vehicle, entirely on sunshine.
If this bright green shipping container isn't the kind of lawn furniture you're looking for, the Audi A8 starts at around $75,000. If you already have a car you love, you can always cram $25,000 of communications electronics into your $500 Dodge P.O.S. like this guy, whose cockpit is below.
Since time immemorial, gadget buyers have been discarding their most prized gizmos for newer, thinner, sleeker gizmos, often at the expense of practicality, durability, and stupendous amounts of money. But in the last few years, emaciated machines have also become economical. The latest company to get it right is Dell.
The new Vostro laptop accomplishes the trifecta: thin, competent and rationally priced. Dell proved it had the chops to go super-thin when it released the premium Adamo notebook earlier this year, but only with the Vostro have they proven they're serious about making gaunt devices be practical. The Vostro starts at just $450 and goes up to $650, and while the speed won't melt your face off--chips top out at 1.3GHz--these things are admirably equipped with Intel Core Solo and Core Duo chips, and are blazing fast compared to their anemic, Atom-powered competition, cheapo netbooks.
We have Motorola to thank for the recent rash of thin-rage: their 0.54-inch-thick RAZR proved in 2004 that you can make a laughably bad product and still achieve meteoric sales as long as the gizmo strikes an under-fed pose. It may have taken 15 button-pushes just to get to a new text message, but the RAZR sold 110 million units in four years.
Other companies rushed to imitate the formula with their own rangy, barely-usable devices, like the Samsung SGH-XH20, pictured next to its forebear. (For a while, the XH20 held the record as the world's thinnest phone at just 0.3 inches.) Other companies like CARD Mobile Phone are still sacrificing function for form, as evidenced by this thing: a phone that is the thickness of three credit cards stacked together, and which relies on a presumably awful on-screen keyboard for data entry.
The Vostro's atavistically blocky profile is perhaps most akin to the Xircom REX, a super-thin electronic Rolodex produced about 10 years ago that cleverly fit into the PCMCIA slot on laptop computers. The REX was a minimalist's take on the PDA: it held a calendar, contacts, tasks, memos, and could even run basic software (called "add-ins") on its 4.3MHz processor, and yet it was no bigger than a few business cards put together. Like the Vostro, it actually worked damn well.
The REX wasn't the first gizmo to do thin right; that honor probably belongs to a now-defunct company called Poqet Computer Corporation, which produced this thing: the Poqet PC.
Sure, your Eee PC is roughly that size--what's the big deal? Well, this 1.5-pound machine came out in 1989, at roughly the same time that Apple was producing its first laptop: the comparatively enormous Macintosh Portable (below). The 1989 Poqet ran straight-up MS-DOS and was powered by two AA batteries, which lasted for several weeks under regular use. How? The Poqet's miserly power-management software actually shut the CPU down between keystrokes. Sure, it only had 2MB of memory and cost $2,000, but the Poqet was a hot property before it was bought out by Fujitsu--just check out this InfoWeek article from 1989 comparing the Poqet to the Mac Portable as they duked it out in the brand-new portable market.
Before PC makers, Kodak was one of the first companies to figure out that compact devices were hot commodities. Their best-selling device to date was the indomitable Kodak Instamatic 104 (above, at left), a small, squarish camera launched in 1965 that ultimately sold over 60 million units thanks to its durability, easy-loading 126-format film, and, of course, it's size. Prior to the Instamatic, Kodak's most popular camera had been the big, bulbous Brownie (pictured above at right); the Instamatic outsold it by a factor of ten.
So why we do we want thin, anyway? Is it because the angular, skeletal MiniDisc player smacks of a Lamborghini Countach? Is it because we all have an ancestral fascination with the waif-like capacity of magnetic tapes, vinyl records and floppy discs?
Why are thin devices like the original iPhone popular despite being heavy? Why are lanky machines like the Titanium PowerBook still selling for hundreds of dollars on eBay despite being slower than Congress? We may never know, and I don't have time to postulate; I have an unopened Sony Vaio X demo unit (1.6 pounds, 0.5 inches thin, $1300) that I'm dying to drool on.
The remote-controlled, computer-savvy car is one of those mythological automotive promises (like the flying car) that we all kind of assumed we'd have by 2010. Where's my Will-Smith-from-i-Robot car?
I could do a full-fledged technological genealogy here, but that'd be denying my impulse to talk about KITT, David Hasselhoff's car from the 1980s show Knight Rider. With the ability to jump through the air, deploy defensive weapons and come wagging to you like a golden retriever, KITT is the car that every car-buyer wants, even if they don't know it, and all attempts to add computer + car are just thinly-veiled attempts to evoke KITTy coolness. We may never have cars that actually control themselves or drive remotely, but we can at least have cars that remind us how cool that'd be.
The robot TT is called Shelly, and its brains are a Sun Real-Time Java computer system running on a basic Solaris box. Using real-time software lets the car achieve reaction times of just a few milliseconds, much faster than the Stanford/VW partnership's last vehicle, the Junior autonomous Passat that got second in DARPA's robot-car race in 2007. Below, Shelly at work on some salt flats, where it can push 140 mph with no one inside. (It usually performs drifts around 40 mph.)
Researchers at VW's Electronics Research Lab hope that technology from Shelly might eventually be used to help drivers control their car during emergency maneuvers, preventing crashes. It smacks a little of the auto-parking technology that companies like Ford and Lexus are building into their high-end sedans.
Like the parking technology, the the VW project presents us with the troubling idea that a car really can have something of a "personality." The card "decides" how fast is too fast, how close is too close, and eventually--in the case of the Audi--when you, the human, needs saving. Very KITT-like indeed.
Of course, KITT had a fully self-aware "cybernetic logic" module with a voice synthesizer that could speak in a variety of accents (including French, Spanish, and New Yorker). Also cool: KITT could do zero to 60 in two seconds, almost twice as fast as a Porsche 997 Turbo. He also had missiles, a mortar-proof shell, rocket motors that enabled gap-jumping, and smell sensor, among about a million other killer features carefully documented on Wikipedia by loving Knight Rider fans.
The only vehicle to match KITT's many senses is perhaps NASA's Mars rover, Spirit, which landed on the Martian surface five years ago for what was supposed to be a 90 day mission, and has been doing science stuff ever since--at least until this week, when it got itself stuck in some Martian quicksand that it can't seem to get out of. (If engineers can't get it to unstick itself before the Martian winter comes in May, it'll be frozen there for time immemorial.)
Toyota takes the cake for mimicking KITT's internal cockpit. This beauty is the Toyota/Monster/Xbox "All Terrain Gamer," a marketing orgy on wheels with four Xbox consoles, four 24-inch LCD displays, one 60-inch LCD TV, and a bunch of cans of Monster energy drink.
Neither Chevy's nor Mercedes' smartphone-controlled cars have quite that much geek cred, but Chevy's system gets points for potential. Their smartphone app, which will be available for Blackberry and iPhone, will allow you to control the charge settings on your shiny new Volt hybrid. Since tethering a car to your home electricity bill is a lot to swallow, this app will allow you to earn some cost savings by controlling when the car is actually charging--presumably so you can program it to suck power only at off-peak hours.
Mercedes is slightly less inventive with their "Mbrace" app; it basically mimics a key fob, letting you locate, lock, and unlock your car.
Zipcar has an app that takes this a step further: not only can you locate a Zipcar and reserve it, you can also tell the horn to honk so you can find it more easily. Chrysler one-ups them all by using a 3G module to turn their cars into mobile WiFi hotspots. None of these cars doesn't talk back, but hey: honking and email are a start.
