Main Dish:

- Not quite the same as adopting a hungry child in Africa, but oil-for-food wasn't either... Adopt-a-Sniper. "Help real snipers get the real gear they need to help keep us safe". via instapundit

- I wrote this about hybrid automobiles a while ago and got a bunch of blowback. Paul sent me this interesting editorial about hybrids that is worth a read. There's no quick fix to the world's reliance on hydrocarbons, maybe fuel cells are the answer but you still need a lot of electricity to produce hydrogen and electricity does come primarily from coal, oil, and natural gas.

- The suits are running things.

- anyone catch the full page ad in yesterday's WSJ from the MPAA announcing, in the form of a movie promo, that lawsuits were beginning? Do you think that anyone in Hollywood has started to wonder if they would have been better off supporting Republicans this election cycle. Democrats hold their lowest number of seats in the Senate since the Great Depression... how's that for irony?

- RIM's market share for the Blackberry is on fire. I have to come clean and publicly say I was way off when I thought, a few years ago, that RIM would get their clock cleaned by M$oft and Palm in the mobile email market. Just goes to show that even though the app is front-and-center to see, and a high school research project would reveal that push style email is the killer app, that not everyone can copy it. At this point, RIM would have to do something really stupid to screw it up, what with the OEM agreements they have in place and everything else.

- If cable companies can offer VoIP, why can't telcos offer television? It appears that SBC is doing just that, along with help from M$oft. It all comes down to price, give me television, data and phone for one low price and I'm in.

- NTT is shipping a cellular/Wifi phone that does VoIP. Now only if they could make all that work on VPNs

- I read this article in BusinessWeek about Starbucks offering a music service in their outlets that enables you to burn a CD. Looked kind of stupid to me, would be better to have an iPod cradle instead... but WTF do I know, I was way off on the whole Blackberry thing after all.

- Mattel looked at extending Barbie, or coming out with a portable media player and opted for the latter. I can see them being successful with this.

- Overture is testing ads spliced into RSS feeds. Yeah, greeeat, whatever.

- New phone from Samsung, it's got pretty much everything.

- yeah, no shit. United Airlines is right up their with El Al when it comes to customer service.

- Phil Windley has a page on how to Podcast.

- yeah, no shit. More advertisements it the one thing that would make me buy a new TiVo.

- RFID facts and figures. Good stuff.

- M$oft and Infosys are teaming up. Developing.

- Commerce One filed for bankruptcy, www.363group.com has been retained to sell off their IP assets.

Comments

[Carlos]

I agree on the fuel dependency side of fuel cell cars. Still, there is a huge advance on contamination when you take it away from the cities. A bit like garbage: it doesn´t disapear from earth, it disapears from your house and gets gathered some place else.
This makes garbage management and recycling good business. The same should go on "maintaing one (or many) big power plant(s) instead of many little small cars, which rarely get maintainance and are far from their efficient fossil/energy consumption.

[jeff]

I think what bothers me about the entire hybrid car craze is that it's single minded in focus, almost to the degree that everything will be okay if we all just drive hybrid cars. Bothers me because the mileage statistics just don't add up to the hype, a hybrid Honda Civic does incrementally better than the non-hybrid version.

Imagine the aggregate fuel savings we would achieve by doing the following:
1) tax incentive to take old cars off the road and replace them with newer, more efficient ones
2) equip all new vehicles with tire-pressure monitoring and self-inflation systems
3) encourage diesel technology, and implement low-sulfur diesel fuels earlier than the current plan
4) emmission requirements for farm and industrial diesel machinery (which President Bush did mandate)

and then ask if the incremental fuel savings would be greater than the current fleet of hybrid cars being sold? But this should not be about one versus the other, but rather a package of developments all moving forward at one time.

The move to allow hybrid cars to use HOV lanes also pisses me off, c'mon HOV lanes are intended to take cars off the road, not simply to put more fuel efficient single passenger drivers on the road.

But back to the fuel cell topic, I fundamentally believe it will happen and the results will be a giant step forward. Producing hydrogen through electricity is more attractive than the current model of producing energy by burning a hydrocarbon. We also have more options to produce electricity with other energy forms (dare I say nuclear). If only we could figure out a way to broadly store and release on demand electricity we would conquer another obstacle in the system.