connected

All the droolworthy stuff from Frankfurt, what it will *really* take to sell the Chevy Volt, Toyota's gonna' call everything a Prius, and this is the first episode of 'Car Tech Live', the new live video edition of the CNET Car Tech Podcast.

• CNET coverage of the Frankfurt auto show

• What's the funny noise coming from your electric Nissan?

• Hertz NeverLost supports USB drives to load your navigation destinations

• Calculate if a plug-in hybrid makes sense for you… Read more

PowerReviews, a company that provides white-label customer review tools for retailers and brands, is preparing to release a service called BrandConnect.

BrandConnect features two elements: Listener and Megaphone. According to Darby Williams, the vice president of marketing at PowerReviews, "Listener will help brands track and understand what their customers really want out of their products."

Listener To do so, PowerReviews first asks users to review a product in more detail than they might be accustomed to. According to Williams, the process will first ask consumers what the pros and cons were of a particular product. It then asks … Read more

In the 2010 version of its flagship security suite, Symantec continues to build on the unexpected progress it made last year. In addition to maintaining the quick load and scan times, and significantly smaller system footprint, Norton 2010 includes a behavioral detection engine based on both behavior and reputation.

Called Quorum, this new engine doesn't adversely affect Norton's performance--a major concern after years of system-crippling sluggishness. It works in concert with Norton Insight, introduced last year as a whitelist-style guard for ''trusted'' files. By examining your files and how they behave--both locally and when trying to access the … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Facebook took the stage on Tuesday afternoon at the TechCrunch50 conference for a "Developer Garage" event, to highlight just how important its team of engineers is to the company--and to unveil a new feature to let users play around with what they're up to.

Facebook engineering lead Aditya Agarwal unveiled a new offering called "Prototypes," which makes internal projects on the site accessible as applications on its developer platform. "Some of them are going to be buggy," Agarwal said. "Some of them are going to be super polished."

Prototypes, which … Read more

TomTom unveiled the successor to its GO 740 Live connected PND, and it's called the GO 750 Live. Like any good sequel, this one adds more characters to the mix in the form of two additional Live models, the GO 950 Live and the GO 550 Live.

All three Live models will feature a wireless data connection for receiving traffic data, fuel prices, and performing Google Local Searches. Additionally, the three models will also all feature TomTom's IQ Routes technology and the free MapShare service for user-generated map updates. An Eco Route option has been added to the … Read more

Traffic firm Hitwise says Facebook eventually overcame MySpace in terms of U.S. traffic as a result of the launch of its Facebook Connect universal log-in product, according to a post from analyst Heather Dougherty.

"The number of Web sites participating in Facebook Connect has grown quickly to over 15,000 Web sites (globally) including CNN.com, NBC.com, ABCNews.com, Hulu, WashingtonPost.com, The Huffington Post, and others," Dougherty's post read. "And what is really interesting is to look at the year-over-year growth in the market share of visits to Facebook, because there is a … Read more

Full Speed promises to improve both the speed and performance of your broadband connection. Oddly, when we put it through the ringer, it did just the opposite: our computer ran at a snail's pace when the program was activated.

The program's user interface doesn't exactly exude professionalism. All of the exclamation points asking us to Get Ready to Boost Your Speed! had us looking for the catch. At start-up, our only option was to select either Internet Explorer or Firefox to run the Web speed test. Once we made our selection a new window appeared and ran … Read more

Alison Rosen is back on the program today, and no, she's not really shrinking. That said, she is mystified by Craigslist missed connections, so we debate about what sort of scenario would lend itself to the use of the site's bizarre feature.

Next stop, Cougarville--better known as San Fransisco--where we investigate a disturbing new expo: The National Single Cougars Convention. Should cougars be given their own convention or should they be hunted in public, the natural way?

Finally, it seems we're just never going to get rid of Autotune. Especially now that the new T-Pain Autotune iPhone app makes robot voice manipulation so easy--as if it wasn't to begin with.

We've got all this and more on today's 404. Enjoy the weekend! (No show on Monday).

Check out Alison's blog or The Daily Alison.

Not to be outdone by HP's Photosmart Premium with TouchSmart Web, Lexmark on Tuesday rolled out a new line of printers, three of which will will feature a touch screen to access the Web. Although both companies claim to have the rights to the "world's first Web-connected printer," Lexmark's new product line is aimed at the business market rather than the consumer.

The Lexmark Solution Center already has several existing applications that users can easily download onto the machine with a touch of a virtual button. Some additions including a photo viewer, application shortcuts, RSS … Read more