You’re not Apple. Stop trying to be. You haven’t earned 1/10th of the mind-share Apple has earned for creating their simple, easy to use products. So cut the ridiculous hype and earn it the hard way – by providing a simple user experience that still delivers the important features while leaving behind the 10% of features that are used less than 1% of the time.

Hyperbolic invites and talk about how you’re going to change the world when you’re just releasing a new revision of an existing product make you look stupid. If you aren’t even going to bother entering or creating a new product category, you should just frame it in more humble terms (our best X ever!). It looks like the lesson of the Segway has been forgotten or willfully ignored. Even the short-lived hype around the recent Bloom Energy generator should be instructive on how not to unveil products, or at least how to do it in a reasonable manner without promising to change the world and fall short.

Elon Musk (Tesla CEO) postulated a “weak Moore’s law” for Li-Ion batteries, that the price/performance ratio will increase by 8% per year, or 9 years to double. The price/performance ratio is the ratio between the price per kWh of the battery pack and the amount of energy the battery can store. If current batteries can store 140Wh/kg and cost $500/kWh, an 8% improvement means either the storage goes up to 150Wh/kg, the price goes down to $460/kWh, or somewhere in between (145Wh/kg and $480/kWh). A Tesla battery pack would go from $35,000 (53kWh at $650/kWh in 2009) to $24,000 ($400/kWh in 2014), a reduction of about 10% of the entire price of the car over approximately 5 years. Combined with other cost saving methods, the next stage of the Tesla evaluation - the Model S – starts to look feasible. Its still not going to be the most affordable car, however significant progress is being made.

The cost per battery pack can be broken into two parts – the batteries themselves and the pack. The pack costs can be trimmed considerably with mass-manufacturing. Instead of hand assembling each battery pack and set of battery modules (a series of cells), semi-automated assembly can increase the throughput of the teams assembling dramatically while keeping the same number of people around, reducing the amount of employee-hours spent per battery pack.

The cell costs don’t come down as easily. This is the decidedly slower part of the electrification of vehicles. Following the 8% rule, automotive battery packs due in 2009 cost approximately $650/kWh. In 2014 this cost is about $430, and by 2017, the cost is $330/kWh, and by 2020 $260/kWh. Following the more agressive price decreases noted above, prices in 2017 would be $235/kWh, and by 2020 $172/kWh.

So by 2020, a Volt-style battery would cost $4,200, or about the cost of a new engine (a rebuilt one can be had for less). This assumes that other battery performance parameters do not improve – rather the Volt still requires a 16kWh battery and only uses 8.8kWh of the battery pack. If the current estimates of what battery specifications will be by 2020 (2,500W/kg, 250Wh/kg, 2,000 cycles and 4,000 recharges at 70%DoD) the Volt would be able to have its pack size reduced to 12.5kWh (50kg, 110kW), thus reducing costs further to $3,250 for the battery pack, and the total price premium of the E-REV system would be approximately $5,500. Factoring that cost over 5 years is $1,100 per year in savings needed over gasoline, which is achievable when factoring in savings in electricity costs over gasoline (approximately 9c or 11c/mile savings depending on cost of electricity), reduced maintenance costs ($150/yr for oil changes, etc) and reduced variability of fuel costs – my electric company needs a regulatory body’s approval to change the price of energy, the local gas station chain can add 10 or 15c to the price of gas over a holiday weekend because they feel like sticking it to us.

By 2030, barring any new technology that would leapfrog Li-Ion on price and performance, battery prices would reach $110/kWh, and total costs would be equivalent to a Prius premium today.

Over the long term, E-REVs are workable from a consumer finance standpoint. Initially, subsidies, longer warranties and extended payback periods will be needed to entice the consumer to buy in to the electrification of vehicles. If we can manage to stick with it for the next 5-7 years, it will take off and the nation can start to wave good-bye to oil and petroleum for their in-city commutes, and we’ll all breathe easier with less smog.

The first thing to recognize is that TiVo fixed most of the major gripes with their existing units. Their biggest problem is the cable companies themselves vis-a-vis CableLabs, and while I’ll not address anything having to do with them for now (there is a long list of gripes), I had a long list of things TiVo needed to fix in a draft blog post ready to hit the “Publish” button had they messed up. Lucky for them I’m scrapping that post! (well, recycling it into this post, got to be green!)

Upgraded Hardware. While the device is still limited to two tuners (the Moxi supports three, new cable cards will support up to six), the upgraded Broadcom Chip on the inside is a dual core 400MHz MIPS processor and 512MB of RAM with clustered multi-threading (portions of the core like the execution unit are partitioned to support more than one thread per core). So once they manage to optimize their interface they should be able to take advantage of the hardware, even if the 400MHz speed look rather slow.

New HD Interface. The Series 3 TiVo uses the ancient SD interface, while the new Series 4 models use the new Adobe Flash-based UI. While the old interface is leaps and bounds above the standard cable set-top box (STB), other set top box makers (DirecTV, Dish, etc) are quickly catching up, and non-broadcast STBs like the Boxee Box already provide an experience that is better. TiVo should be the far and away leader given the head start they had, but they haven’t kept up. The new UI still needs some (a lot) of polish (“My Shows” should go back to “Now Playing” considering it can contain non-TV show content) but they seem to have got out of the rut they were in.

Better integration with internet content. Whether its the latest episode of The Big Bang Theory or a new Tekzilla I want them all in one list, organized by show name. I want one screen that shows me all the content I can watch now, whether its recorded TV shows, internet TV shows, plus TV shows, movies, pictures and music from my home network. Everything in one place. While I wont be able to get the stuff from my home network, I’m hoping the UI addresses the centralization issue.

Apps. The new TiVo is supposed to have an API available for developers. Combined with the Bluetooth Remote/Keyboard I can see cool Facebook or Twitter notifications. We’ll see if TiVo opens it up to all comers. If so, they are definitely going to need some sort of App Store. It would be really neat though, to replicate some of the iPhone App Store successes on the TiVo.

What did the get wrong?

No DLNA. I wont mince words, this is a huge mistake. TiVo’s proprietary protocols for sharing recorded content needed to be dropped a long time ago in place of the DLNA standard. Part of this might be restrictions imposed on them in terms of getting video out, but at the very least, I should be allowed to stream audio and video into the TiVo from my Windows Home Server easily, and it would be nice if they supported video formats like MKV (MP4+AC3 or DTS) since its really only a container around codecs supported by the Broadcom decoder chip.

No Built-in Bluetooth. While I can understand selling the awesome slider remote for $80, not including the $10 Bluetooth chip inside the unit seems incredibly weak. If I already have a BT keyboard I could do without one in my remote (especially for $80). Allowing BT keyboards in the first place was a great idea, but allow people who already have the hardware to use it! Also, BT would be useful for talking to a TiVo iPhone/Android application to use my phone as an advanced remote control, again, meaning that I don’t need the remote and BT dongle, rather just the BT capability.

While I still think TiVo needs to strengthen their engineering department to make their product better (DLNA, TTG Mac client, etc), the Series 4 is a step in the right direction. Hopefully they can manage to produce a new box more often than every 3 years to keep up with the rate of change in consumer electronics and can manage to squeeze more out of the Series 4 hardware they’re going to start shipping soon.

Finally, one parting thought on comparing a Tivo to an iPhone.

I think its odd that I have no problem dropping $300 every year on an new iPhone plus $30 a month for data and yet still complaining about AT&T’s poor service. But everyone is griping about the TiVo’s price ($300) and monthly costs ($13 or $400 lifetime) and yet they still love their TiVo. It is incredible to me actually. Why does everyone have such a hard time justifying to themselves a $300 TiVo once every three years and the $12.95/mo. I might get more out of an iPhone, but I would presume more people spend more time in front of the TV than a phone (except for teenagers perhaps). The only possible reason I can think of is because the only people I hate more than my cell phone provider is the cable company for its annual price increases. That and it would cost me an extra $10/mo just to them to add a Series 4 TiVo to my house – $2/mo cable card fee PLUS $8/mo for “additional digital service outlet” which is a, pardon my language, bullshit charge hoisted on us by the cable companies and the hardware vendors.

Essentially, the internet goes from something you sit down at a computer to use to something that connects everything in our daily life together.

1. Its not renewable energy. While it is possible to run the generator using biogas which would make it carbon neutral, there isn’t nearly enough biogas to provide the approximately 2,500 TWh per year of baseload (24/7) energy needs in the United States. So it will run off of natural gas (methane), which will produce CO2.

2. It can provide heat in addition to energy. The reaction that produces electricity also produces some heat (exothermic). The reaction also needs heat (1000 degrees C), but some heat can be bled off for combined heat and power (CHP) situations, supplementing traditional heating systems or pre-warming water before going into a hot water heater. How much heat is unknown, other than it does support CHP.

3. It emits slightly less CO2 compared to a modern natural gas power plant. A modern natural gas power plant will release approximately 822 lbs. of CO2 per MWh of generation (pg. 8). The Bloom box emits 773 lbs. Factoring in 10% (average) transmission losses between a typical power plant and your home, thats 904 lbs. The Bloom energy server reduces CO2 emissions by 14.5%. Its better, but its no miracle. And this doesn’t include any carbon output from issues related to distributing the natural gas city-wide, distributed repair work, or materials required for the Bloom Energy Server vs. one large natural gas pipeline and a large natural gas turbine power plant. To its credit, it is certainly cleaner than coal which releases about 2,800 lbs of CO2 per MWh on average in the US. If coal power is what it replaces, thats great.

4. You’ll still need the grid. Because it appears that Bloom is going towards baseload power (the turf of coal and nuclear), you’ll still need the grid to supply power when your electricity needs spike, like with air conditioning units or any electric appliances (range, stove, clothes dryer). This has implications however, as noted below in number 6. This need will likely be met by conventional natural gas turbine power plants or solar in appropriate climates.

5. The future price of $3,000 for a home unit is still comparatively expensive. While Bloom is correct in that you could recoup the costs within 3-5 years at that price point and current energy costs, things are not going to stay that way. Plus, automotive companies are working to create powerful fuel cells for vehicles. A fuel cell for a passenger vehicle from GM or Toyota (the two leading fuel cell contenders at the moment) would need to produce as much as Bloom’s current large unit but come at a cost between $5,000 and $7,000 to be economical to sell to the public; never mind the fact that Bloom’s unit is a large as the car itself, while the automotive solutions would be small enough to volumetrically replace a traditional gasoline engine. Even incorporating the steam reformation technology, and the technology to convert the DC energy to AC energy, the automakers are going to have a cheaper per kW solution than Bloom is discussing – currently $7,500/kW based on estimates and the $3,000/kW future target, by comparison natural gas turbine is $700-1000/kW capital cost (pg 17). Automakers are working on reducing precious metals required for their fuel cells, down to about twice the platinum required for a catalytic converter (10g Pt). Their plans are to introduce fuel cell vehicles in 2015, with broad (read: affordable) consumer options by 2025. Bloom’s only hope in this aspect is that their fuel cell lasts much longer than the fuel cells for automotive applications.

6. Your regular power bill will not go down as much as you think. Power companies have large fixed cost bases (transmission, distribution, power plants) and if the utilization of those items drops significantly, they will have to raise prices to cover the fixed cost base. They will essentially be spreading the same fixed costs over a smaller amount of kWh being generated and transmitted. Guess how your power company bills you? Per unit of energy you consume, so you would see cost per unit of energy go up. Alternately or in addition to that, they may raise their monthly service fee to remain connected to the grid.

7. When it breaks, you’re responsible to get it fixed! Suffice to say, there are some benefits to relying on the power company – when their power plants break they fix them. When yours breaks you have to fix it. You’ll still be able to rely on the grid but, as mentioned above, its likely you’ll want to get it fixed as soon as possible. Bloom has a 10 year warranty on their first units, but its currently unknown if it will reach its payback period within that 10 year period.

8. Increased natural gas prices could negate some of the savings. For those who rely on natural gas for heating and cooking, they could see their prices go up as demand increases. While the United States has ample natural gas reserves, that doesn’t mean they are easy to get to and cheap to access. Gas companies will be required to expend money to develop new resources, and they will be sure to pass the costs on to you. During the last boom cycle, natural gas prices went for as high as $9/MMBTU which would translate to 6c/kWh for fuel only (not including capital or maintenance costs).

9. A smart grid will be needed to regulate your personal Bloom Energy Server(s). The smart grid, which is slowly developing around the world, will be needed to regulate the output of the personal Bloom Energy Servers. If not, they will at the very least need to be able to sense the load of your house and not put energy back onto the grid. Some electrical equipment in the grid (at the substation level) cant handle energy flowing backwards, if all the Bloom boxes put energy back onto the grid at night, it could harm the distribution infrastructure, to say nothing of individuals who erroneously think it would be a good idea to have multiple Bloom Servers so their peak use would be covered but provide a large surplus back to the grid.

10. They don’t have the right business model. This probably isn’t that big of an issue now, but as Bloom grows, they aren’t going to be able to monitor the power generation boxes in every home and business in America. This is a job for the utilities. Bloom will need to adjust its business model to join with utilities or third parties so they can monitor the devices and provide services like maintenance and repair, as well as utilities controlling how the boxes get installed and attached to their grid.

So thats it. I hope a healthy bit of skepticism douses the hype this new breakthrough got. It looks to be an important step in the right direction. There are certainly niche cases where something like this would be incredibly valuable. But as far as having one in every home in the country generating the baseload energy, that seems a bit far fetched, at least in the next 10-15 years and costs retreat dramatically.

The ultra-capacitor is designed to store small amounts of energy (small compared to regular batteries) but are able to receive and put out large quantities of energy quickly. The ultra-capacitor unveiled here can store 14Wh of energy, about three times your iPhone battery. You can see that one or two of these alone wont be able to push a 2,000 lb car very far. So you would put many of these together to form an energy capture device. When you brake, the ultra-capacitor is charged, and when you start again, the stored electrical energy is used to propel the vehicle.

With many of these, you would build a small battery, about 1000 Wh or more depending on vehicle size, and then charge and discharge them. These particular ultra-capacitors could deliver 50kW of energy, which would be enough to propel a small sedan up to 40MPH. They wouldn’t be able to provide for all-electric driving, since a usable 500Wh of energy could only provide about 2 miles of range, but it would create a new range of super-hybrids that could very efficiently provide for acceleration on residential and side streets.

They are designed to put up with the stop-and-go driving, since the initial demonstration units lasted for 2,000 cycles before losing 20% of their capacity. It is likely that this will be worked on and improved up to 10,000 cycles to be suitable for hybrid vehicles.

Mitsubishi has not announced a production time table.

Via Green Car Congress

I spend most of my Thursday at work trying to figure out why the worker threads weren’t, well, working. It turns out that they’re incredibly hard to debug. Impossible actually, because they’re isolated from the browser process completely, there is no way to log events to the console, alert() or anything other than perhaps the DB connection. But if the DB doesn’t show the entries it was supposed to make, well, you’re out of luck.

I had managed to proceed a little further in my debugging using Firefox and Firebug (since it will show console log entries from the Google Gears plug-in but not from the JS), however as soon as I got a useful point, Firefox crashed. Repeatedly. At the same point. So that was of no use anymore.

The only way it seems is to build it all in a single thread, debug it, verify it, and then separate it out into a worker thread and hope that the worker thread executes properly. This is no way to develop HTML5 apps.

First is a an iPhone “Service” application. Yes, this is a new class of application that would run in the background, but it isn’t what most people will want in terms of “background apps”. The software will have no configuration, no way to interface with the user whatsoever. The goal is to facilitate iPhone interoperability with outside systems. Namely, an in-car productiivty solution like Ford Sync. The goal is to allow me to talk to the Ford Sync system (which now has something of an open API), and allowing it to interoperate seamlessly with the iPhone. When I ask my car to go through my unread mail, it would read me the sender and subject line, whether or not I was a TO or CC, and if I want it to read me the contents of the email I’ll say “read it to me”. The iPhone would allow access to that email, it would communicate using either the dock connector or bluetooth, and copy the email to the Ford Sync system to read it to me. I could send a short voice-transcribed reply of the email (you wouldn’t want to do a long-form email because of the quality of the microphones in the vehicle or the lack of good dictation engines that run on the Sync or iPhone systems).

Next is a Voice Synthesis API. The iPhone already has a limited voice synthesis engine – exposed through VoiceOver. Being able to talk to the user would be especially useful for me – I’ve got a number of app ideas that would make great use of this API and provide a great user experience.

Social Network Integration fills in what a lot of other OSes have that the iPhone is lacking. The new Windows Phone 7 OS today showed that using the “Photos” app, they could pull down photos from their friend’s or their own Facebook pages. Allowing apps to access Calendar, Photos and other built-in libraries on the phone to add and updates photos would help social apps feel more integrated with the operating system.

A Response Interface would be a great tool. This improvement would be two parts – first to get rid of the modal (everything else stops) dialog boxes and allowing the notifications to not be obtrusive; then allow the user to reply without exiting their current application. Just an overlay on top of the existing app. I would assume it cant take much memory or resources just to throw up a generic text capture application and then route it as a reply to the app handling the incoming message and let it send it out.

Here are some other quick ideas:

• Usage patterns that allow the user to put the most commonly used apps on the first or second page automatically.
• Access to files, shared over USB when plugged into a computer (this is rumored for the iPad)
• Hardware-based video encoding API, allowing apps to set things like resolution and bitrate up to some specific maximum. This allows for streaming apps like UStream to consume less power.

Hopefully we’ll see some of these with the 4.0 operating system.

The first thing to note is that it only can map your tweets. You can’t map your friends tweets or random tweets. I’ve set this limit because I don’t want this becoming a stalking tool.

That said, its a easy way to see where you tweeted something based on the latitude and longitude from the GPS unit in your phone or tweeting device. If you have geotagging enabled the geospatial information encoded with the tweet will stay in the Twitter service. Geotagging is off by default, and you have to enable it in your twitter settings as well as the app you use to tweet.

So that said, give it a try!

First, a brief overview of the new Lenovo workstations - they are single processor Intel Core i5 CPUs, using the Intel 3400-series Platform Controller Hub (PCH). The configuration allows for the use of ECC DDR3 RAM, which is an important consideration for a workstation. The configuration and capabilities are otherwise similar to what is in the new 27″ iMacs. The price for a modestly equipped Lenovo Workstation is about $1000 (Core i5 3.33GHz dual core, 2GB of RAM, 250GB HDD).

I would expect Apple to limit such a configuration to a dual core system – or at the very least charge a significant enough premium on the quad core. This would be to prevent it from taking away too much business from the MacPro line (which is currently 4-8 cores, soon to be up to 12). Likewise, it would need to offer more compelling features than a Mac Mini – the ability to handle powerful graphics cards (ATI Radeon 5850 or Nvidia GTX280), more RAM (4 slots instead of 2), and more than one optical drive. The computer case would likely be smaller than a Mac Pro (2 HDDs an 2 optical drives, or 3 HDDs and one optical drive).

The toughest question is will Apple do it? Surely, Apple has the telemetry information to know how many hackintoshes are out there, and that there is some demand to have such a configuration. But Apple seems less and less focused on computers and more focused on iDevices (iPhone, iPad) as the future of computing, would they ever consider making a new Mac model, especially one that wasn’t a laptop?

As much as the hacker/modder/gamer community might like the idea, it seems unlikely that Apple would create a new Mac desktop model. There is the possibility now, given Intel’s new product line up and the ability to plug the cheaper Core i5 chips into a Workstation platform with all the things workstation users expect, but it doesn’t seem likely. So for now we’ll continue to plug ahead with hackintoshes for the best desktop experience.