A completely connected car. John Halamka, of CareGroup Healthcare System, anoints his "cool technology of the week": AutoNet Mobile, a device that can turn one's car into a WiFi hot spot, for $29 per month.
Access speeds range from 600Kbps to 800Kbps with upload speeds about 200Kbps. No software is needed to use the device, since it uses existing WiFi connections resident on mobile devices and thus it is compatible with all operating systems and devices. No additional antennas are needed. Chrysler plans to offer this service on all of its 2009 models starting in August.
Of course, this connectivity is to be used by passengers sharing your commute, family members who want to stay connected on long car trips or as an access point once you've reached your destination. WiFi connectivity while driving is a bad idea - keep your attention on the road.
It's rare for an investor to serve up a list of ideas he'd like to back, but that's just what Paul Graham did this month. He founded an early e-commerce company, Viaweb, that was acquired by Yahoo a decade ago and now runs a Cambridge firm called Y Combinator that invests in - and helps cultivate - start-ups. On his wish list:
Simplified browsing. There are a lot of cases where you'd trade some of the power of a Web browser for greater simplicity. Grandparents and small children don't want the full Web; they want to communicate and share pictures and look things up. What viable ideas lie undiscovered in the space between a digital photo frame and a computer running Firefox? If you built one now, who else would use it besides grandparents and small children?
New news. The problem is not merely that [newspapers have] been slow to adapt to the Web. It's more serious than that: Their problems are due to deep structural flaws that are exposed now that they have competitors. News will morph significantly in the more competitive environment of the Web. So called "blogs" (because the old media call everything published online a "blog") like PerezHilton and TechCrunch are one sign of the future. News sites like Reddit and Digg are another. But these are just the beginning.
Auctions. Online auctions have more potential than most people currently realize. Auctions seem boring now because eBay is doing a bad job, but is still powerful enough that it has a de facto monopoly. Result: stagnation. But I suspect eBay could now be attacked on its home territory, and that this territory would, in the hands of a successful invader, turn out to be more valuable than it currently appears. . . . A start-up that wants to do this has to expend more effort on their strategy for cracking the monopoly than on how their auction site will work.
Hewlett-Packard executive Antonio Rodriguez, who wound up at the company after it bought his Cambridge start-up last year, writes about his latest gadget acquisition.
Essentially, a Tengu is a USB-powered set of LEDs that make faces depending on the ambient noise. So when you play music, Tengu "sings along" with you.
It's an interesting reaction people have to it; upon first hearing what it does, almost everyone says "that's it!?!", surprised by the fact that it needs to plug into a computer at all (which, sadly, it only uses for power). But after watching it for a little while, observers become entranced in trying to determine the pattern of its various facial expressions.
Having seen the mesmerizing power of the Tengu, I now want someone to build a Tengu that does something more useful with its host's networking capabilities.
What about taking a page out of Ambient's products and showing a happy Tengu when the market is up and a sad one when it is down?
By Scott Kirsner
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