Category: Tech news

Product: CR-Z Hybrid

Manufacturer: Honda

Wired Rating: 0

Hybrids are many things. Efficient, yes. Practical? Sure. Attractive? Hmm, well, maybe. Sporty? You’re kidding, right? No one in their right mind would call hybrids sporty.

Until now.

Honda delivers much-needed excitement to eco-friendly driving with the CR-Z, an attractive, affordable hybrid that’s a genuine hoot to drive. It isn’t, contrary to the buzz, the second coming of the venerable CRX and you aren’t going to see it tearing up any tracks, but the CR-Z is, dare we say it, sporty.

The thing is, the CR-Z doesn’t feel like a hybrid. There’s no lag when the 10-kilowatt electric motor hands off to the 1.5-liter engine. The responsive antilock brakes lack the mushiness found in other hybrids, and the continuously variable transmission is smooth.

There’s a paddle-shifting slushbox available if you want to row through the gears, but the six-speed manual — a first in a hybrid — is the way to go. It’s much more fun. Trust us on this.

We spent several hours exploring some of our favorite back roads north of San Francisco, and the CR-Z showed its athletic side with nimble handling and reasonably brisk acceleration. The chassis is tight, the suspension is firm and there’s a hint of understeer. The car feels a bit heavy — the six-speed model weighs 2,630 pounds — but most of the bulk is down low, and the CR-Z is fairly easy to toss around.

You’ve got a choice of three driving modes to suit your style. Sport — where we spent most of our time — gooses the output of the electric motor, optimizes throttle response and gives the electric power-steering a tighter feel. Econ shifts the equation toward maximum fuel efficiency. Normal splits the difference.

The gasoline engine does most of the work regardless of the mode. The small (5.7 ampere-hour) nickel–metal hydride battery and 10-kilowatt electric motor are there to boost acceleration and ease the load on the engine when cruising. The gas-electric combo gives you 122 horsepower and 128 pound-feet of torque.

Set the car in normal mode and it’ll get 35 mpg in the city and 39 on the highway (37 combined) with the automatic tranny. Chose the six-speed and you’ll see 31 city, 37 highway, 34 combined. Yeah, you might expect a hybrid to do better, but the CR-Z skews ever so slightly toward performance end of the spectrum over efficiency. Still, Honda says it’s among the top-five fuel misers in America (based on combined fuel economy figures of 2010 models).

Around town, the CR-Z trudged through an afternoon commute without complaint. The cabin is relatively spacious and nicely appointed. Our car had the optional seven-speaker, 360-watt audio system and the optional navi (with 6.5-inch screen). Both were easy to use and performed reasonably well.

The seats are supportive, and there’s plenty of leg and headroom for all but the tallest people. You’ve got up to 25.1 cubic feet of cargo space behind the seats, and a huge hatchback makes it easy to use it all.

When Honda unveiled the production version of the CR-Z at the Detroit auto show earlier this year, it all but called it CRX 2.0. It has toned down the comparisons, but the Z bears a strong resemblance to the X. It’s wide and low, and at 160.5 inches long and 54.9 inches tall about the size of the Honda Fit. Honda claims it’s more aerodynamic than the Toyota Prius.

The car is not without its flaws. The instrument cluster, though comprehensive and easy to read, is laughably futuristic. “Aluminum-style” interior trim always looks cheap. The shifter feels limp — a mortal sin in a car with sporting pretensions. And the rear quarter windows are useless, with blindspots about the size of an SUV.

But those are minor quibbles in a car that’ll run less than $20,000 or so when it goes on sale Aug. 24. Choose all the options that came with our test model, and Honda says you’ll pay less than $24,000. (Honda hasn’t finalized pricing.)

As nice as the CR-Z is, those who truly enjoy driving will want a bit more power and handling prowess. Honda has “nothing official” to say about whether we’ll see a sportier Si version, but the tuner crowd already is developing parts. If the CR-Z isn’t the second coming of the CRX, it might soon be.

Until then, Honda has done something remarkable. It’s made an affordable hybrid that’s actually fun to drive, even sporty.

On Friday, I dropped by Foursquare HQ in New York City. They showed me some stickers, and I got to sit down for a few minutes with CEO Dennis Crowley. In the video interview above, he describes his fundraising philosophy (at about the 4:00 mark), which is timely coming from the founder of a hot startup everybody wants to invest in or acquire:

You don’t have to rush through it. If you are building interesting things that people are excited about there is a way to make things work on your terms. It is important to select the partners that will support you and take the time to find the right partners.

Crowley also talks about Foursquare’s plans to give local merchants and brands more self-serve options for managing their venues and offers. “The sooner we can get those self-service systems in place, the better it will be for revenue.” He says that for businesses, Foursquare is building two different products: one for local shops, and another for national brands and media companies. There are only 25 people working at Foursquare, and most of them are “building things,” not “answering phones.” So the self-serve products are a big priorioty.

On whether Foursquare will take advantage of the iPhone’s new background processing in iOS 4, he says he is excited about that possibility but, like everyone else, is waiting to get his hands on a new iPhone so that his engineers can test it out. He supports the idea of an open places database which all location services can contribute.

But it is not until the very end of the interview that Crowley reveals his deepest secret of all: “I only have two mayorships left.”

Last month at TechCrunch Disrupt, we saw the launch of Appbistro, a marketplace for Facebook tab applications that help companies and brands flesh out their Facebook Pages. Developers like it because it gives them an easy way to charge for their applications using Appbistro’s payments system (previously there wasn’t an easy way to charge for Facebook apps). And today, Appbistro is announcing that it’s landed a deal to distribute Facebook apps from a significant new partner: Wildfire Interactive.

Wildfire offers a platform for running marketing campaigns simultaneously on Twitter and Facebook. The company was part of Facebook’s fbFund twice, and has many large clients including Pepsi, Red Bull, Victoria’s Secret, plenty of small businesses, and everything in between.

Through Appbistro, Wildfire is now offering five tab applications, including tabs for contests, coupons, and quizzes. As with all its developer partners, Appbistro does a 30/70% revenue split in the developer’s favor.

This is definitely a win for Appbistro — the more high quality applications it offers, the easier it will be to get the attention of the millions of small businesses (and larger brands) looking to build out their Facebook Pages. Appbistro needs that audience in order to appeal to application developers in the first place, and this is a good step toward beating the chicken-and-egg problem.

You could call it the perfect storm.

Over the last few months, user engagement on Scribd has surged, according to CEO Trip Adler, thanks to its transition to HTML5, the introduction of the iPad, and Scribd’s Facebook integration. Of these three factors, Adler says the conversion from Flash to HTML5 was by far the greatest driver for his document sharing company. According to Scribd’s numbers, time on the site has tripled in the last three months.

In early May, Scribd announced its plans to ditch Adobe’s Flash and began the arduous process of converting every document (of its “tens of millions”) to native, HTML5 pages. “We are scrapping three years of Flash development and betting the company on HTML5 because we believe HTML5 is a dramatically better reading experience than Flash, “co-founder and CTO, Jared Friedman, told Erick Schonfeld. Although many documents on the web are still boxed into Flash players, the HTML5 format turns them into rich, interactive web pages.

That gamble has paid off handsomely for Scribd. Although the number of unique visitors still stands at roughly 50 million per month, those users are spending significantly more time perusing documents and sharing with friends.That growth in user engagement has rapidly accelerated in the past month. On May 25, at TechCrunch Disrupt, Friedman said user engagement had doubled— implying strong acceleration in the last three weeks.

The HTML5 play has also made Scribd’s product very iPad friendly and iPad users are responding in kind. According to Adler, although iPhones clearly outnumber iPads in the wild by a large margin, the number of users accessing Scribd through the iPad is now roughly equivalent with the number of users who are using their iPhone.

Now that the company has its HTML5 and iPad strategy in place, Adler says they are focusing on making Scribd more social and less reliant on search engines. Today, the majority of their traffic comes from Google, but Scribd is putting a greater emphasis on the social by closely integrating with Facebook.

Earlier this year, Scribd revamped its Facebook Connect option (enhanced content sharing and added an activity feed plug-in) and introduced Readcasting, which automatically tells your social networks, like Twitter and Facebook what you’re reading. According to Adler, those initiatives are growing: the number of people who are auto-Readcasting is increasing by roughly 10% each day and daily subscriptions to other users is up 15x (in the last three months). Quick video with Adler above.

A decade ago, tech IPOs ruled the stock markets and Silicon Valley. They were the end-all and be-all for ambitious entrepreneurs and venture capitalists looking to become instant billionaires, or at least millionaires. That was many booms and busts ago. The IPO market never came back, and the multiple financial meltdowns which brought on Sarbanes-Oxley and other regulations made going public even less appealing to shoot-from-the-hip entrepreneurs. The founders of the most successful tech companies today—Facebook, Skype, LinkedIn—are pushing off the inevitable IPO for as long as possible. And for smaller tech companies, IPOs seem hardly worth the bother.

And those companies which are going public simply are not the cream of the crop. IPO returns across all sectors this year are down 3 percent, according to Renaissance Capital.  And over the past three years, IPO returns are basically tracking the S&P 500, which hardly justifies the added risk of investing in them.

Even venture capitalists are souring on IPOs. In a post this morning titled “IPOs Just Aren’t What They Used To Be,” Fred Wilson laments:

The cost is just too high and the benefits are just too low for most companies these days.

Wilson shares two anecdotes. One was of a startup which prepared to go public, but couldn’t and was still stuck with a $3.5 million bill it couldn’t afford. The other was of a “successful” tech IPO which raised $75 million, but gave the company a lower valuation than it might have gotten in a “late stage private financing.” (He doesn’t name either company). In his opinion, “only the very best companies” should attempt an IPO: The exit of choice for most startups, he suggests, is selling to a larger company.

And that describes exactly the market today, where the best possible exit for most startups is to be acquired by Google, Microsoft, or (more recently) Apple. And instead of going public, the best tech startups like Facebook, Zynga, and Groupn are getting early payouts for founders and employees via late-stage, private DST-type financings.

But limiting exits to M&A might not be the best thing for venture returns. At TechCrunch Disrupt, technology banker Frank Quattrone argued: “For the VC market to produce above average returns you need there to be an IPO market.” An important part of venture returns come from holding onto some shares after an IPO and riding the public markets a while. “If you lose those longtail returns you lose a lot of the returns,” he concluded.

Quattrone seems to think this problem will be solved when the new standard bearers of the Web decide to go public, as opposed to the lackluster offerings so far:

There are probably 40 to 45 IPOs on file. They are not the category-defining, earthshaking companies the market wants to see. The market wants to see Facebook, Twitter, Zynga, LinkedIn, Skype. They want to see the companies that are changing the way we live.

I’m not sure a few iconic IPOs will bring back the Netscape years. First of all, it might still be a couple years before we see a Facebook IPO, and even longer for a Twitter IPO. But even if and when those kinds of tech companies do go public, the IPO option for lesser startups will remain limited for the reasons Wilson outlines. Unless, of course, a Facebook IPO makes public investors irrational once again and we get another bubble. But nobody wants that, or do they?

Whether you buy into the hype or not, it’s plain fact that 3D is everywhere these days. From movies and games to laptops and handhelds, pretty much every screen in the house is going to be 3D-capable in a year or so, even if you opt not to display any 3D content on it. Those of you who choose that path may stop reading now, and come back a little later when you change your mind. Because if you have kids or enjoy movies and games, there will be a point where you’re convinced, perhaps by a single standout piece of media, that 3D is worth it at least some of the time.

But 3D isn’t as easy to get used to as, say, getting a surround-sound system or moving from 4:3 to widescreen. Why is that? Well, it’s complicated, but worth taking the time to understand. Moreover, like any other new technology, 3D is not without its potential risks, and of course studies will have to be done to determine the long-term effects of usage, if any. For now, though, it must be sufficient to inform yourself of the principles behind it and make your own decision.

Continue reading…

There’s no question that Twitter’s web experience has been improving pretty rapidly over the past several months. However, one area that’s still lacking is a good way to view conversations. Clicking on the “in reply to” links is tedious for long conversations. Several third-party apps (including Twitter’s own native iPhone app — which they bought) are much better at doing this. One of those is an app called Twitoaster. And its creator just got hired by Twitter.

Twitoaster is the work of French developer Arnaud Meunier. As he tweeted and blogged today, he’s going to work for Twitter after getting to know some of the team following the Chirp conference in April. Of note, Twitoaster’s speciality was the threaded conversation view it gave to tweets.

So does that mean this is coming to Twitter? Not necessarily — Twitoaster eventually added a number of other features — such as analytics — that could point to how Twitter could use Meunier’s skills as well. But given the direction Twitter has been going with its web product, I would be surprised if some sort of better conversation view wasn’t added to the site relatively soon.

Another key focus of Twitoaster is tweet archiving. That’s another feature Twitter could definitely improve upon. Currently, thanks to Twitter’s search limitations, once a tweet is a couple of months old, it’s basically lost in the Twitter.com ether. If Twitter had a better archiving mechanism for old tweets, it could extend the life of them, and make them much more useful.

All of this, of course, is some fun late Friday afternoon speculation. But Twitter was clearly impressed with what Meunier built, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they use his skills in a similar fashion on their core product.

Meanwhile, Twitoaster will live on, but Meunier says not to expect any new features as he’ll be focused on his new job.

[thanks Richard]

Colorado startup Lijit is best known for providing websites with really good search. And it does search well – sites from Fred Wilson’s blog to ICanHasCheezburger use it.

But Lijit is really an advertising network. Publishers that use Lijit also get access to lots of stats about what’s going on with site searches. And they have an option to join the Lijit ad network to put display ads up on their sites – not just on search results – targeted via that data. So far, so good. Lijit doesn’t take inventory unless they can get the publisher a minimum $1 CPM, and 30% of their 700 million page views on publisher sites serve Lijit ads. They say that will grow to 1 billion page views by end of September this year.

Gross revenue, mostly from those display ads, is on target to hit $4 million – $5 million this year, CEO Todd Vernon told me earlier today. And most of their display ad publishers have joined Lijit in the last 90 days. Last year, revenue was near $0.

Vernon says that the company is able to get premium advertising rates for publishers by combining that search intent data with demographic and content targeting, and that they work very well with mid and long tail publishers who aren’t yet big enough to hire their own sales force.

All that growth and potential means Ligit gets a new round of funding. Existing investors Foundry Group, Boulder Ventures and High Country Venture have put another $6 million into the company, bringing the total to $18.3 million to date.

If revenue trajectories continue the company will get to profitability by the time they’ve spent this round, says Vernon.

PogoPlug just released its upgraded Android app. The app allows you to browse media and music on connected drives, share files publicly from drives, and search for files. You can also manage the folders on your connected drives.

It is available in the app store now. As you recall, the Pogoplug is essentially a NAS adapter that plugs right into the wall and then pop in the Ethernet cable. Any USB drives connected to it are automatically shared on the Internet (password-protected, of course) and you can manage the entire drive from anywhere in the world. The device itself is available for $129.

Click through for full details.

Read more…

Earlier today we learned that SGN, a mobile gaming company that focuses on the iPhone/iPad and will soon be expanding to Android, had raised $2 million from Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s Tomorrow Ventures and Xing founder Lars Hinrichs. Today SGN is also making its 3D shooter EXO-Planet Elite available for the iPhone and iPod Touch in the hopes of recreating the success of its hit Skies of Glory. The game runs $4.99, and you can buy it on the App Store here.

EXO-Planet, which was an iPad launch title but wasn’t available on the iPhone or iPod Touch until now, is a third-person shooter set in space, with a nifty grappling hook mechanic that lets players fling themselves to the other side of a room with one tap. Gameplay is primarily multiplayer — hit Deathmatch or Capture the Flag, and the game’s matchmaking system will usually have you playing a game in a few seconds. This update also introduces a single player time trial mode.

We first profiled the game in early April, and it was one of the first games I tried when I got my hands on an iPad. At the time, I wasn’t too impressed — the game looked compelling, but the controls were really difficult. Despite a lifetime of gaming experience, I couldn’t figure out how to get my character unstuck from the magnetic ceiling, and then I somehow flung myself into an endless abyss. Fortunately, it looks like those problems have been fixed, and the game is starting to live up to its potential.

I fired up the iPad version for the first time in months and quickly jumped into an online multiplayer Deathmatch. The game was still a little disorienting for a few minutes, but I quickly got the hang of it and managed to rack up three kills in my first game (I may have died ten times, but that was a lot better than I did the first time I tried to play).

And it looks like the iPhone version is actually better than the iPad version — the smaller form factor makes it a bit easier to control. And the iPhone obviously has a much larger userbase than the iPad, so despite the game’s slow start a few months ago, SGN may be able to turn EXO-Planet into another hit.

Here’s a video review done by the folks over at AppSpy that gives you an idea of how the gameplay works.

How can Foursquare get more people to check into places as they go about town? One way is stickers. Next month you will start to see stickers in storefront windows reminding Foursquare users to check in and unlock specials. Foursquare’s director of business development Tristan Walker flashed one of the stickers in front of my camera when I was visiting the New York offices earlier today.

In the video above (forgive the iPhone audio) he confirms the company will start to ship the stickers soon to popular Foursquare venues. The stickers are part of Foursqare’s new business-friendly focus. They are just regular stickers that say, “Check-in Here on Foursquare” and “Foursquare Special Here.”

I asked Walker what he thinks about QR codes, those 2d barcodes people can scan with their cameras which are on the stickers Google sent out to local merchants a while back. He is not “particularly bullish” that they will catch on anytime soon. (I’ve argued in the past they could become a backdoor check-in for Google, but I tend to agree that cell-phone barcode scanning is still an unnatural act for most people)

And since he’s been Tweeting all day how much he thinks Twitter’s Promoted Trends is a goldmine business model, I asked him about that also. On camera, Walker was a little shy, but he points out that it is a fascinating way for advertisers to get in front of a large portion of Twitter users. Of course, there are also ways to geo-target the promoted trends by city or even neighborhood. Maybe there is a Foursquare tie-in there, Promoted Specials! Nah.

Thanks to an SEC filing, another detail emerged today about Google’s acquisition of mobile ad network AdMob. We already knew the $750 million Google-AdMob acquisition was a cash and stock deal but we didn’t know the breakdown between the two. According to an SEC filing submitted by Google today, the search giant sold $530 million worth of stock as part of the deal, indicating that AdMob (and its investors) may have taken home the remainder, $220 million, in cash (because of some accounting issues, this number may not be exact).

So was AdMob happy with the split between cash and stock? I guess that depends on whether they think Google’s stock will keep going up. Google paid for the bulk of the deal with stock, and the deal will hardly make a dent in its huge cash reserves (the company has $26.5 billion in the bank).

The deal itself was drawn out due to concerns from the FTC over anti-trust issues. Over six months after announcing its plans to acquire AdMob, Google finally closed the deal at the end of May, a week after the FTC unanimously approved the deal.

When Jack Dorsey’s new startup, Square, was first unveiled in December, there was a lot of excitement about it. And rightly so. It looked like it could revolutionize the way individuals accept payments for their work using their smartphones. But the road to the revolution has been a bit rocky. Today, Dorsey sent an email to the early adopters of Square explaining some of the reasons for delays in getting the product up to speed — and announcing a new indefinite delay.

Of note, he admits that, “we’ve let our excitement get the best of us and have released parts of Square before they were fully baked.” Square had hoped to have the service ready to roll in “early 2010,” but it’s already the middle of the year now and many users are still without units. Dorsey says that while initial hardware shortage issues have been resolved (by sending co-founder Jim McKelvey to China where the devices are made), now a credit processing issue is hampering the service.

As such, Square has decided to halt the mass shipment of Square readers (the little hardware dongle required to read credit cards). They are now “rethinking and expanding our underwriting infrastructure,” Dorsey notes. The main problem now is that to ensure credit fraud doesn’t run wild on Square, they limit transactions numbers — but customers are complaining those limits are too low. Square agrees, so they’re trying to figure out a new way to handle things.

So when might this problem be resolved? “We’re working on the ETA for mass shipments,” Dorsey tells us via email. “We want to make sure the underwriting is solid to manage the fraud and risk,” he continues.

Below, find the full email Dorsey sent to Square users:

Dear Square user,

We announced Square with the phrase: “0 to $60 in under 10 seconds.”

Square’s goal is to enable people to accept payments immediately, everywhere. We realize the amount of time we’ve taken to ship our Square readers has been frustrating, sometimes confusing, and has generated a number of questions. When we announced the company last December, we estimated Square would be ready in the U.S. sometime in early 2010. Since then, we’ve let our excitement get the best of us and have released parts of Square before they were fully baked.

A recent email from our support team to a Square user sums up where we are:

Until recently, we were facing a big hardware shortage, but that is now resolved (we sent our co-founder Jim to China for a couple weeks to arrange better manufacturing, and that did the trick). The problem has transitioned to something we’ve been working on simultaneously, a credit processing and risk issue. We need to strengthen our underwriting infrastructure so that we can handle the huge demand for readers and still manage the risk of chargebacks and fraud. This is the last thing preventing us from shipping readers as fast as we’d like, and we have pretty much the entire team working on it.

The way we are handling the risk of chargebacks and fraud is through transaction limits, but we have received feedback that those limits are too low. We are rethinking and expanding our underwriting infrastructure to address this issue. As soon as we finish, we will send you an email to confirm that you would like us to run a credit check (or you can cancel your request to process cards with Square which will securely remove your personal information). We will then ship your free card reader and activate your account to accept card payments.

We thank you for your continued patience as we work to deliver a utility you can use every day and for allowing us the time to get it right.

Jack Dorsey
Square CEO

Palo Alto based Social Gaming Network, which focuses on multiplayer iPhone/iPod/iPad games, has raised a first tranche in a second round of financing – $2 million from Tomorrow Ventures (Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s investment firm) and Xing founder Lars Hinrichs.

The company previously raised $15 million. Founder Shervin Pishevar says this new round is the first tranche in a much larger Series B funding.

Unlike most social gaming companies today, SGN has focused on very high quality games that allow multi-player gaming from different devices. Skies Of Glory is the office favorite. The company will soon be releasing titles for Android devices, says Pishevar.