Coda's All-Electric Sedan Revs Up U.S. Auto Market

Chris Dannen — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 13:00:00 -0500

Sliding into the driver's seat of Coda's electric sedan for the first time, I looked around for clues. Here's 100 years of automotive history, reinvented -- what's different? No gear-shift, just a knob that engages the car's two speeds, forward and reverse. A battery-life gauge. Not much else. Then I pull into midtown Manhattan traffic and hear the road noise, the thrum of passing air. They were always there, but now there's no engine roar to drown them out. The Coda's motor barely whimpers as it speeds into a new market for cars with no gas and no exhaust.

How to Build an iPhone App That Doesn't Suck

Chris Dannen — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 10:45:03 -0400

If it's not intuitive and good-looking, iPhone owners simply won't use it. Applications that are text-heavy tend to create too much cognitive load, while apps that use a combination of images and sparse text are much more manageable. Take a look at Flixter's movie listings, that cram all the relevant information you need about a movie right next to its cover image, creating a rich list that requires very few taps to access information about a given movie.

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Chris Dannen — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 14:44:35 -0500

At a conference on the 2012 Olympic Games this month, I had the opportunity to ask NBC General Counsel Rick Cotton about his thoughts on fair use and remixing. He had mentioned that popular video sites like YouTube have video-fingerprinting software that detects and removes copyrighted NBC content. I asked how loose the "fingerprinting" was -- specifically, if a user can splice and change footage enough to make it his or her own, and put it on YouTube as "original" work. His response was that NBC considers none of that activity fair use. (His exact words: "The short answer is: No.")

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Chris Dannen — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 15:11:12 -0500

EDIT: Amazon has just submitted to pressure from the Author's Guild, and will now make text-to-speech functionality optional on a per-title basis: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10184406-93.html

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Chris Dannen — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 13:05:57 -0500

@ Larry White: If all you want to do it read on the Kindle, get Kindle 1. It's priced right and does all the same stuff. Kindle 2, in my opinion, is better for tech tinkerers who want to the latest and greatest, even if it's half-baked.

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Chris Dannen — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 12:53:14 -0500

@Noah, I wouldn't advocate any profit-sharing; I think Facebook is best as a Zuckerbergian dictatorship than a co-op if it wants to grow and stay solvent.

Earlier this month, when the company changed its terms of service, it was doing something it had to do -- it was taking a step towards generating more revenue. Governments are intrinsically bureaucratic and bad at yielding profit, because they encourage deliberation and welfare for all. That's good for real countries, but bad for Facebook, which has 1/3 the cashflow of MySpace (@Joe Momma) despite having 45 million more users.