This&That: Green envy: the Tesla sports car is coming; 3VR and robot assassins from the future; good review for Long Tail book.
By Tom Foremski - July 7, 2006
There will be lot more hybrid cars hitting the used car markets locally because there will soon be a much greener (and faster) car available from startup Tesla Motors. On July 20 Tesla will pull off the covers on its all-electric sports car, a secret design powered by a new type of electric motor.
Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin are Toyota Prius hybrid drivers and also investors in Tesla, which has collected funding of about $60m. I recently met Martin Eberhard, CEO and co-founder of Tesla Motors. He is confident of the car's success--even though hardly anyone, including investors, have seen the design. This, and other details will be revealed later this month.
This is what is known so far: the car will be priced at the lower-end of the premium sports car range; it has a Tesla Motors designed variable torque electric engine; it does zero to sixty mph in 4 seconds; it has a range of about 250 miles per electric charge; it has a carbon fiber body.
You'll need a lot of green to get a Tesla sports car but you'll be greener than anyone else on the highway. And at just 1 cent per mile in electric power costs, it'll pay for itself after just 500,000 miles! (My rough estimate ;-)
. . .I recently visited 3VR Security, a San Francisco startup with very impressive video surveillance technology.
3VR has some minority funding from In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the Central Intelligence Agency. And you can see why because the video surveillance technology is very impressive searching for faces within masses of video camera surveillance images.
Stephen Russell, the CEO of 3VR showed me how the search technology could pull together a timeline of video segments from many cameras to follow a specific person around the office and in the hallways. It was just one of many ways to analyze video data from dozens of video cameras in near real-time. The first customers include banks, large corporations, and government agencies.
The technology still has a ways to go before it can match the facial recognition abilities of humans, but that will eventually happen. And it doesn't take a genius to figure out that in the right/wrong hands future versions of 3VR's technology could track people without any need for RFID chips.
And it doesn't take a science fiction writer to figure out that if future sentient machine life forms get their hands on this technology, they could use it to oppress humanity.
But I think 3VR's technology is not that threatening to future human societies because if it were, the robot assassins from the future would have already wiped out the company :-)
. . . Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired magazine coined the term "long tail" to describe the existence of many millions of niche markets; and the the ability to use the Internet to find the few dozen customers for each of those niche markets. The term is popular within business plans and PowerPoints for Web 2.0 startups but most people around here are sick of hearing it, but don't want to antagonize the influential Mr Anderson.
The book of the article just came out and I spoke with Giovanni Rodriguez, of Eastwick Commnications, who bought a copy and is writing a review for Gelf magazine. His initial impression is very positive.
"I was glad to see that it is only about 200 pages, it has the feel of a slim volume. That's a relief because I didn't want to slog through 600 pages."
If the reviews continue to be this good, Mr Anderson will be on the best seller lists in no time.
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July 7, 2006 | Permalink | Comment | Category: FridayWatch | Subscribe to SVW
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