NY Times : Cruise Control So Last Century

Danny Hakim of The New York Times writes about the new safety technologies making their way into today’s cars. Americans in general still want to control their cars, and are wary of even a train that drives itself. Japan gets to tryout this technology first while the marketers figure out how to sell the idea to Americans. The Prius in Japan can park itself. An Infiniti can keep itself in the center of the lane. I would like to see car manufacturers abandon what they think we want and instead give us great products. Who would have thought the Prius would have a nine month waiting list?

News.com interviews MSN head Yusuf Mehdi

Stefanie Olsen of News.com interviewed Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President, MSN Information Services & Merchant Platform.

We think the sun has not set on even the first day of the search opportunity. In all our research, one out of every two people searching for something do not even get an answer.

MSN Messenger is just effectively a couple of simple tweaks away from becoming a social network, because you have all your buddies and your buddies know who their buddies are. This is the ability to actually connect the two, and it’s very, very close.

Google Copernicus Center is hiring

Obviously an April Fool’s joke, but Google is hiring for their new lunar center. Lengthy for a prank. “The Googlunaplex will house 35 engineers, 27,000 low cost web servers, 2 massage therapists and a sushi chef formerly employed by the pop group Hanson.” “What happens to PageRank in the proximity of a black hole? Is there distortion that might result in link relevancy reduction or popularity warping? Could this somehow be harnessed to generate more dates for engineers?”

Segway Robotic Mobility Platform

Segway RMP The Segway Robotic Mobility Platform is a modified Segway Human Transporter designed as a base for your robot. The Segway receives commands through a dual CANbus interface. 100 pound payload, 8 mph top speed, 8-10 mile range. Available in April.

imgSeek: sketch your search

“imgSeek is a photo collection manager and viewer with content-based search and many other features. The query is expressed either as a rough sketch painted by the user or as another image you supply (or an image in your collection). The searching algorithm makes use of multiresolution wavelet decomposition of the query and database images.” You draw a rough sketch of what you want to find and imgSeek returns thumbnail views of the best matches. Written in Python.