Vectrix has introduced two new electric scooters at the New York Motorcycle Show, according to AutoblogGreen. The lower-cost $8,495 VX-1E features a new lead-acid battery pack that allows the company to sell the thing for $1,500 less than its existing VX-1, but at the somewhat major cost of reducing acceleration, top speed, regenerative braking, and range. Given that electric vehicles are already a compromise even with today’s latest lithium ion technology, the VX-1E doesn’t sound like the greatest idea—even if it’s less expensive.
The other new model is the VX-2, a smaller and less ambitious electric scooter sourced from China. It also uses lead acid batteries and is good for a top speed of 30 mph and a range of 45 to 50 miles. Next up for Vectrix according to the report: a three-wheeler using technology developed by Piaggio.
We already covered the numbers from Netflix’s impressive earnings call this past Monday, but there was another story lurking in there too; a potential sign of the coming apocalypse for physical media. The company is reporting that many of its customers are replacing mailed movies with streamed ones, taxing the USPS less and their broadband connections more. CEO Reed Hastings is playing coy about whether this is a strong trend or just the curious behavior of early adopters, and since his company gets paid either way he probably doesn’t care, but you can be sure those still firmly attached to profits from plastic discs are going to be watching this pattern rather closely. (As if Sony needed any more bad news.)
Verizon Communications posted a 15 percent increase in fourth-quarter profit, mainly on the strength of its growing wireless business, according to MediaPost. The report said that the carrier saw 44 percent growth in data services—including text messaging, email and Internet access—compared with the same period last year, an indication of their increasing popularity.
In addition, Verizon picked up another 1.2 million customers, bringing its total in the U.S. to 72 million; that number doesn’t count the subscribers gained in the Alltel acquisition.
Following RIM co-CEO Jim Balsillie’s rather obnoxious comment the other day about how buggy smartphones should be accepted as a “new reality,” Verizon President and Chief Operating Officer Denny Strigl said in the article that the controversial BlackBerry Storm smartphone has now sold over 1 million units. Strigl added that the carrier could have sold another 200,000 if it wasn’t for limited inventory.
We heard some impressive claims about LG’s Renoir earlier this month at CES courtesy of a rather desperate spokesman, but nothing compares to the torture test the phone recently underwent and, unlike Nokia’s 5800, survived. The handset was left in the freezer at -20C (-4F) for 12 hours, dropped to the floor, stepped on, thrown in a clothes drier for 15 minutes, caked in dust, dunked in wine, and run over by a Ford Focus. After all that it functioned just fine, suffering only a few scratches on the screen inflicted by the pavement — a small price to pay if you’re clumsy enough to drive over your own phone. Curiously soothing videos of the abuse after the break.
Coming on like a piece of spam, an email invite from Acer just dropped into my inbox:
Good day,
Are you ready to join Acer’s launch into the world of mobile communications?
The event? A February 9th launch at Barcelona’s crazy Gaudí-designed Casa Batllò, featuring Acer head honcho Gianfranco Lanci. The product? A smartphone launch.
This invitation is certainly a teaser — there appear to be no leaks so far to give us any clues as to just what Acer has planned. Digging a little into last year’s news, though, turns up Acer’s purchase of E-Ten, makers of Glofish phones, including the old (2006) QWERTY slider M-700. That phone ran Windows mobile 5, and a newer Windows Mobile handset is certainly possible. But given that Acer has dallied with Linpus, the (almost) instant-on Linux, in its Aspire one, we’d hope for some Linux action in the smartphone, too. Android? Pretty please.
The best part? "Buffet Dinner and Open Bar". I’m already signed up.
This clunky little workaround will let you shoot video with the Nikon D700. In fact, it will work for any camera which can pump a live video stream into a computer. It has nothing to do with the rather nice, and rather higher definition hack we covered earlier today, but it will let you at least play with the great lenses and shallow depth of field afforded by DSLR videography.
This hack uses three ingredients. First, a camera with a live view function, which lets you see a real-time stream on the camera’s screen. Every single compact camera does this, and more and more DSLRs provide the feature. Second, a way to get the feed from the camera to the computer. I used a trial version of Nikon’s Camera Control 2, a truly awful piece of non-intuitive software that just manages to get the job done. Third is a way to capture the video displayed on the screen. For this I used iShowU HD Pro, a screencasting application for the Mac.
First, connect the camera via USB cable and fire up Nikon Capture (or software of choice). At bottom right you see the button marked "Lv", or Live View. Click this and the camera will start sending a low quality video feed to the computer (you can click to make the picture bigger):
Next, fire up your video capture application, in this case iShowU. If you can, set it to capture only the part of the screen you actually want, otherwise you’ll have to take the video file into an editor to crop it later:
Once done, hit return and start the recording. Anything you now do with the camera is being recorded. Here’s the result. It’s pretty poor, and because I’m using the trial version there’s an overlay watermark from iShowU. But you get the idea.
The quality is severely limited by the refresh rate of the incoming video feed, although the D700 has an HDMI out port, so this could be used to get a much better stream. What is interesting is that you can see just how useless live view is even for still capture — the focusing takes forever in any mode.
As an exercise, this is fun, but ultimately the quality is too poor for anything — on a Mac it would be better to just use the iSight camera to shoot. Still, if you have the camera, the trial software is free so go and try it out.
We know what you’re thinking — “great, another SSD.” Right though you may be, OCZ’s Apex line is rather unique. It manages to combine the low cost of MLC technology with the high performance more commonly associated with SLC designs by instituting a dual-controller RAID-0 configuration. The 250GB version that was tested by PC Perspective managed to hold its own, and while it still didn’t wow critics the way Intel’s X25-M did, it seemed to notch a very solid second place. In fact, they couldn’t help but recommend it (and the much, much cheaper 120GB sibling) for those scouting a speedy upgrade without completely decimating the bank account. We couldn’t possibly run down the results from the litany of benchmarks this thing endured, so we’ll just point you to the read link and suggest you slice out a solid half hour to really look this over.
Bandai, typically a toy and game company, is using technology to appeal to the adult market’s more sophisticated senses. The new Digital Living Gallery forgoes the standard sleek and shiny for a traditional wood frame appropriate for paintings. What’s interesting is that Bandai is also selling content for the frame.
Starting with two artists, Renoir and van Gogh, each SD-card loaded collection comes with high quality digital renderings that can look permanent on the wall despite being easily changeable. Plus, the features go well beyond that of the originals.
TREND POTENTIAL Digital content is manifesting itself in ways beyond audio and video. We cover this example, plus scores of related trends, in our Trendpool database designed to help businesses innovate in new ways. Get the rest of the story HERE.
According to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, since January 2005 there have been more than 252 millions records containing sensitive personal information compromised because of security breaches in the U.S.
Most of these breaches were because of the loss of computer equipment, more specifically the hard drive. When a laptop …
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Verizon Communications posted a 15 percent increase in fourth-quarter profit, mainly on the strength of its growing wireless business, according to 
