The mark of Marchionne and Fiat's journey into the black | Automotive News Blog - Wide Open Throttle

Interesting article on FIAT's turnaround.... in a nutshell it gained $US2B via GM's pullout, then set about refreshing its product line on fewer platforms. That's simplification and focus in action, folks.

"The Fiat Group has achieved something that many automakers are striving for in such a harsh economic time throughout the world: it has made a profit."

The mark of Marchionne and Fiat's journey into the black | Automotive News Blog - Wide Open Throttle

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Fuel efficiency 'no better than 1960s'

Well yes and no. Car engines are more efficient, but people keep buying the wrong cars! Let me put it few other ways. Rather than buy smaller, lighter cars, wealthier car-buyers these days tend to buy bigger, heavier cars. So any gain in engine efficiency is lost in weight gained. They (the modern affluent consumers) also tend to buy 4WDs when they don't 'need' them, adding further weight and complexity plus transmission losses. When they want a 'faster' or more powerful car they tend to go up in cylinder numbers or sheer capacity, neither or which improves fuel efficiency. Sigh. So the numbers get all skewed.

Which renders this article 'predictable' but - alas - it needs to be said nonetheless: While engine efficiency has increased since 1963, car size and extra features - air-conditioning, power steering and windows, safety and entertainment systems - mean petrol consumption per 100 kilometres has not budged. Freeways had also reduced fuel efficiency, Dr Mees said. "If you drive at 110kmh you use more fuel than if you drive at 70kmh."

Nice sites to visit

If you are way out freaky weird like me you'll enjoy...

• Killerstartups.com, yet another way to keep track of new stuff you don't necessarily need but may take off and become huge - and we don't wanna mess up our early-adopter status, do we?
• Vimas Web Audio Chat and Comment system... add not just sound to your site, but your users' sounds (sounds dangerous!!). Sadly there's a small charge for the service... (aka MobaTalk or MyChingo, I think)
  
• But the WordPress-only Riffly Audio and Video plugin does something similar (but not as neatly) for free!
• Alternatively checkout Jaduka, who offer a range of audio products that appear somewhat way-cool... including dukaBuzz that appears to do what the Vimas product does...
• And for something completely different, there's KickApps, providing a range of online community templates, widgets and what have you ( a bit like ning.com but different)

More later!

Another bio-fuel possible-maybe

Big ambitions, but there's a lot at stake. This article in Forbes mag caught my eye: Amyris’ technology harnesses a modified yeast that essentially "eats" the crushed sugarcane and spits out a hydrocarbon-like renewable fuel. The technology came from research at the lab of Jay Keasling, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Now if it's a goer and can scale up then it solves a few problems. If, I said, if.

Let me list a few of these problems and the claimed advantages of this solution:

• Biofuels generally take land away from food-generation and give it over to fuel production, although it may be that this idea has less of a footprint in that regard
• Biofuels also need energy to be expended in manufacture and distribution, but whereas some biofuels are incompatible with existing petroleum fuels and their infrastructure, this one can use the same pipes end-to-end without raising concerns about solvency, impurities and corrosion. Although it seems unlikely that major oil pipelines serendipitously pass by sugar refineries, at least we can envisage building some short spur lines to wherever we do the bio-processing, and we can assume cheap water transport is nearby to sugar refineries as well
  
• Given that ethanol requires more extensive trucking, this idea could sink the aggressively expanding ethanol industry pretty quickly (probably a good thing, but not everyone would agree!)
  
• But it still robs us of a food source and valuable agricultural land, although in this case it's sugar cane rather than corn (somewhat preferable I guess as rich western nations need to reduce their sugar intake anyway!)
• And it still needs energy in manufacture, although there may be less of it required (don't know the actuals here, do we? What energy is expended in growing the microbes, or in encouraging them to feast on the cane?)
• And as a bonus the biotech involved can be used elsewhere: Keasling and his former post-doctoral students started Amyris to develop a synthetic anti-malarial drug. But the process of modifying either yeast or bacteria to churn out specific byproducts is general enough that they could make products as varied as drugs or fuels.
  
• So in a nutshell this particular idea potentially uses much more of the existing oil distribution infrastucture, saving the expense and carbon-cost of building new pipelines or trucks to get the product to market, resolving a big minus of the ethanol alternative.

The big bet here is that oil will run out sooner rather than later and that prices will stay high. It's possible however that there's more cheap oil yet to be found, or that the big exporters have kept a supply "for their children". So they could kill off this competition by short-term overproduction (driving down prices), although that's a dangerous play. Also, alternatives like ethanol, solar, wind, geothermal and tidal generation - perhaps even nuclear power - may ramp up quicker than expected and drive down costs again, but that seems unlikely for now. But in 20 years, who knows?

Assuming just such a 20 year window, these biofuel ideas, including ethanol to some extent, may embed themselves and come to wield considerable power, both as a method of stretching out current oil supplies and as a means to keep prices down, forcing the alternatives to remain a mere slice of the overall market. Unless they get a leg up by legislation or subsidy, of course.

Splunk: A play on words and a minor correction

Forbes mag says that Splunk.com's moniker is a play on "spelunking," a term coined by IT specialists to describe sifting through mountains of machine data. Or so they say. In fact it's a word that means "caving", as in cave exploring. So to say it's a coinage is wrong or a stretch at best but it is an interesting new use for an existing form.

That trifle aside, it's an interesting company that uses indexing to assist trawling through log files for data mining purposes. They offer a free download which I haven't tried as yet but will. It's meant for IT shops and the like but anything that indexes alerts and log files can't help but assist in managing anything ummm, voluminous and ineffable. Like IT generally.

Well this is no surprise really - peak oil by design

Peak oil? Well the oil-rich Middle-East woke up in 1973 and discovered the power of restricted supply, and once they opened that particular magic lamp they have used it ever since. It's fairly clear - and eminently logical - that if there is a limited resource and wild demand that the suppliers are in the box seat. In the case of oil we have seen a deliberate slow down in production, a restriction in supply, that has forced the price up. Indeed we now see that some oil fields have been left untapped, for future use. Which is sensible, of course, but does impose another restrictor on peak production.

Now this creates a more controlled stream of wealth for the oil exporters, which is what they need. They don't want to give the stuff away, or pump it out too quickly and create a glut. So they restrict supply. Now back in 1973 this was a sharp shock for the oil-desperate, now it's more like a blunt weapon. The answer for the consumers is to look at alternatives, but they all carry costs. Ethanol creation relies on a wasteful method of production and robs us of food. Solar is largely inefficient, useless at night, dependent on weather and locale and consumes enormous areas of land. Wind farms suffer similar constraints. Geo thermal and tidal generation requires specific locations, usually far distant from the consumers. And nuclear is just plain scary to most people. Hydrogen? Yes, well, we all want to see it happen but the problems of storage and distribution are horrendous.

Now we can fix these problems, but we haven't had the will to do so. And the suppliers have let us have enough of that powerfully addictive black gold to keep the price too low to encourage the development of alternatives. I think "sucked in" in one way of putting it. (And I don't blame the oil exporters at all - it's plain enough we'd all do the same.)

Have a read of this:“King Abdullah's remarks reflect the new thinking in the Middle East, where the Kuwaiti parliament has also expressed a need to stabilize oil exports. Higher oil prices enable producers to focus more on domestic investments than on increasing exports. All Gulf countries have seen huge growth in domestic demand for power and fuel. By 2015, Iran may consume as much of its crude oil as they export. The King’s remarks mean that we in the industrialized countries better start looking for other solutions.”

Now get back in your gas-guzzling cars and rage against the cost of gas at the pump. As I said, sucked in.

Another cool tool: Yahoo Pipes

Mash it up! If you are into Web 2.0 and going crazy with mashups of Google Maps with whatever else you want, check out this InfoWorld article on the Yahoo Pipes service. Then checkout Pipes itself, and maybe join video service Jumpcut while you are at it.

Pipes allows you to mash together numerous types of data and feed it out a pipe, such as via RSS. You then pick it up in an RSS reader or pour it onto a page. It's a cool example of a web service in action.

Good golly - someone else sees doom for fat Aussie cars

It's not just me after all. The Truth About Cars has written just about the same words as mine, just better: The ultimate moral to the troubled narrative of Australian car production: if you aren't competitive, you will die. In the absence of real leadership from either the industry (choosing to adapt) or the government (forcing their hand by killing off tariffs), Australia's car industry will continue to wither on the vine. Half measures and failures of nerve do not deter the wheels of change. It's a fact that America's troubled industry players would do well to note.

Of course Steve Bracks is going to want to keep the jobs and investment dollars in his state, at any cost (especially if the cost is borne by Canberra). He's not going to let go of what his state has got, even when it's plain that we are just fooling ourselves about our so-called competitive niche as a maker of large cars.

Interesting interview with Vinod Dham

As in Vinod Dham, of AMD and Intel microprocessor fame. Now you could quibble with the history but there are some interesting insights, like Intel's fear of RISC succeeding over CISC microprocessor architecture. If you are looking for another IT-industry case study to go along with the rise and fall and rise again of IBM, or Microsoft, or Google, here's another:The RISC computing really took off in a big way with the advent of MIPS, which was the other company that came on the scene. MIPS stood for Millions of Instructions Per Second, and that was the name of the company itself -- it's still around. They said that they could build a RISC-based processor that would be much more cost effective and much higher performance than Intel's technology could build.

Blogging tool - clip2net

Well it's just a cool tool, isn't it? clip2net will upload a screen shot and give you a URL, just like that. Saves a bit of work if you are blogging on the go...

Cool tool: fix your videos online

If you have a dark and grainy video that you want cleaned, take it to the online cleaners at FixMyMovie!

Or try fotoflexer for online editing of still images...

EMotive Consumer-based EEG System Uses Brain Activity

It's almost worthy of April 1, except it's probably for real. Your own personal EEG gear, a new way to interface with your game console or 3D world...

Flash-based Flypaper really sticks

OK, this is hot. It's a flash-based presentation tool, it's a community and it's free. What you do is share flash designs online, to create - online, did I say online - pretty well anything from ideas, stories to resumes; and then publish the output on the web. It's called Flypaper. I'm stuck.

Phrasr... set your words to images

Not sure this works perfectly for me, yet, but as the images become more diverse yet aligned with the nuances of language, this will be huge... could this idea of word to image translation become a key tool of communication? Or a new way to create art? I reckon it's a lot of fun, anyway! It's called Phrasr.