space

Is there such a thing as a mini minivan?

Volkswagen's Space Up, which was unveiled at the 2007 Tokyo auto show on Wednesday, certainly seems to qualify.

The four-door Space Up is just 3.68 m (12 feet) by 1.63 m (5 feet) compared to the VW Touran minivan, which is roughly 4.3 m (14 feet) by 1.8 m (6 feet).

The Space Up follows the two-door Up that debuted at the 2007 Frankfurt Auto Show. As with the Up concept car, the drive train for all of the gasoline, diesel, and electric drives for this … Read more

News Corp.-owned social-networking site MySpace.com announced on Tuesday that it has partnered with casual-game maker Oberon Games, part of Oberon Media, to create a "channel" of social games.

Slated to launch in January, MySpace Games will allow users of the service to play games against other MySpace members and embed game widgets in their profiles.

Additionally--as it seems that there just can't be a social-networking announcement without talk of the "D" word--developers will be able to submit ideas for new games, and Oberon will be providing a developer toolkit when the game site … Read more

So far, no one has won NASA's $500,000 space elevator challenge after five days of bad weather in Salt Lake City, Utah, and more than enough snafus.

As of Monday, three finalist teams--the Kansas City Space Pirates, The University of Saskatchewan (USST) and the Technology Tycons (high-school kids from California)--were scheduled to perform two tests each of their self-built robotic climbers. To win the prize money, the teams' robots must be able to hoist up a thin carbon tether 100 meters within 50 seconds, under its own power source.

The three finalists emerged from eight teams … Read more

MySpace.com is testing out the director's chair with a new Web-based series, Roommates, which debuts Monday at 1 p.m. PDT. Through December 21, a new three-minute episode of the show will be available each weekday on the MySpaceTV portal and through the Roommates profile page.

The series, co-created by MySpace and new-media production studio Iron Sink Productions, marks the first time that the News Corp.-owned social-networking site has been behind the development of a scripted Web show. Roommates is a show within a show, as four recent college graduates move to Los Angeles and enlist in … Read more

The Web 2.0 definition of a misanthrope is somebody who doesn't belong to any social networking sites, and by that yardstick I fit the bill. I don't have a MySpace account, nor a Facebook. I do not Twitter except when I've had way too much coffee. I'm not even going to begin to tell you what I think a LinkSpank is, and as far as I'm concerned, Digging requires a shovel and a backyard. I have neither.

So I may not be the best person to evaluate Flock 1.0 beta, a browser built on Firefox that is designed to make interfacing with social networking sites extremely easy. Still, I've got a Flickr account and I blog. Would Flock be useful for a social minimalist such as myself?

… Read more

NEW YORK--Marshall Herskovitz, co-creator of the upcoming Web series Quarterlife, calls his decision to distribute the show on MySpace.com a "deal with the devil."

At a Thursday screening of the first six eight-minute episodes of the show as part of the CMJ Music Marathon and film festival, Herskovitz--best known as one half of the team that created the critically acclaimed TV series Thirtysomething and My So-Called Life--emphasized his aim to bring creativity to the world of professional online video.

"What I'm seeing on the Internet right now is really boring, and I think these big companies are missing it in a big way," he explained in a question-and-answer session following the screening. "All these new things, Hulu and even Joost, they're creating these platforms as though that's the goal. But they're not creating interesting programming. They're reusing content from television."

He continued: "There aren't any very good ideas coming out of it, and I haven't seen anything that really interests me."

Then, according to Herskovitz, there's the YouTube problem.

"People are quite fascinated by user-generated content on the Internet right now, and I'm not against that. And we want that on our site. But I believe that user-generated on the Internet, just like reality shows on television, are not completely satisfactory," he asserted. "There are reasons why we've had classical storytelling for 2,500 years, and across so many cultures. And there are reasons why we've had a film grammar for the past 100 years about how we shoot a film, and there's a place for that."

Which is why he and Zwick saw a window of opportunity for Quarterlife, a series about a half-dozen 20-somethings working in "creative" industries like acting, writing and filmmaking. Divided into eight-minute episodes, the Web series will be the center of a planned social network for fans as well as young creative people in general.

… Read more

The evil Sanrio empire will stop at nothing in its quest for universal domination. As it continues its relentless assault by land and water, it is also manipulating the elements with such devious schemes as seizing our air supply. And now, as winter nears, it's commandeering our heat sources as well with the "Hello Kitty Space Heater"--an obvious ratcheting up from its USB lap warmer and other guerilla tactics.

A special thanks to Hello Kitty Hell, our spiritual leader in The Resistance, for alerting us to this latest plan. We agree with one of his readers, … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Before Virgin Group mogul Richard Branson hired him to design a futuristic tourist rocket ship, Richard Seymour's only experience in the market was dreaming up spacecraft for the movies.

The U.K. industrial designer, for example, conceived of a spacecraft that could send people to the sun in the Fox Searchlight movie Sunshine. That exercise, although not technically possible, taught him to think about how hostile space is for humans, with the capability to "turn you into face cream," Seymour said.

"We were thrilled when Virgin Galactic came to us," he said here Thursday … Read more

Updated 12:30 p.m. PT

A coalition of major media and technology companies that notably does not include Google appears to be getting serious about copyright on the Internet.

A who's who of media companies--CBS, News Corp.'s Fox Entertainment Group, NBC Universal, Viacom, and Disney--as well as Microsoft and the News Corp.-owned MySpace, along with video-sharing sites Dailymotion and Veoh Networks released a set of guidelines Thursday designed to halt online piracy.

Notably absent from the list is Google, which unveiled filtering technology for its YouTube video-sharing site on Monday. Sources familiar with the coalition plan … Read more