Wow, that is quite the video there. This reports on Chrysler’s offer to cap gas prices, which have skyrocketed to a whopping $3.63 in my area recently, to $2.99 a gallon. Of course they have their stipulations, but who doesn’t.

Microsoft has signed a world wide deal with Kia and Hyundai so their customers will have the ability to use voice commands to control a number of different features with the use of their in-car software. For already is in the contract with Microsoft, but theirs will expire in November.

T-mobile has already launched their 3G network in New York, but now they have announced that Seattle is the next lucky city to get their 4x faster download speed. The new network launch will take place this fall, so get ready you Seattleites.

I don’t know many Zune people, but there are some out there, and this should excite them. Microsoft Zune fans will soon have the ability to download popular t.v. shows directly to their Zune!! At $1.99 each you can get shows like South Park, Battle Star Galactica, Heroes and my favorite The Office.

Webby Awards took place and guess who are the winners! That is correct, buzz travels fast, but Colbert is the Webby Person of the Year for connecting to his fans using the Internet. Will.I.Am of the Black Eyed Peas won Webby Artist of the Year for his music video supporting Barack Obama. A few others are

Best Political Blog - Huffington Post

Best Cultural Blog - Post Secret

Best in the Politics category - FactCheck.org

Best Community - Flickr

All that in one video, how informational! Enjoy!

Another designer advert for the designer brand.  Anyone care to say otherwise?

Apple is just showing off the iPod’s ‘new’ fancy maneuvers, let me know when they get a bigger selection of memory.  Starting out with the 8 Gb and now the 32 Gb?  Yeah right, still too small for the amount of stuff you can put on it.

Any could easily fill that little gadget up, and not with just porn.. C’mon people that’s not what Apple intended, is it?  What perverts.

I do [in most cases] like Apple’s choice in music.

These three chaps got together to make a gadget band using the Nintendo DS and the fine products by Apple.  The applications used are: iAno, Pocket Guitar and a game called Electroplankton for Nintendo DS.

Pretty neat so I posted, plus I had talked about the iAno yesterday.  These three consider themselves the first iBand, so challengers thinking they were first get out there and YouTube it!

Check out their homepage here.

I just read over at Engadget about more crazy police officers. Any suspicious movements can have the feds pointing the barrels of their guns straight at you. When UK’s Darren Nixon, the mild-mannered mechanic, was on his way home from work when he was surrounded by police, with guns drawn. He apparently appeared to have a gun in his pocket, when all he really had was his 4GB Philips GoGear.

The police went through the trouble of tracking him on CCTV, arresting at gunpoint, swabbed for DNA, fingerprinting and throwing Nixon in a cell. Sounds like a lot of work for this simple misunderstanding, I mean, his music probably was bad but it definitely does not warrant that much work.

After the team of Mentat cops realized their mistake, they couldn’t even offer an apology, said Nixon, “They just dropped me off at home and said a quick ’sorry for any inconvenience’, and that was all I got from them, which I thought was pretty out of order.”

Not to be overly zune focused on the commercial front, it’s only fair to post the new iPod commercial with Mary J. Blige - Work That

Here is another very creative spot for the zune, check out the previous post dreamscape 1.

I don’t have a zune so I can’t say it cool or crap but these latest commercials are very artistic and totally out of character for a Microsoft product.

I have another one lined up that is just a trip, I will post it later today.

American cars are hard to buy, I wish I didn’t feel that way but I do. The exterior design of the cars are usually average but it’s the interior and cheap looking materials that turns me off before I even start thinking about the technical quality and longevity.

This new 2008 Ford Focus has sparked my interest. The design seems solid (inside and out) and the gas mileage is good.

I just got back from a business trip and was given a Chrysler Sebring. The car itself was okay but the interior was total crap. In fact the interior was damn right plastic and hurtful. The armrest between the front seats had a hard plastic top that followed the angular design of the car style which ended with a point (made of the same plastic material of the rest of the car) that was positioned directly behind the automatic gear shift.

Every time I shifted, my elbow hit the point of the hard plastic point of the armrest, jabbing into my elbow. I even asked a business partner to sit in the car and see if it was me, it was not. It just reaffirmed my opinion of American auto making.

This view might be too judgmental. I shouldn’t base my opinion on one car, I have not been in the new 2006 Ford Focus but from the interactive elements I have seen online tonight, it looks far better than other American cars I have driven or sat in. They have also added the Microsoft SYNC technology which is damn cool.

So, I will give Ford and American cars a chance based on what I have seen in commercials and these interactive promotional spots pulled from Yahoo.

The design inside and out seems to be better than most American designs. The 2008 Ford Focus web site does a very good job of showing off the car and its new design (inside and out).

Here are a couple interesting stories from .

They are both from “The Gadget Hound”. The first one is  and the second story is .

They are not the end-all-be-all about iPods/iPhones but good reading and the comments do make me laugh.

Since iPod is the undisputed leader (market share) in MP3/personal video players this obviously going to happen.

I don’t own one and will not (mostly because of the iTunes and file type issues) but that doesn’t stop me from admiring the design and marketing power of Apple. Even if Steve Jobs hasn’t changed his outfit since 1980, his marketing delivery and power of design surpasses his mock turtle necks (I’m just trying to get the Apple zealots fired up).

Here is how I see it, the products are innovative for the US ( about touch and UI in Japan - again Apple Fanboys unite) but problems happen in all tech product launches.

Get over it and lets hope that Apple takes care of its users. Like Apple or not, they are pushing the industry like they always have and it makes the slower moving companies try and keep up. Size of company and profit directly change focus, I hope this doesn’t happen with Apple.

If we can learn something specific from Apple: design, usability and functionally are king over everything else. Marketing those 3 things are an easy sell. Achieving those 3 things is not, if you loose focus.

I’m getting way off track but the posts on Yahoo Tech are interesting and worth reading.

I hope someone can come in and make some waves, just not sure Walmart is the company to do it but DRM-FREE is a good start:

The retail giant just today, at just 94 cents per song, versus $1.29/song on iTunes. Let the DRM-free price wars begin!

Reuters is reporting that Wal-Mart’s DRM-free music store is selling thousands of songs from labels such as EMI (which last April) and Universal Music (which that it was entering the DRM-free music fray, although not on iTunes). Even better, the copy protection-free tracks will go for just 94 cents a song, compared to the $1.29 premium that Apple is charging for its DRM-free music on iTunes.

Read the full story here: