99 years after the Ford Model T, the Tata Nano has been announced in India for 100,000 rupees, or about $2500. And you know what? It looks amazingly good. I was completely expecting a Yugo ugly box, but you could drop this 10 foot long car into an urban street in Europe (the most competitive subcompact market on the planet) and it would fit right in. It looks amazingly refined and interesting - heck, it looks better than budget models selling for many times the price from most mainstream manufacturers.

And they have a website that is fairly Web … Read more

Sanyo has these "Infobar 2" phones showing at their booth, in lots of funky colors. They are quite large (about 1.5"/40mm longer than a standard candy bar phone, and relatively thick), but have a nice rounded smooth shape to them and interesting texture finishes. The smooth keys make them a bit of a challenge to use, but the 2.6" OLED screen has a 16:9 ratio that is geared toward watching movies and TV. They come with a built-in digital TV tuner.

They also come with a docking stand that charges the phone … Read more

At the Consumer Electronics Show, Hitachi is demo'ing a product called Starboard that is a multi-touch interface at a very large scale. You can use it to control a regular PC, and they've also got some custom apps for it. One of those is shown in the video.

What's interesting is that this is a projected interface, so it's untethered from the need to have a touch-sensitive LCD. This allows it to scale very large relatively inexpensively. They were also showing a wall-size version.

The projector in both cases was a very short throw Hitachi model … Read more

I checked out Casio's new $1,000 Exilim Pro EX-F1 that can shoot bursts of up to an amazing 60 frames per second. That's at it's full 6 megapixel resolution. You'll never miss little Johnny's first steps again.

They've done a really nice job with the interface. The bursts are shown as stacks of photos so you're not trying to scroll through 60 almost identical images when in thumbnail mode. Once looking at a burst, you can use the big thumbwheel on the back to job back and forth. It's great. It … Read more

Isn't it interesting how trends are made? "One of the things I like about trends is that they seem so easy -- Blue is the color of 2008! GenY likes health food!" observes Stacey Gillar. Coupling the disparate ("Chic Trash"), pushing an already extreme concept to the extreme ("Radical Transparency"), or simply announcing the advent of something "new" ("Nouvelle Vague," "Nouveau Niche," etc.) are some of the flourishing categories. Or you simply repackage an old concept.

"RenGen," short for Renaissance Generation and the title of … Read more

With the dust-up this week about Intel leaving the fold of OLPC, it got me to thinking: Will One Laptop Per Child become the TiVo of PCs for emerging markets? In other words, they spark the revolution but gain relatively little from it.

TiVo of course almost single-handidly created the DVR category and market. Their technology was very well executed, they created a user experience that is still unparalleled in terms of ease and joy of use, and with continual roll-out of innovative capabilities that kept stretching the definition of the product.

But ultimately their business model proved insufficient to … Read more

With everyone becoming a producer in the YouTube age, self-branding ("The Brand Called You") has evolved from a fancy to a necessity.

Andy Warhol's 15 minutes of fame have shrunk to 5 seconds of microfame, and in the contained public arena of social networks, amateur paparazzi--thanks to the viral nature of social media--have the power to grant celebrity status. That, in a nutshell, is the thesis of Clive Thompson's poignant piece for Wired on the rise of "microcelebrities."

As Facebook walls make personal communications open to the rest of your trusted network, even your … Read more

Here's another trend for 2008: From micro-loans to micro-vacations, micro-celebrities to micro-trends, speed dating to speed cooking: the "long tail" world of consumers is becoming smaller and shorter. Products, services, and experiences are being deconstructed in easier-to-digest, easier-to-afford bits, allowing consumers to collect even more experiences, as often as possible, in an even shorter time frame. Shrinking attention spans have prompted the rise of what Wired Magazine calls "snack-size media," and the hyper-personalization of online communication has led to new formats (micro-blogs, widgets, feeds, texting, etc.) that challenge long-held marketing conventions.

The emerging "economy … Read more

Doof, says company spokesman Devang Chouhan, is all about "playing games and meeting people" -- in other words: fun. The UK-based "social gaming" start-up aims to mesh aspects of multi-layer online gaming with social networking, providing a highly personalized and visually rich user experience based on the Flex technology.

Liad Shababo, founder of doof, explains: "When we came up with the idea for doof we quickly realised there was nothing like it in the market, and there was a real hunger among social networkers for something new. We have spent months working to perfect the … Read more