The Great American Bubble Machine

Article from Rolling Stone

Google Wave

Fantastic new concept Google Wave coming out of Googles skunk works

The video demo is long but if you have the time will give you a system reset about what the next generation of email/instant messaging/collaboration is going to be like.

Concept motorcycle

One of the nice things about having two young sons, is that you get to relive your childhood through their toys. I was admiring one of my sons fighter jets recently, and started to wonder why modern motorcycle design is well, so old and boring.

Why don't motorcycle riders demand that their bikes look as styled as modern cars? Or even look like a fighter jet?

The result of these musings was a design for a reclining, aerodynamic, agressive motorcycle concept. New market segment - new generation of riders that want more security than traditional motorcycles, wouldn't be seen dead riding a baby-boomer sixties throwback Harley (it's only pot-bellied retires that buy Harleys these days), still want excitement, but also want double the fuel economy and three times the acceleration of a Prius.

Some of the design ideas (hard to read the scribblings on my sketch)...

- Supercar style (or fighter jet intake) air intakes either side of the rider

- Aluminim rollcage goes provides visual cue of strength and safety

- Fuel tank at the back above the wheel

- Very low CG due to the rider being reclining in front of the engine.

- Utilize existing bike mechanicals as much as possible

- Lockable, integrated storage behind drive and in front of the fuel tank

- Aluminium box frame gives visual cue to strength

- Optional 'Targa' top fits over driver for more enclosed feel

- Partial door gives sense of security while maintaining a bike feel

As far as I know, only the Swiss have been venturing into this market niche with the slick and very expensive Monotracer. The Monotracer actually has quite a long history, most of them horrifically ugly from design perspective. The new one is very contempory, but priced way out of range except for possibly the Knomes of Zurich on their weekends.

My design is a lot more close to existing motorcycles - semi exposed rather than completely enclosed. Exposed engines and mechanics are really part of motorcycle magic, as is fresh air. Also, having the rider be able to put their feet down gets around the tricky problem of retracing stabilzer wheels that fully enclosed motorcycles will always need to solve.

New life for GM, new car for Buick, new job for Lutz

The new GM yesterday, a new old job for Bob Lutz, the new Buick Lacrosse today.

Being in Michigan has some benefits...like seeing the latest GM and Chrysler vehicles before everyone else does. I live in leafy Rochester Hills, home to lots of auto engineers,managers and so on, so you see a lot of new vehicles that they are getting to drive on their discount schemes.

So when a spotted a nice new car by the gym the other day, I thought, oh, nice new Lexus. Not a Lexus. Not a Hyundai Genisis even. A Buick? I did a double take, then walked around it.

Then walked around it again. Now, when you have loved cars and good design for years, you create a little protocol for checking out new cars. Walking right around a new car twice, is something that I think I did the last time in Germany when I first saw the Mercedes SLK. And that was a good eight year ago.

It's special, this car. Everything is tight. The curves are tight. The chrome swoops, the bonnet slices, the interior makes the even the S-Class (my usual standard for luxury interiors) look dated and fusty. The historic references like the air-intakes on the bonnet add to the overall design, not detract.

With the Cadillac CTS, the Lincoln MKX, MKZ, and the new Chevy Camaro, US auto design is finally showing it can blend design elements from the heyday of US auto design, into relevant 21st century cars.

Hopefully, bringing back Bob Lutz into the new GM will make sure we keep getting great American design like this.

Solar Powered Paraglider

Interesting idea for solar cells on paragliders that caught my attention while researching paragliding near HP locations globally.

My wife and I are trying to figure out where the best location in the world for us to live is. Not that we don't love our classic colonial in Rochester Hills, Michigan, its just that we are ever on the search for perfection...And, there is no local paragliding site. The closest place to fly is 3.5 hrs.

I'm thinking of crowdsourcing the search for the perfect place to live.

Konigsegg sets up Saab deal

What a curious turn of events. A Norwedgian industrial designer and a Swedish financial whizzkid pull of an audacious coup to convince the Swedish government to invest hundreds of millions of dollars/crowns/euros to pick up one of the world's more interesting auto brands at a firesale price.


Check out Baard Eker's design company. He owns 49% of Koenigsegg. As an trained industrial designer long ago, this outfit makes me drool. Small creative studio set in the sylvan Norwegian countryside, turning out the design for one of the world's fastest production cars (although it is debatable whether 18 cars a year can be called production), and other cool products and now presumably to play a big part in the remaking of Saab. Perhaps they might even persuade Saab to productionize the cool AeroX concept car.

In another curious turn of evens, 350 million in stimulus for Tesla motors was announced from our physicist in chief, Stephen Chu. Lets hope Better Place has filled out their application form too.

Maybe Gen-X is finally starting to wrench control of the world away from the insane and greedy industrial politics of the twentieth century baby boomers, and towards the world I've been dreaming about seeing for the last twenty years.

Testing out the cloud

Today's cloud test. Google docs vs Microsoft Skydrive. I wanted to know how realistic it would be to start storing all my personal data on the web using free products. I assumed security wasn't an issue, so long as I went with a major known provider.

Criteria:

1. Upload multiple files at one time

2. View files in browser

3. Easily move files between files and folders

4. Unlimited folder depth

5. Contemporary look and feel

Analysis

1. Skydrive lets you easily upload multiple files, Google docs doesn't.

2. Guess what, Skydrive completely wrecks .pdfs. That's almost a show stopper, as I would really like to file a lot of old bills online using .pdfs. Google docs uploads .pdf very unpredictably, do both fail miserably in this area.

3. Skydrive has  much more sophsticated look and feel, and moving files is easier.

4. Folder depth is really important to me because I'm a disciplined organizer of files. Google docs allows to create folder depth, but once you do, it's almost impossible to follow. Skydrive wins easily.

5. Come on Google, the interface is really dated, and actually, just plain bad. I know the Skydrive gui is all Vista/Silverlight  smooth, but it just looks better, has less clutter, and shows that more thought was put into it. Google obviously gave Google Earth an unlimited budget, it's clear they are not seeing the revenue stream in docs with an inteface this dated and poorly thought through.

Verdict

Overall, Skydrive would win, but fails the .pdf test so badly that it blew it's chance. Google displayed them seamlessly, but uploaded them only when it felt like it. So neither product got past five or six user actions without show-stopper functionality breakdowns. So it looks like I'm hanging out with my hardrive for a little longer.

The Million Server Data Center

Interesting article about trends in data centers

The greed of the rich comes under attack

The public outrage over the greed and incompetance behind AIG's disasterous credit default swaps is mounting. This article from the NY Times captures the moment.

Well, you reap what you sow, guys. Maybe we will start seeing corporate and personal greed as an addiction that is undeserving of allocades and social grace, and redefine these robber barons as destructive, rather than constructive.

Scenes from the Recession

Global photo essay on the world financial crisis and its impact on everyday life around the world.

Is HP still a technology company, or just a profit center for Wall St?

One of the HP-EDS executive team managed to speak for an hour today without once alluding to anything except costs, cutting costs, making more profit for the corporation, growth, saving, increasing revenue, increasing margin for the corporation, getting the forecast right...ad naseum.

Hello? Is HP a technology company anymore? The entire hour was so generic and contentless that it could have been an MBA textbook speech designed to present to the wage slaves on day 90 of the 100 day corporate integration plan.

Where is the vision? Where is the discussion of the convergence of RFID chips, mobile phones, GPS systems, and location based advertising using internet marketing and on virtual servers purchased from Amazon web services. Not to mention the competivtive pressure HP is experiencing from Googles cloud algorithms or the Sun merger with IBM, that could profoundly EDS's general leaning towards Sun as a hardware supplier for thousands of client data centers, and create enormous competitive pressure for HPs blade offering. These are the topics that I want my executives to be conversant in, and use to prove their credibility to be running a global technology company.

Maybe the EDS acqusition was the tipping point for HP. Maybe HP under first Carly and now Mark, has become so big that all it's executives are capable of taking about anymore is the bottom line. And basically the bottom line means their bonus check.

Congratuations, Mr Hurd. You've sold out to Wall st. I have to admit it, $42 million is a pretty good price for your soul.

Just please, please don't sell out me. I love working with technology. I love feeling like the work I do is cutting edge. I love feeling that when I read 'Wired' magazine, I actuallly understand the articles. But, if recent HP-EDS executive performance is anything to go by, it's already too late.

HP Pay Cuts - an unfair act of economic opportunism and greed.

Suffering, suffering. Buddists have a belief that life is suffering. Sure feels like it at the moment.

Thousands of hardworking employees take pay cuts while executive continue to reap millions in bonuses.

Reading Damien Saunder's post about the recent HP Pay cuts (disclosure: I'm one of those taking them, and have experienced the corresponding % drop in job motivation), I believe we are really experiencing not only a financial crisis, but a corporate leadership crisis as well.

Software for Mindmapping on a blog

Trying to find software to bring mindmapping into my blog.

I created this mindmap about cloud computing using Webspiration. This took about 5 minutes to sign up to this service, 15 minutes to create the mindmap, and 2 minutes to figure out how to imbed it into this blog. The link above goes direct to the website, and the imbedded version is below.



The embedded Webspiration mindmap is very clean and easy to scroll around, but allows no scaling and easy scrolling allowing clear navigation.

A little more fiddly to get started with and embed, but more attractive results and vastly more sophisticated editing is Xmind.

The free version of Xmind involves a download, installation, and then the upload didn't work through my corporate proxy server.

The editing tools are sophisticated, and in the free version everything you create is public. Editing is intuitive and fast to learn, although the added functionality also makes it more time consuming to learn. I created a mindmap in about 30 minutes. Using the website enables full screen viewing and a host of collaboration tools.

Xmind creates a very nice embedded map, with options to see the outline and author. But the scaling creates problems when maps are small. You'd really need a completely separate page to have this work in a blog.

Los bikers Kiwis

I love hearing about mad adventures. Here is one from a Brazillian friend who is just starting a motorcycle ride through Patagonia.

Finally, a leader revelant to the USA and the world

Watching Obama's inaugral address, I believe the USA, as the only real global superpower, finally has a leader who is capable of being a leader the world needs, as well as the leader the USA needs.

Two things really moved me. I've lived in four different countries around the world, with very different cultures. So I feel pretty global in my outlook on life. So Obama's global viewpoint really strikes a chord. His global perspective, environmental awareness, respect for the role of both religion and science, clarity that the middle way is really the only way to bring people together, opposition to crude brute force , a stern clarity about the damage that greed and unrestrained market forces will bring to the world - all of this mirrors the experiences that my own evoution has led me who I am.

The second thing was that Obama clearly has crystal clear values. The USA is founded on inclusivity, crafted as a place of opportunity for those that wanted freedom of belief, religion, commerce and self-expression. As articulated by Obama, these values made me realize why I instinctively always wanted to experience living in the USA .

For the last eight years, we saw a massively corrupt Republican cabel cynically manipulate many of these values in order to justify political power and orchestrate the transfer of trillions of dollars in taxpayer wealth into the private fortunes of a narrow elite. Obama's message of new challenge, of creating a new country that improves on the old, of a 'more perfect union', these things speak to the timeless attraction of life in the US, rather than cynically created fear and war-based patriotism that the Bush white house cynically rammed down the throats of a vulnerable public after September 11, as part of their calculated campaign of theft of public money and misuse of power.

Obamas message, in contrast, articulates the the essence if freedom that US citizens so often feel deeply - but often fail to describe clearly. These values are much more clear when you move to the USA from another country where they are not as present. The USA is a land where people don't apologize for who they decide to be, where ideas can be tried on, spoken aloud, reconsidered and abandoned for better ones when you have grown beyond them. This is the attraction of living in this country, and through Obama's clarity of communication, I've leapt forward in understanding this.

He is a very much the consumate leader for our time, a leader for my generation of intelligent, discerning adults in their 30s and 40s who are sick of the hypocrisy and greed that so often characterised the powerful adults that supposedly served as our role models as we grew up. Instead these adults became the figures of our ridicule, digust and disillusionment.

We waited a long time for you Obama. Your time has come.

GM, please, please build this car

GM is not dead yet. Just returned from the Detroit autoshow, and can feel the change coming.

Why?

GM introduced the Converj, a kick-ass, razor sharp, Cadilliac plug in hybrid. And unlike the utterly gorgeous Lincoln concept C car, the Converj looked like it was production ready, already.

The converj uses Volt technology, which catapults the Cadillac brand into the future of eco-geek tech, as well as making it the must have status symbol for those who would otherwise be lusting after a BMW hybrid.

And, if you hadn't already noticed, eco-geek is the direction the USA is going as fast as Obama can hire PHD's for his white house staff.

The change in the auto industry is happening faster than most consumers realize. Let's see where this goes.

Through the worst of the crisis?

Well, it's 2009 and I still have a job.

There was a horrible moment not so long ago, where the only sane thing to do was to sit down and mind-map my own personal worst case scenario.

Which went something like this:
- Lose my job at HP
- Along with the job, lose my visa to work in the USA
- Have to sell our beautiful house at a big loss
- Have to search for a job somewhere else in the world in a global recession
- Spend all our savings moving a family of four around the world
- Move back to NZ or move back to Germany
- In short....start again.

Actually, I've done that several time before in Germany and the USA, so it shouldn't be too bad. Problem is, we really like what we are experiencing right now. Kids are growing up fast and don't keep us up at night, job is OK, house is a delight, Michigan is beautiful whatever season you are in...

But now that Bush did the only thing I ever think was actual a well informed decision in his 8 years of being president by bailing out the Detroit automakers (on which my job depends), at least the mortgage payment seems a bit more safe now. We've had a beautiful snowy winter, and my oldest son is finally potty trained! Life is looking up.