Category: Tech news

Product: Equus

Manufacturer: Hyundai

Wired Rating: 0

Hyundai is going upscale. No, really.

The Korean automaker is building on the success of the Sonata and the (excellent) Genesis with the Equus, a 385-horsepower luxury barge injected with leather accents and enough gadgets to make Best Buy jealous. Having proven that it can match the best from Japan, Hyundai is challenging the best from Germany.

The Germans have cause to worry.

This car is supremely comfortable, it can cover vast distances quickly, and it’s entertaining on a winding road provided the curves aren’t too tight. But this is touted as a luxury car. It’s all about the tchotchkes when you’re in this segment, and Hyundai delivers with a list of standard features longer than a Russian novel. Name it, and the odds are this car’s got it.

We spent the day in an Equus with the top-shelf Ultimate package and didn’t want to get out of the heated and cooled massaging back seat to take our turn at the wheel. We could have happily spent all day back there listening to the excellent 17-speaker Lexicon audio system or watching movies on the 7.1 DTS surround-sound system while pulling cold ones from the shoebox-sized thermoelectric fridge between the seats.

Did we mention the Equus is supremely comfortable?

Our only complaint was we couldn’t try out the reclining rear seat because the Hyundai exec sitting up front was in the way. Oh, and the 8-inch LCD video screen is too small for a car of this caliber. And it would have been nice to have a headphone jack, so we could crank up the 608-watt stereo without distracting the driver.

Beyond those quibbles, we loved the passenger experience, enjoying the smooth ride, completely insulated from road noise by thick acoustic glass, plush carpet and what must be a few hundred pounds of sound-deadening material. The Equus is almost meditatively quiet inside; there’s only a subtle hint of tire noise.

But, alas, the Hyundai folks were pretty adamant that we should actually drive the Equus, so we reluctantly traded the back seat for the 12-way adjustable driver’s seat. We were surprised. For a big, heavy car, the Equus proved surprisingly fun to pilot.

To show what the car can do, Hyundai mapped a route more suited to a motorcycle than 4,600-pound sedan almost 17 feet (!) long. All that mass rides on an electronically controlled air suspension and 19-inch wheels..

It’s plush, but push the sport-mode button and the suspension tightens, the steering response improves and the six-speed automatic gearbox (with a manual mode) shifts more aggressively. It’s no Audi or BMW, and even in sport mode the ride is a bit soft. But the Equus remains flat through turns, and we surprised ourselves with the speeds we could carry through the winding roads of California’s Santa Cruz Mountains.

Of course, there are all kinds of electronic nannies to keep you out of trouble, including electronic stability control, cornering brake control, traction control and a host of others in Hyundai’s Vehicle Stability Management system. The car also has adaptive cruise control, lane-departure warning, a backup camera and self-leveling headlights. If you somehow manage to overwhelm the nannies, electronic seat-belt pre-tensioning and nine airbags will minimize the damage to your body, if not the car.

Under the hood is an aluminum 4.6-liter V-8 good for 385 horsepower and 333 pound feet of torque. Of course it drives the rear wheels. Hyundai wouldn’t mention acceleration specs but is confident the Equus will do zero to 60 “in the low sixes.” We didn’t measure it, but the car accelerated briskly and confidently when we stomped on it. Still, a car this big could use more power, and Hyundai reportedly has a 5.0-liter V-8 with 429 horsepower coming this spring.

The Equus gets 16 mpg in the city, 24 on the highway and 19 combined.

The roomy interior is slathered with butter-soft leather, with an Alcantara suede headliner, walnut (or birch) veneer and polished-aluminum accents. The infotainment and navi systems are intuitive and easy to navigate using the large knob on the center console. (Navi system is 2-D only, though.) And the steering wheel — heated, of course — feels absolutely fantastic. The front seats are heated and cooled, and the driver’s seat offers a subtle massage that, frankly, feels great.

Hyundai doesn’t offer any options on the Equus: Everything is included as standard equipment. The Ultimate package is meant for those important (and/or wealthy) enough to have a driver. Most of the 2,000 or so Equuses (Equui?) that Hyundai expects to sell in the United States will have the Signature package. It doesn’t get the massaging and reclining rear seat, the fridge and a few other minor features.

Regardless of which package you choose, Hyundai includes an iPad, because that’s where the owner’s manual is. There’s also a dead-tree manual in the glovebox if you want it, but flipping through pages is so 2008.

If the car has a shortcoming, it’s the styling. The car closely resembles a Lexus but often feels bland. There’s also way, way too much chrome. Still, the Equus is sleek and aerodynamic, with a drag coefficient almost as slick as the Toyota Prius.

Hyundai’s keeping mum on the pricing for now, but figure on spending something in the $50,000 ballpark for the Signature package, and about 10 grand above that for the Ultimate when the car goes on sale in November.

We have talked about the awesome TV-B-Gone device before, you know, the device that can turn off any TV within distance. The only downside to it is that all people have to do it turn then back on. I know that you can just turn them back off but that would just be suspicious. What if you could jam the IR of the TV once you turn it off? Now you can.

The guys over at hackedgadgets.com sell just that, an IR jammer kit. Created by Alan Parekh, the unit will jam any infrared remote controlled device. It works across all 6 of the major IR frequencies and corrupts the data that is being sent by normal remote controls.

If your ambitious you can build your own from scratch or you could order a kit here and just slap it all together.

[Via HackedGadgets]

IR Jammer originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2010/09/10.

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inDinero, like a Mint for Quickbooks, finalized their highly sought after $1.2 million seed round this week. Shunning institutional financing, the small business banking startup was funded by a syndicate of twenty angel investors, including Intuit’s David Wu, Slide’s Keith Rabois, Yelp’s Jeremy Stoppelman, Microsoft’s Fritz Lanman, 500Startups’ Dave McClure, YouTube’s Christina Brodbeck, Stanford’s Steve Blank, YouTube’s Jawed Karim and more!

inDinero founders Andy Su and Jessica Mah initially set out to raise $500K but reportedly received so much interest that the round could have topped out at $2 million. Su and Mah had to eventually turn people away. A illustrated list of those that made the cut below.

Side note: Reinforcing inDinero’s“inDinero Is The Next Intuit” elevator pitch, investor David Wu, who was formerly VP of the Small Business Group at Intuit, wrote inDinero a check the very day he quit.

The most popular note type created by Evernote users is a webpage. It seems that people love to save webpages in Evernote! Now Evernote is making it even easier for sites to get saved into notes with the announcement of the Evernote Site Memory Button. This is something of a departure from the historical Evernote modus operandi, where the user invokes a client application or opens up the Evernote website: the Site Memory Button is a server-side implementation, and sites that want to use it need to specifically add it. Once added, though, any Evernote user can use the button to add the page to their list of notes. The note will be pre-populated with content selected by the site owner, including title, and even have tags helpfully suggested.

Mobile ad exchange network operator Mobclix has published its monthly infographic based on its analytics platform and advertising impressions served by the startup. While July’s report focused on iPad app, August’s infographic addresses ad impressions, CTRs and more in the network.

According to Mobclix, impressions on the Android platform have grown 45% in the last 3 months and 420 percent since the launch of the platform. This growth seems to be in line with mobile ad network Millennial Media’s reports on Android growth.

Unsurprisingly, Mobclix says that 90 percent of mobile app ad inventory are standard banner ads but inventory with rich media components (for example, iAd formats) receive higher engagement rates. Rich media ads average a 3.5X higher eCPM than the standard banner ads.

In terms of click throughs, the app ecosystem trumps the mobile web, with the average CTR on mobile apps is .67 percent vs. .17 percent CTR on mobile web. The same applies for videos, with mobile video ads seeing three times higher of an engagement rate than online video ads.

While rhe U.S. market holds the #1 sport for mobile ad impressions, the U.K., Canada and Japan are Top 3, respectively, for impressions. Australia and France follow for the fourth and fifth spot.

With the advent of the iPad and the plethora of cheaper Android tablets that are due to flood the market over the coming months, there’s an increasingly popular theory in the tech industry: the days of the dedicated e-reader are numbered.

Last week we published the latest forecasts from Informa Telecoms & Media analysts that said as much. Sales of ‘smartbooks’ (a loosely defined term) are expected to grow from 3.65 million in 2010 to nearly 50 million in 2014, or over 50% of all embedded device sales. The losers will be dedicated e-readers, such as the Amazon Kindle or Sony Reader, and the winners, multifunctional portable devices like the iPad and Samsung Galaxy Tab.

The reasoning – and it’s convincing – is that e-book content is now available on most multifunctional devices like mobiles and tablets that work well enough as book readers, while having other functions.

“Your mobile phone should be free.”

That was Google CEO Eric Schmidt talking to Reuters in November of 2006. It was just about a year before the Android project was first unveiled. It was also just a few months before the iPhone was introduced (Schmidt was a member of Apple’s Board at the time). At that point, Schmidt had to know that both Google and Apple were on the verge of changing the mobile industry. Or, at least, that’s what he thought was going to happen.

There’s no question that the situation in the mobile industry (particularly in the U.S.) is better than it was in 2006 from a consumer perspective. And yes, that’s largely thanks to Apple and Google. But free phones? We’re nowhere close to that. But last year we were. And then Google’s dream turned into a nightmare.

Before I get to that, let’s clarify what “free” is. There are plenty of phones out there on the market today that are “free”. But they’re not really free, you’re simply paying for them over the life of a cellular contract and accepting an upfront subsidy to make them “free”. It’s really a nice little mind game scam the carriers have in place. That’s not what Schmidt was talking about.

What he meant was that phones should be free because they would be fully (or mostly) subsidized by mobile advertising. In a way, that’s not really free either — but it’s a lot more free than the contract version of “free”.

And Schmidt’s vision was almost realized last year, we’ve heard from a couple of sources. Specifically, we’ve heard that the original plan for the Nexus One (the device that was being called the first real “Google Phone”, remember) was to release it for $99 unlocked. Let me repeat that. $99. Unlocked.

How? Google was going to pay the subsidy. Mobile advertising was ramping up so nicely at that point for Google that they felt they could get away with eating a few hundred dollars per user (which would be paid to the phone’s manufacturer, HTC), and really explode the market. It wasn’t a free phone. But it was damn close.

So what happened?

Well, as we hear it, the carriers told Google to go screw themselves.

You see, Google’s grand mobile plan had just one pesky problem: Google doesn’t run their own cellular service. They need the carriers’ support in order to make their phones work. Otherwise they’re just handheld WiFi devices (an idea Google also toyed with).

And Google had another problem. Android was already in full swing at the time, and while the Nexus One was going to be a different kind of phone, they still needed full carrier support for all their other phones. They simply couldn’t afford to piss off the carriers who could effectively destroy the platform they had built. So Google backed down.

Instead of a $99 unlocked Nexus One, we got a $179 version that was subsidized… by T-Mobile… if you signed a two-year contract. You could still get an unlocked version — but it was going to cost you $529.

At the Nexus One launch event, Google also announced a commitment from Verizon to sell the device. A couple months later, Sprint and AT&T also committed. All the major U.S. carriers were on board to sell the Google Phone. Subsidized. With contracts.

Yeah. That wasn’t Google’s original plan.

Their big back-up plan to revolutionize the industry was to sell the device online. The carriers went along with that, likely knowing it would flop. After only a few months, the entire thing fell apart.

By May of 2010, Google announced that they would no longer be selling the Nexus One (except to developers) — and this was before Sprint and Vierzon even got around to launching their versions of the device. What was the point? Instead of an insanely cheap super phone, the Nexus One had become just a moderately-priced poor-selling smartphone.

Gee thanks, carriers.

Earlier today, Robert Scoble painted a similar (though much more brief) picture over Twitter of the story I just told. “My conversation last night with a Google VP confirmed that they threw their principles under the bus in order to gain Android market share,” he tweeted this morning. “What did the Google VP say? They learned from Google Nexus One that carriers hold all the cards. They had to play ball with them,” he continued. Bingo.

On one hand, it’s hard to blame Google. I mean, what else were they going to do? They had no choice. On the other hand, the pendulum is now swinging in the complete opposite direction and the carriers are starting to take advantage of the openness of Android to set the entire industry back ten years. And Google is playing along.

My only remaining hope is that Google is secretly building up Google Voice to be the VoIP solution they can use in conjunction with ever-expanding WiFi to blindside the carriers. That, or that they’ll somehow use the Open Spectrum they fought so hard for to come up with another way around the carriers. But the recent net neutrality shenanigans with Verizon don’t leave me too hopeful.

With Android growing so quickly, with Apple now clearly a foe, and with Microsoft trying to come back with Windows Phone 7, I fear Google now has too much vested interest in the current game to take the risks necessary to change it. It almost happened, but the carriers got in the way. Now, the only way we’re getting anything sort of resembling the free phones Schmidt promised is by giving Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, or T-Mobile roughly two grand over the next couple of years.

You know, “free”.

[images: New Line Cinemas]

After a year’s worth of work, Seesmic founder Loic Le Meur just announced the launch of Seesmic Desktop 2 (SD2), a desktop client that goes beyond Twitter; “We want to be the first platform for platforms,” says Le Meur.

Running on Silverlight (to install go here), the desktop app now has plugin architecture that supports a multitude of content streams including but not limited to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google Buzz, Foursquare, Flicker, Klout, Formspring, Myspace, Google Reader (!), GroupOn (!), Salesforce Chatter, E-Bay, Last.fm and so on and so forth.

With this latest iteration it looks like Seesmic has found a way to prove that it’s more than just a one-trick, Twitter-platform pony, “The inspiration to build SD2 came from the understanding that our users desired support of many different social services, more than just Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin” Le Meur writes on his blog and in fact you can customize the app any way you like, “If you don’t like Foursquare, you can filter out Foursquare.”

Seesmic has also gone the way of the App store and has developed a plugin Marketplace, where you can search and download your favorite news viewing or social interaction plugins. Note: There’s a bit of turbulence in the installation process as you needlessly have to restart Seesmic Desktop in order to get the plugin to initially load.

Seesmic plans on launching payment options next year, but for the moment all plugins are free. And as Seesmic Desktop 2 is an open platform, Le Meur expects many more, “If all goes well there will be hundreds,” he tells TechCrunch hinting at more to come like E-Bay, ZenDesk, Gowalla, GroupOn, Visa, Blippy and Mint.

To encourage this he has built a SDK, offered up the Seesmic team for those companies that don’t have the chops, and hired third-party developers tequilarapido to build some of the more popular plugins like YouTube and Google Reader.

Alongside Seesmic Desktop UI mainstays like URL shortening, Search, Multiple Accounts, Lists, Photos/Video Twitter integration, and accounts support for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google Buzz, the most exciting new features being launched here are individual to each plugin. And while it would take forever to get into into each one, I will bring up some of the most notable.

YouTube

The YouTube plugin allows you to share and watch video within your Seesmic app, and enables you to keep tabs on your Favorites, Most Popular, etc.

Last.Fm

You can now listen to music through the Seesmic client, if you have a Last.fm Pro account.

Zappos

With the Zappos plugin, perhaps the first social commerce plugin, anytime someone tweets a Zappos link you can see the item and buy it — If a Zappos link is tweeted by someone you follow you can now see all product information in your streams.

Techmeme

You can now view the tech news aggregator entirely on Seesmic, including discussion and related links.

Klout

The Klout plugin includes a small box under tweets in your stream which allows you to see the “Klout” or “influence” rank of of people who are tweeting.

Google Reader

Seesmic Desktop supports all Google Reader features, you can open any RSS and now use Seesmic as an RSS Reader.

Seesmic, which has received 12 million dollars in funding thus far, plans on monetizing Desktop 2 both from eventual Marketplace sales as well as with a classic freemium model which has at its core deep integration with the enterprise software and B2B space, which is where plugins like Salesforce Chatter and ZenDesk fit in. As TechCrunch Europe’s Mike Butcher said about the Chatter integration, “It’s like the link enterprise and the realtime social web just got invented.”

Le Meur also plans to take many of the Seesmic Desktop 2 features, and port them over to the iPhone/Android platforms next year. Windows Phone 7 will come first, since it’s the most compatible system with Silverlight.

Hot on the heels of Apple’s decision to increase, ever so slightly, the opportunities for devs to use different frameworks for iPhone app creation, Adobe announced that its resuming work on its Flash-to-iPhone system for Flash Professional CS5.

Here is the relevant quote:

Apple’s announcement today that it has lifted restrictions on its third-party developer guidelines has direct implications for Adobe’s Packager for iPhone, a feature in the Flash Professional CS5 authoring tool. This feature was created to enable Flash developers to quickly and easily deliver applications for iOS devices. The feature is available for developers to use today in Flash Professional CS5, and we will now resume development work on this feature for future releases.

Read more…

“It’s not often you see a for-profit company donate one of their most valuable core assets and give up control,” Automattic founder Matt Mullenweg writes today in a post announcing that the WordPress trademark has been transfered from his company to the WordPress Foundation. “This is a really big deal,” he continues.

What this means is that the key ingredient behind Automattic is now in the hands of the organization in charge of “promoting and ensuring access to WordPress and related open source projects in perpetuity.” So why do this? Mullenweg says it has been his goal since the beginning to blend a non-profit business, a for-profit one, and not-just-for-profit one under one banner. Now that he feels each of those aspects is stable enough, he wants that main banner, WordPress, to be “protected” as a “beacon for open source freedom.”

With a quarter billion people now using the WordPress.com product — and with other for-profit products doing well (we use WordPress VIP to host TechCrunch, for example), Automattic clearly feels they can afford to lose their biggest asset. And Mullenweg thanks Automattic’s Board for allowing this transition to go down.

“I know in my heart that this is the right thing for the entire WordPress community, and they followed me on that. It wasn’t easy, but things worth doing seldom are,” Mullenweg notes.

This move ensures that WordPress will live on as a project no matter who is in charge of the for-profit business or what happens to it. If this is about legacy, Mullenweg seems to have just cemented his. Good move.

We’ve been tracking the progress of Qik, a service that lets you broadcast movies from your mobile phone directly to the web, for years now. But until now we haven’t been able to get an especially accurate grasp of just how well the service has been doing. Today, that’s changing: Qik is releasing some user stats, for what cofounder Bhaskar Roy says is the first time.

Roy says that Qik curently has 3.5 million users, and is adding nearly 500,000 users each month. The application’s userbase has grown sixfold in the last year, and Roy expects that growth to continue. Much of it will stem from the fact that Qik is included as a default application on millions of devices, including the HTC EVO 4G and Nokia N97. Roy says based on current and upcoming partnerships, Qik will be preloaded on a whopping 75 million devices in the next year.

Qik is not the only player in this space. While live streaming companies Justin.tv and Ustream didn’t begin as mobile streaming services, they’ve launched applications for iPhone and Android that enable this functionality.

One good thing to come out of MySpace’s slow demise: a bunch of former employees are creating startups left and right, mostly in Los Angeles and helping to grow the startup ecosystem there. We’re tracking Gravity, Mindjolt, Gogobot and Beachmint. And we’re adding one more to the list.

Namesake was founded by Dan Gould and Brian Norgard. The site is still in private beta and it’s not 100% clear what it will be. From the about page:

We’re here to honor, support and serve people who create. People who aren’t afraid to embrace risk. People passionate enough to challenge the status quo and win. People who push us forward despite all odds.

At Namesake, we wake up every day to build an infinitely curious and innovative company. Building a better Namesake means more creators can build and spread their creations faster — which makes the world better.

We’re located in Los Angeles, CA. Today, we call the humble 10′ by 8′ Founder’s Room home, which has also been the site of a number of practical jokes. The company is founded and funded by Brian Norgard and Daniel Gould.

Via email, Gould says “We believe there’s a better way to match and route opportunities that come across your desk everyday. Our whole purpose is to make creators more successful by helping match them with these relevant opportunities in real-time.” Which isn’t super helpful. The company is self funded for now, says Gould. Both He and Norgard have some money to burn, they got their jobs at MySpace by selling a company to them, Newroo, in 2006.

There’s a place to sign up for the service once it launches for all you early adopter types.

On July 28 2009, a pair of iPhone applications that offered support for Google Voice were unceremoniously, and without warning, removed from Apple’s App Store. We then learned that Apple had blocked the official Google Voice application as well, which eventually led to an FCC inquiry. A year later, Google Voice was still missing from the App Store. Now it looks like there may be a glimmer of hope for getting Google Voice on your iPhone.

This morning Apple released guidelines explicitly spelling out for the first time what it would reject from the App Store. Sean Kovacs, the developer of third party Google Voice application GV Mobile (which was removed from the App Store over a year ago), read through each of the 100+ rules, and he concluded that his app didn’t seem to violate any of them. He emailed Apple’s approval board to see if he could possibly get his app reinstated. The response was encouraging.

I reached out to Kovacs, who says that an Apple representative responded that given the new guidelines released today, he was welcome to resubmit GV Mobile for review. Which is a much better response than he’s been getting before now (radio silence).

Of course, nothing is certain yet. This could be a case of an App Store reviewer stepping out of line and making a mistake. It’s possible that Apple will say this violates rule 8.3, which states “Apps which appear confusingly similar to an existing Apple product or advertising theme will be rejected” (this is similar to the “reducing functionality” explanation that Apple gave to the FCC last summer).

Or it could mean that Google Voice, albeit from a third party application, could finally be making its way back to the iPhone.

We’ve reached out to both Apple and Google to see if there has been a change and will update when we hear back.

Update: Google has given us this statement:

“We currently offer Google Voice mobile apps for Blackberry and Android, and we offer an HTML5 web app for the iPhone. We have nothing further to announce at this time.”