Renault-Nissan and Israel go ahead with Project Better Place electric car program

Project Better Place is finding its first application in Israel. Earlier this week, its CEO Shai Agassi, Israel’s Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Renault-Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn took part in a press conference to announce the collaboration. Project Better Place has raised $2.3 billion from private investors -mainly in Israel- and will invest initially $200 million and a total of $1 billion by the project’s completion. The project will consist of the following:

• Electric cars from Renault-Nissan that is extremely keen to get in the alternative automotive field. Range will be 100 km in cities and 160 km on intercity roads. Availability will start in 2011.
• A network of 500,000 charging points where drivers will be able to swap their depleted lithium-ion batteries for fresh ones.

Most drivers in Israel only cover short daily distances and will be able to recharge their car batteries themselves if they so wish. Israel will be a good testing ground for the new technologies since the distances covered are nowhere near what European or American drivers cover on a daily basis. Naturally, nobody would underestimate the politics taking place in such a huge project.

Thank you WordPress!

From today I see that WordPress gives me a whole 3 GB available for my blog -instead of the previous 50 MB.

Thank you WordPress! I am so glad I chose you for Electronrun!

Is Lumenlab’s Q all-in-one proposition worth $10,000?

Are you worried how to get your PC multimedia content to your TV? Worry no more because Lumenlab has taken a drastic measure to satisfy you, it is actually bringing to the market a device that is HDTV and PC at the same time! Everything comes integrated in a slick 3.5 inch thick aluminium box. The 42 inch display is 1080p while the integrated PC consists of:

• Asus P5E3 Deluxe WiFi-AP motherboard.
• Overclocked Intel Qx9650 processor to 3.3 GHz.
• Overclocked Nvidia 8800 768 MB DDR3 RAM graphics card.

Blu-Ray camp celebrates win with 2.0 spec, early adopters in trouble

At CES 2008 there was no official press conference to declare that the HD war is over and Toshiba stated that it will battle on. However, nobody is fooled and the release of Blu-Ray’s spec 2.0 is an indirect confirmation that Sony et al actually now control the game. While spec 1.1 required a double decoder for PIP and 256 MB of storage, spec 2.0 goes a large step further as it requires an Internet connection and 1 GB of local storage for updates and content. Those features more or less complete the previously unfinished Blu-Ray specifications, and imply the following facts:

• Although HD-DVD had from the start a complete spec to match Blu-Ray’s spec 2.0 it did not manage to promote its advantage and future proof nature to the customer.

EA tries the free game model with its new Battlefield game

Further to our post yesterday on PC game piracy and the tendency towards online downloads and online gaming, EA’s confirmation of the changes to come arrives in the form of its new Battlefield iteration. Unlike the traditional model, the idea here is to give gamers the software online for free but get revenue as they pay for cool equipment and clothes as they progress in the game.

Since John Riccitiello became CEO of EA, the company is eyeing innovative distribution models with renewed interest. The first effort took place in 2006 in South Korea with a free version of FIFA soccer. Whereas Europe and North America largely stick to disc based gaming, Southeast Asian markets are leaders in online distribution.

The PC gaming platform still plagued by piracy

Since the inception of computer gaming, piracy has been a great headache. Access to the web and the downloading of pirate copies has exacerbated the problem beyond all proportions. As most titles are released in autumn for the Christmas party buildup, January is a good time to look back and judge the sales results. There are voices of concern about the future of PC gaming, despite recent efforts to promote the PC as a great gaming platform. The word “great” of course is for gamers that use pirated titles in large numbers and not for the developers and distributors that see a huge piece of revenue from their work not coming in at all…

Cable cars are new option for city transport

Cars increase, buildings saturate centers and some times city geography is a problem for the creation of efficient city transportation systems. What do you do? The city of Haifa in Israel is going ahead with a novel cable car system that is ideal to bypass hills and densely built areas. Finally, this skiing hobby is paying off!

Anyone that has gone for skiing holidays must have come across the latest multi-cabin cable car systems or multi-seat chair-lifts. They are blazingly fast and fun to use. Each compartment takes from four people and up, while getting in and out is nice and simple with slow speed cable lines at both end stations.

eSATA trying to catch up with USB and Firewire

eSATA is offering the convenience of internal SATA speeds with a connector that lets external drives be connected to a PC. The aim is to provide the convenience of USB or Firewire. The later have been around for some time now, have a huge user pool and present a formidable obstacle to wide eSATA adoption. In an effort to attract more customer attention, the Serial-ATA International Organisation (SATA-IO) will bring in the second half of 2008 a new version called Power Over eSATA. It will offer enhanced convenience as no power connection will be required for external drives of up to 2.5 inches.

So far, very few PC users are even aware of the presence of eSATA, while the number of motherboards and PCs supporting it is limited.

Drobo Share offers what users were crying for

With the Drobo storage device Data Robotics dared create the storage device everybody was dreaming of. A box that can take up to four SATA disc drives of differing sizes that can safely store our files. This array overcomes the limitation of using identical discs for a regular NAS or a simple mirror array. At $500 it doesn’t come cheap, but people loved the simplicity of dropping in any SATA drive and utilising the full capacity for safe back-ups. The problem was that the Drobo is not a NAS and relies on a USB connection, and this was the reason users -including myself- were hoping for an Ethernet equipped version.

Data Robotics comes to the rescue with the Drobo Share.

Japan plans Super Hi-Vision, why it is an insane project

I was shocked to read in Engadget that the Japanese government is planning a joint project with private companies to develop and eventually get to market a new broadcast standard called Super Hi-Vision. It is a super high definition protocol that makes even 1080p HD and 4K -the standard that Hollywood and cinemas are still struggling to introduce- pale by comparison. It will have a resolution of 7,680 x 4,320 pixels -if you do the maths it is a humongous 33 megapixels- provide support for 22.2 channel sound and will require an uncompressed stream of 24 Gbps. The aim is to introduce the new broadcast standard by 2015.