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Tonight, Silicon Valley’s heroes gave competition a rest and joined together at the third annual TechFellow Awards to celebrate the spirit of innovation. An all-star committee of industry moguls carefully considered your nominations of visionaries in the fields of engineering, product design and marketing, general management, and disruptive innovation. They chose 5 leaders per category and awarded them each a $100,000 grant to invest in a startup of their choice.

Supported by Founders Fund, TechCrunch, and New Enterprise Associates (NEA), the awards ceremony was hosted by Jim Parsons, the Emmy-award winning star of nerdy television comedy show The Big Bang Theory at San Francisco’s Museum Of Modern Art. Mayor Ed Lee spoke, Facebook engineer Mark Slee DJ’d, and past winners toasted the future of our industry.

Thanks to everyone for submitting your nominations. Here are the 5 winners for each category of this year’s TechFellow Awards:

Engineering Leadership
Presented by: Sandy Jen, co-founder of Meebo

• Ruchi Sanghvi, former Product Manager (NewsFeed) at Facebook
• Amitt Mahajan, co-creator of MyMiniLife (Farmville)
• Scott Marlette, former Product Manager (Photos) at Facebook
• Hilary Mason, Chief Scientist at Bit.ly
• Brian Totty, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Groupon

Product Design & Marketing
Presented by: Dave Morin, co-founder and CEO at Path

• Craig Mod, former designer at Flipboard
• Dustin Mierau, co-founder and Chief Designer of Path
• Wilson Miner, designer at rdio
• Dan Cederholm, co-founder of Dribbble
• Joe Hewitt, former Product Manager (iPhone) at Facebook

General Management
Presented by: Aaron Patzer, founder of Mint

• Joe Greenstein, founder and CEO of Flixster
• Heather Harde, former CEO of TechCrunch
• Andrew Siegel, SVP, Strategy and Corporate Development of Conde Nast
• Clara Shih, CEO of Hearsay
• Victoria Ransom, founder & CEO of Wildfire Interactive

Disruptive Innovation
Presented by: David Friedberg, CEO at The Climate Corporation

• Diego Berdakin, co-founder and President of BeachMint
• Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper
• Leilah Janah, founder and CEO of Samasource
• Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare
• Perry Chen, co-founder and CEO of Kickstarter
• Tom Preston-Werner, co-founder and CTO, Github

San Francisco may not have intended to be become the startup mecca that it is today, but now the city government is working hard to make itself as friendly as possible to tech entrepreneurs. Makes sense, considering that there are 1,539 tech companies and 30,000 tech jobs in the city now — a number that’s been growing fast as older industries like high finance continue to suffer through the recession.

What that means is this. Mayor Ed Lee, who came to power last year with heavy support from the local tech scene, is announcing a new initiative today at the TechFellow awards ceremony, that has some intriguing ideas for making the city itself more relevant to the booming industry within it.

Broadly, the so-called 2012 Innovation Portfolio is trying to do everything from helping founders making it easier to complete the paperwork for creating a company, to giving developers new access to city data, to introducing new ways for citizens to share their opinions with the city, to actually testing out tech products at City Hall itself. A number of other cities in the US and around the world have been working on similar initiatives, so as a resident I can personally say that I’m happy to see this happening.

Especially because the city’s awful taxi system is getting opened up to innovation.

Here’s a closer look at key pieces of the portfolio, based on documents provided to me from the city — plus my own editorializing.

Business One-Stop: Having been through the awful state and federal paperwork for founding a company myself, this one sounds very helpful. The city will launch an online service that allows businesses to “answer simple step-by-step questions and be presented with a clear roadmap of the required steps and forms to complete” founding paperwork online. It’s not clear if this is only for companies that make California their federal home — that might be an issue for tech companies, which normally federally incorporate in Delaware due to its business-friendly bureaucracy. The city is aiming for at least one section of the new site to be online by the end of this year.

ImproveSF: Slated for this spring, the site will let any citizen provide answers to major civic problems — budget savings (which the city has struggled to make happen), and revitalization plans for the middle part of Market Street are two examples.

Open Taxi Access: “In our City, 50% of taxis sit empty, many concentrate downtown and at SFO, and central dispatch doesn’t work, so we want to work with you in solving this problem,” the city states frankly in its presentation on the initiative. Exactly. In fact, this type of problem has helped Uber’s town car service become a hit with residents. To kick this effort off, the city is planning an event for February 24 and 25 “to help the City redefine taxi access and help us define next steps.” Look for TechCrunch to be all over this project.

Hackathons 2.0: Similar to the taxi initiative, the idea here is to bring “hackathon” developer events put on by tech organizations to specific city issues. It promises “user-centered” hackathons for civic topics like veterans services, payments, and transportation. Events are already planned with the California College of Art, Black Founders, Mozilla and GAFFTA.

Open Data: In addition to taxis and the hackathons, the city is more generally trying to make all sorts of other data available to developers — it says it already has 60 apps built on its data, according to its presentation. The broader data plan includes working for legislation that will make information more easily available to the public, and providing more than 200 of its own data sets online. “As part of this effort, the City is moving to a cloud-based data sharing service for launch in March” — I’m not sure what that means, but I guess a central online repository for the data sets? I’ll update if I find out more.

SmartPDFs: In parallel with the open data efforts listed above, the city also wants to make paperwork easier for all of its citizens. This means moving paper-based processes online so you don’t need to print and fax and mail everything. The pilot launch has started and look for deployment across city agencies over the year.

Separately, the city says it’s beginning to test out new technology at City Hall — including Yammer, and Cozybit and 802.11s mesh networking.

You can find more details on the city’s “Innovation” site, here. Partners include sf.citi (which we covered more here), along with Code For America, CCOL, the San Francisco Office of Economic and Workforce Development, and SPUR.

[San Francisco cityscape photo via Mr. Thorngren’s social studies blog.]

You’re probably familiar with OnLive, the company that made its mark by streaming brand new console and PC games to whatever devices could support a high-bandwidth video stream. Many doubted its technology to begin with (including yours truly – Is OnLive OnCrack?) but they’ve more or less delivered on their promises, and have also been expanding the services they offer. Most recently they introduced OnLive Desktop, which streamed a Windows 7 desktop to your iPad.

That was mainly focused on productivity – Office apps and such. Now they’ve added web browsing to the table. Yes, they will stream live video of a web browser running in a datacenter to your device, which almost certainly already has a web browser.

If that sounds crazy, it’s probably because it kind of is. But maybe it’s crazy like a fox. Their accelerated browser is a full-on desktop browser running on a gigabit connection. It can load files and display them to you in the video stream faster than you can load them on your own device. And of course it has Flash. It’s certainly more capable than, say, Safari on iPad, but is it really better?

The problem is that the average consumption experience doesn’t really benefit from being streamed. Flash is rarely critical to use from a tablet (though it can be nice), and big attachments are often virtualized already – big PDFs and video files can be viewed or streamed online without a tedious download process. The few cases where a window into a high-speed but generic browser is better than the built-in one are probably overshadowed by the inevitable downsides of interacting with a virtual, video desktop: lag and occasional poor image quality.

You’ll have to shell out to give it a try; the iOS app is free and you can access productivity tools (if they have the spare bandwidth for you), but for the browser and desktop you’ll need to drop $5 per month. Soon you’ll also be able to pay $10 per month for extra space and custom desktop apps. It’s the beginning of something cool, but at the moment it seems a hard sell.

The browser wars are in a tense state of suspension right now. The once-obvious advantages of one and disadvantages of another can’t be counted on as much as they could a year ago, and fast-changing standards and interaction methods have produced a sort of uneasy détente while everyone awaits the browser equivalent of the Manhattan Project to catapult them into the atomic age.

Tom’s Hardware just did a nice, thorough examination of the available browsers on Windows 7 and Ubuntu, and the findings are really mixed. It used to be that Firefox always won, and we could all make fun of IE. Then Chrome came and won all the speed benchmarks. And then there was Opera. Now it’s a mess. How do you pick the browser that’s best for you? Easy: you flip a coin.

The benchmarks are what you’d expect: standards compliance, HTML5 stuff, Javascript speed, hardware acceleration. It’s such a mixed bag of victories and losses by various parties that you can barely draw any conclusions. In the end, the winner (Firefox) is far from decisive, and is often “weak” in things at which the runner-up, Chrome, excels. And vice versa. Meanwhile Opera takes a few wins home, IE is the best at memory management (but little else), and Safari cleans up in page load times (but little else).

So why do I say you can flip a coin? Because first of all, don’t use Safari. It’s just not good enough, and unless you are compelled to use it for some purpose, it has no advantage over the rest and plenty of disadvantages. And don’t use IE (except for testing), because it still has trouble rendering properly, despite some interesting features. You can use Opera, but if you are, you’ve already made that decision and aren’t likely to go back on it any time soon. But for “regular” users who want to use popular plugins, ensure compliance with various webpages and apps that may or may not be built properly, and be sure of a very regular update schedule, Firefox and Chrome are really your only options.

And which should you choose? If you really don’t know, flip a coin. If you try to argue against it when it lands on Firefox, install Chrome. If you don’t like it, install Firefox. Or use both. The fact is right now, for the average user, it doesn’t matter much, and both browsers are great. I use Firefox for reasons that are trivial, yet nonetheless more important than performance or under the hood differences. But I wouldn’t recommend it over Chrome for anyone but myself.

Don’t get me wrong: there are differences between the browsers, and the results are worth going through if the browser is a mission-critical item for your work or you are seriously worried about a certain type of performance. Of course, in a couple months, all these positions might be reversed. So you’ll have to take that coin out again.

It goes without saying that the death of veteran Sunday Times war correspondent Marie Colvin and the French photographer Remi Ochlik – after an artillery shell hit their makeshift press centre in the Syrian city of Homs – is tragic. It’s also testament to the lengths to which journalists often go to get the story. But equally, the use of new technology by ‘citizen journalists’ has been equally significant in documenting the deadly acts of the Syrian government against its own people.

Among those killed in yesterday’s attack on the journalists’ position were three activists. One of those was video blogger Rami Ahmad al-Sayed, who was also known as “Syria Pioneer“. Ahmad al-Sayed had uploaded over 200 videos to various platforms of the killing and destruction in his area. We wrote about him and his video only this week when the Syrian government blocked Bambuser, the live video platform he was using.

Colvin was a decorated foreign correspondent. Ochlik had won a World Press Photo award. Obviously al-Sayed / Syria Pioneer had not had the chance to win such accolades. But his live broadcasts, using the startup video platform Bambuser did their part in showing the world what was going on in Syria.

His footage of the bombing of Homs was aired all over the world by BBC World, SkyNews, Al Jazeera and many more. Live video from the roof where Rami and his friends positioned their camera was broadcast all over the world. A collection of some of that output is contained in a tribute at Storyful. Be warned, much of it is harrowing to watch.

We know from Bambuser that Rami was accompanying three people to a civil hospital when he died. The car was believed to have been the target of mortar fire. While the others died instantaneously, Rami was badly injured but died from his wounds later in the hospital.

Born in 1985, father of a little girl aged a year and a half called Marym (pictured), his last message for his friends was sent to Bambuser:

“Babaamr is facing a genocide right now. I will never forgive you for your silence. You have all just given us your words but we need actions. However, our hearts will always be with those who risk their life for our freedom. I know what we need! We need campaigns everywhere inside Syria and outside Syria, and now we need all people in front of all embassies all over the world. In a few hours there will be NO place called BabaAmr and I expect this will be my last message and no one will forgive you who talked but didn’t act.”

But although a family has lost a husband and father, Syria Pioneer lives on, bringing live footage from inside Homs: because Rami’s friends and colleagues have resumed using the account.

Rami’s pioneering work, using the platforms of the new technology world, will not have been in vain.

You can get Syria Pioneer’s live channel on Bambuser right here.

Though Apple, Google, Microsoft, RIM, Amazon, and HP don’t always see eye-to-eye, the six of them have entered into an agreement brokered by California Attorney General Kamala Harris to take a tougher stance on the issue of mobile privacy.

Going forward, the six companies involved must provide users with a privacy policy if the app in question collects personal information. Though the move will affect the app submission and downloading process for users the world over, it was designed to bring those six companies into compliance with California state law.

“The majority of mobile apps sold today do not contain a privacy policy,” Harris said. “By ensuring that mobile apps have privacy policies, we create more transparency and give mobile users more informed control over who accesses their personal information and how it is used.”

It isn’t just enough for these companies to provide app-specific privacy policies to their users; they must also do it before the user downloads it, creating a much-needed means for them to opt-in. Apple and company also need to be consistent in how they display that information, as the agreement Harris brokered called for “a consistent location for an app’s privacy policy on the application-download screen.”

On top of that, users will also be given tools to help police their respective app stores. The terms of the agreement note that the platforms in question will allow users to report non-compliant apps, which could bring about some welcome change in some respects — while the Android Market already allows users to flag questionable apps, the iOS App Store and the Windows Marketplace don’t give users that power.

The past few weeks have made the mobile privacy issue a hot-button topic outside of the tech sphere, and the attention doesn’t just end with California’s AG — two congressmen sent a letter to Apple CEO Tim Cook posing questions about user data privacy, and the White House will be holding an online meeting tomorrow to accompany the release of a white paper on online privacy. Regardless of how this privacy discussion began, don’t expect for the talk to subside any time soon.

Last Friday I visited the Aol* building on Page Mill Road in Palo Alto. But instead of the stench of death and decay you would normally find at a dying company, I found joy and the hustle and bustle of youth. More importantly, I found startups, tens of startups with founders eager to show me around the various VC firms (SoftTech, Morado) and incubators occupying the building’s first floor.

Because someone brilliant at Aol decided to give away the space to startup incubators instead of renting it out to other dead men walking companies, it was filled with light and life. Whoever you are, you’re a genius.

Anyways, on the first floor of this huge Aol building, in addition to StartX and education-focused incubator Imagine K-12, is a modest accelerator called First Floor Labs.

Founded by Stanford MBA and Former Facebooker Maisy Samuelson and Aol Ventures dude Adam Smith, First Floor Labs basically provides office space and amenities like a kitchen and a gym to pre-Series A teams of between one to four people — startups that would otherwise work out of coffee shops or apartments. Thanks to an Aol Ventures sponsorship, the space is free for six months to all accepted startups without further obligation or any equity transferral.

 

Samuelson says that she and Smith are in it because they are passionate about startups and the tech community (In Smith’s case having early access to hot startups never hurts a VC), “I love working with an established company to help the next generation of entrepreneurs succeed. It’s amazing to have so much talent and energy in one room. “

“Smoopa grew from 20,000 downloads to more than 100,000 downloads while we were in First Floor Labs and it’s been great to have smart people around to help us scale,” First Floor Labs resident and Smoopa co-founder Mendel Chuang told me, “The amount of knowledge and expertise in this community is incredible.”

Already one startup, Digital Staircase, has gone to Facebook, while three (stealth) others made it into the current YCombinator class (only three applied).

Applications for First Floor Labs spring session, which will house 15 startups instead of 10, are due on March 9th. Also, I’m going to try work out of there every Thursday from now on, so if you’re around, come say hi!

*Disclosure: TechCrunch is owned by Aol, in case this is your first time visiting the Internet. I think they write it ‘AOL’ though.

Every time a dating site succeeds in making a match, it loses two users. To offset churn, Zoosk tells me that tomorrow it’s announcing a new business model that complements subscriptions with date discounts, expert relationship advice, gift ideas, holiday reminders and online scrapbooks. The products could convince users to pay even after they’ve found their sweethearts. If users fall in love with the new revenue streams, the whole dating industry could start courting happy couples.

Zoosk now has 15 million monthly active users across its site, mobile, and Facebook app. It also has a $90 million annual sales run rate, up from $20 million in 2009. Still, it’s had to raise $40.5 million to buy ads and failed dating sites so it could replace the users who canceled their subscriptions once they’ve found a mate. Most users don’t want to look like losers by sharing their Zoosk activity on Facebook or Twitter, so the service misses out on the organic virality enjoyed in other verticals.

But Zoosk may have found a way out of this downward spiral. While a $12-$30 monthly subscription may seem expensive, singles, and men in particular, are used to forking over cash to impress dates with dinners, drinks, and nightlife. Zoosk could grow profits if it captured some of this spend by offering discount package dates similar to romantic experience subscription service BeCouply.

Once a couple emerges from the high-priced date honeymoon period, Zoosk could sell them on reminders and gift ideas. It could take cut of spend on birthdays, Valentine’s Day, and the winter holidays, as well as digital scrapbooks.

Finally, Zoosk could identify couples on the verge of breakup through on-site behavior analysis that surfaces users returning to their profiles for the first time in months. Then it’s as simple as targeting them with in-house ads about how true love never dies and they’ll never find someone better.

[Image Credit: iStockPhoto]

As you probably know, bistable or passive displays like the E-Ink ones in e-readers focus on battery life and readability rather than color and interactivity. The latest devices have been optimized for fast page refreshes and touch operation, but generally you’re still waiting a half a second or so for the screen to flip over to the next page, menu, or what have you.

But that’s not all they’re capable of. We’ve seen hacks before, but this one definitely takes the cake. Check out this video of a Nook Touch from XDA hacker marspeople:

Bear in mind this is strictly a hack and not a full-on release or commercially developed product. Most people wouldn’t want to use the device in this state: it’s not consistent in how fast it responds, there are graphical glitches, and it probably drains the battery like crazy. But the fact is they’ve got a passive display refreshing ~15-20 times per second and responding to touches instantly like a normal tablet.

The possibilities for this generation of readers are limited: few people are going to install a hack like this, and even if they did, not much content is really designed to be consumed this way. Pages are a natural way to read books, and scrolling constantly is kind of a pain. But it’s amazing to see these displays, usually so slow and static, being used so actively. Here’s hoping the next displays from E-Ink (or Bridgestone, or whoever) are capable of even more. Despite what people might say, the passive display still has a lot of potential to grow and evolve.

[via The Digital Reader]

HP just reported mixed first quarter earnings. The company posted non-GAAP diluted earnings per share of $0.92, down 32 percent from the prior-year period (GAAP diluted earnings per share were $0.73, down 38 percent from the prior-year period). First quarter net revenue came in at $30 billion, down 7 percent from the previous year. Analysts expected earnings of $0.87 cents a share on revenue of $30.7 billion. GAAP Net Income was down 44 percent to $1.5 billion.

“In the first quarter, we delivered on our Q1 outlook and remained focused on the fundamentals to drive long-term sustainable returns,” Meg Whitman, HP president and chief executive officer, said in a statement. “We are taking the necessary steps to improve execution, increase effectiveness and capitalize on emerging opportunities to reassert HP’s technology leadership.”

In the Americas, first quarter revenue was $13.2 billion, down 9 percent year over year. Europe, the Middle East and Africa revenue of $11.7 billion was down 4 percent year over year, and revenue in Asia Pacific was $5.2 billion, representing a 10 percent decrease year over year.

Revenue from outside of the United States in the first quarter accounted for 66 percent of total HP revenue. BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) generated revenue of $3.1 billion, down 13 percent from the year-ago period, and representing 10 percent of total HP revenue. Revenue in HP’s commercial businesses declined 4 percent year over year. Revenue in HP’s consumer businesses, within PSG and IPG, was collectively down 23 percent year over year.

In terms of specific product lines, the Personal Systems Group (PSG) revenue declined 15 percent year over year, and services revenue of $8.6 billion grew 1 percent year over year with a 10.5 percent operating margin. Imaging and Printing Group revenue declined 7 percent year over year. Consumer hardware revenue was down 15 percent year over year.Enterprise Servers, Storage and Networking (ESSN) revenue declined 10 percent year over year.

On the bright side, software revenue grew 30 percent year over year with a 17.1 percent. HP says software revenue was driven by 12 percent license growth, 22 percent support growth and 108 percent growth in services.

Aiming to become one of the giants of online advertising, ad retargeting startup AdRoll has hired Googler Suresh Khanna as its vice president of sales.

In nearly six years at Google, Khanna held a number of roles. Most recently, he was director of new advertiser sales, where he says he led the North American team for acquiring mid-market and larger advertisers. Until now, Khanna says AdRoll hasn’t had anyone focused on building out the sales team, so one of his big goals is to “attract rock stars.” He also says that he wants to help AdRoll build relationships with larger advertisers and ad agencies.

“I think it’s very early days on retargeting,” Khanna says. “We’ve got 3,500 customers but, again, I think the opportunity is in the millions of advertisers.”

Retargeting, where ads are delivered based on your past online behavior, sometimes get a bad rap. Khanna himself admits that he had a similar “knee jerk” reaction when he heard about AdRoll, thinking of it as a system where, say, someone abandons an e-commerce shopping cart with kitchen knives, then suddenly finds that they’re bombarded with kitchen knife ads wherever they go online. The key, he says, is to expand the definition of retargeting from that narrow use case to thinking “more strategically” about taking advantage of “all the data you have on all your customers.”

“I think that’s classic early days,” he says. “When you’re on the bleeding edge, that’s what the first round of people in the space might have done, but we need to push beyond that.”

AdRoll recently announced that it quadrupled revenue last year and was profitable for the first time.

(I also see, via LinkedIn, that Khanna is the co-founder and co-owner of Kasa Indian Eatery, one of my favorite restaurants in San Francisco.)

Tabber is an upcoming Kickstarter project that essentially adds an LED light show to your guitar and, more importantly, allows you to learn to play chords and solos by following the lights on the fretboard.

The idea is definitely not new. The Fretlight guitar beat these guys to the punch and I wonder what patent issues they will have to deal with. However, as an idea, it’s pretty ingenious. The Tabber is a “sleeve” that fits over the neck of your guitar and it should work, as the folks at Tabber reiterate, on any git-fiddle in your possession.

The project uses an open source Arduino board and open source software to drive the lights and/or create an active light show for guitarists who don’t need TAB help and are instead interested in looking like Peter Frampton in the year 2020.

The project is launching soon on Kickstarter and should be an interesting addition to the gigger’s bag of tricks.

Project Page

Referral traffic is pouring out of Pinterest and Facebook’s Open Graph frictionless sharing. With Sociable Lab’s licensable EverShare you can snatch their functionality without any serious development work and soak up some page views. EverShare lets you host your own Pinterest-style product or content boards to give your users their social curation fix. It also instantly roots your site into Facebook’s confusing APIs so purchases, comments, reviews, and pins are automatically blasted at friends of your visitors.

Pinterest’s simple, stable sharing canvas has struck a chord with ecommerce shoppers and middle America’s women in particular. You could add Pin It buttons to your site and hope they get clicked, but great websites steal, they don’t borrow. Sociable Labs licenses a website personalization SaaS to sites that want to instantly get social. EverShare Gallery mimics Pinterest’s home page activity board, but only displays trending products and those shared by a user’s friends.

I’ve spoken to several developers and they want to add Frictionless Sharing, but they’ve found the Facebook developer docs confusing. Considering how most sites and apps that integrates it see traffic go through the roof, there’s surely plenty of sites looking for a turnkey hose into the Facebook Ticker, Timeline, and news feed. EverShare Connector makes it as easy as writing a check.

Once integrated, users don’t even have to go back to Facebook to see what friends are sharing. The sidebar activity feed also includes the option to turn off sharing, for those who don’t want friends to know how many shoes they buy.

Virality best practices are developing faster than most companies can employ them. Meanwhile, good developers and designers are in short supply. For content sites, buying referral traffic might not produce big ROI. But for ecommerce sites, a monthly SaaS subscription could pay for itself quickly since Sociable Labs says socially sourced traffic converts 250-300% higher.

Here’s a fun fact: Batteries and cars require maintenance. The Tesla Roadster runs on batteries that require lots of maintenance. Out of the 2,200 Roadster owners, apparently at least five didn’t read the manual on their new toy and let the car sit off the charger for several months – or so says one regional service manager. This is a no-no according to Tesla. The result? The battery packs completely died and needed to be replaced at the owner’s expense.

This is not unique to the $100k Tesla Roadster. Batteries stop working without a charge. It just so happens that the battery pack in question isn’t a $100 laptop battery. The latest owner with a bricked Tesla is reportedly going to have to pay $40,000 to replace the battery pack in his Roadster.

Tesla notes in a released statement today that the Roadster can sit for weeks or months without a problem — if the car is originally fully charged. Problems arise if, say, if an owner took a Roadster for a drive, depleted the battery and then parked it in his seaside bungalow while he went yachting. Car and bike enthusiasts will attest that batteries die when not maintained. Trickle chargers are often employed to prevent batteries from dying while vehicles are in storage. Nissan advises Leaf owners to plug in the vehicle within 14 days of depleting the battery. Tesla says to do it immediately with the likely cause being the Roadster has several low-level systems that run even when the car is not in use.

The Tesla differs from traditional vehicles in that it does not have a combustion engine but rather an electric motor. There is a lot less to worry about. Electric motors have fewer fault points and a lot less fluid circulating inside. Tesla does recommend replacing Roadsters’ transmission fluid every 30k miles or once a year. But that’s about it. Well, besides maintaining the battery.

The Tesla Roadster is an intelligent vehicle. It warns the owner when the battery is low. The latest version of the Roadster can even alert Tesla itself if the battery level is too low. But apparently these owners decided to ignore those warnings and park their expensive electric cars for extended periods of time.

Tesla Motors released a statement today in response to TheUnderstatement’s scaremongering story.

All automobiles require some level of owner care. For example, combustion vehicles require regular oil changes or the engine will be destroyed. Electric vehicles should be plugged in and charging when not in use for maximum performance. All batteries are subject to damage if the charge is kept at zero for long periods of time. However, Tesla avoids this problem in virtually all instances with numerous counter-measures. Tesla batteries can remain unplugged for weeks (or even months), without reaching zero state of charge. Owners of Roadster 2.0 and all subsequent Tesla products can request that their vehicle alert Tesla if SOC falls to a low level. All Tesla vehicles emit various visual and audible warnings if the battery pack falls below 5 percent SOC. Tesla provides extensive maintenance recommendations as part of the customer experience.

This fully-drained situation is also possible with the upcoming Model S sedan and Model X CUV. They use a similar lithium-ion battery pack. Tesla will no doubt seek to increase awareness of this potential issue, though.

The Roadster is a first generation electric vehicle. Since its introduction in 2008 it has enjoyed a life free from many public controversies. This battery nonsense will blow over and the Roadster can get back to causing real drama by embarrassing Porsche 911s everywhere.

It’s safe to say we’ve all been in a situation where a few extra pairs of eyes could come in handy, and the folks at Google know just how that feels. In an effort to give people that backup when they need it, they’ve just pushed out a useful new update to the Google Docs Android app.

The update’s biggest draw is the addition of live, multi-user editing — after sharing the document with your closest confidantes, any changes made will carry over to each person’s device in real time. To help with the mobile editing process, Google has also added the ability to pinch-zoom between page and paragraph views, not to mention some much-needed formatting tweaks. Need to bold a particularly thoughtful passage, or point out a lousy turn of phrase with some red ink? Now you can.

Of course, there’s nothing like a human slant to make even the most utilitarian updates grab you by the heartstrings. Google’s demo video tells the charming story of a guy doing some last-minute prep on a speech, and I half-expected it to highlight the other side of the collaborative editing coin: that more voices involved doesn’t always lead to a better final product.

It didn’t, of course, but I could definitely imagine a few of my friends clogging up a heartfelt speech with off-color jokes if I were in the same spot.

The moral of the story? Keep your friends close, and your collaborative editors even closer.