I’m so happy to read all over the Internet the different approaches companies are taking to dodge the mortal blows of high gasoline prices. Wind power and solar power seem to be on the top of the list of alternative energy resources.

Thanks to Toyota, electric cars are back on the spotlight. Some of them are plug-in hybrids, which means that they use both gasoline and electricity to run. Others are 100 percent electric.

The electric car that captured my attention is the Aptera Typ-1 (photographed above), manufactured by Aptera Motors based in Carlsbad, California. The Aptera Typ-1 is an all-electric, two-seater, three-wheeled car whose streamlined shape might look at home in a Jetsons cartoon. Each street-legal vehicle has an approximate price tag of less than $30,000.

The electric version of the three-wheeler would drive 120 miles per charge, while a hybrid version due for release near the end of 2009 is meant to achieve 300 miles per gallon. The vehicles are supposed to accelerate to 60 miles per hour within 10 seconds and recharge from a 110-volt outlet. If all goes well the company plans on a four-wheeled model capable of sitting up to five people hitting the streets in the not-so-distant future.

This concept car of the future has a unique design. The prototype features high-tech touches such as rear and side cameras instead of rear-view side mirrors to further reduce wind drag. There’s a solar panel on the roof to provide a bit of extra power.

Google is investing $2.75 million into electric-vehicle maker Aptera and battery start-up ActaCell. The announcement, which follows Google’s request for proposals from companies with electric car technologies, came Tuesday during the Plug-In 2008 conference in San Jose, California.

Having the backup of a company with deep pockets like Google is a sure bet that this classy electric car will hit the California street by year’s end. By then the car of the future will surely be here! Way to go Google!

By now you already know that the Apple's iPhone is much more than a phone.  It's really a full-fledged computer with an operating system of its own.  Some of its applications are sold through Apple App Store while others are completely free.

The picture above is an ingenious iPhone application dubbed, "iBeer 2.0" which you can buy at an Apple App Store.  This application simulates the process of enjoying a nice glass of cold beer.  The whole process is:  brew, wiggle, drink, shake and burp.  If you don't like beer, no problem;  there's the option of drinking milk.  You can run this application through an iPhone or iPod touch.

The YouTube video showing a guy drinking beer and a lady drinking milk is absolutely hilarious.  You have the option of drinking from your right or left hand.  iBeer 2.0 is totally interactive.  When you shake the glass, you can even create a digital beer head.  Pretty cool isn't it?  Bottoms up!

Source:  Bits & Pieces

Flock’s Development Team has done it again.  This time they have added another innovative edition to their successful string of dedicated browser categories.  The new edition is dubbed, “Gloss Edition” and covers popular Fashion, Entertainment and Lifestyle trends.

Flock’s ‘Gloss Edition’ is the world’s first fashion and entertainment browser designed to help people keep up with the latest fashion trends and celebrity lifestyle scoop also known as “gossip”.

Flock has assembled a bundle of the best sources on the Web to bring you your daily dose of fashion inspiration, celebrity dish, and trends by including over 35 leading content providers and partners, from Glam, PopSugar, InStyle, ThisNext, DesignerApparel, AllTop and others.  All of this information is updated immediately as news and images are published.

Flock’s devs worked with a great panel of women to design a theme for the Gloss Edition that is pink, “soft”, fun and well suited for the fashionistas’ never-ending pursuit of stylish individuality.

If you’re passionate about keeping up with fashion, entertainment and lifestyle trends, then this baby was tailor-made for you.  You can download this pink puppy by clicking here.

Other Flock’s Special Editions are:

• Flock Eco Edition
• Digg Edition
• Yahoo! Edition
• Photobucket Edition

I really don’t care about whose Britney Spears’ latest boyfriend is or if Mel Gibson was fined for DUI, but I know a lot of people who are ardent about these trivial things. 

Thanks to oil’s soaring prices, people are now more interested in adopting cleaner and environment-friendly energy resources than before. Some of the most popular renewable energy resources are:

• Biofuels
• Biomass
• Geothermal
• Hydro Power
• Solar Power
• Tidal Power
• Wave Power
• Wind Power

I’ve penned a couple of posts about wind and solar power. These are my favorite renewable resources, because they have a great potential in Panama, the country where I live. If only our government officials would take their dark glasses off to see reality.

Texas is doing just fine making huge investments in wind power building giant wind turbines in a place called Pampa located northeast of Amarillo on the Texas panhandle. Famous oilman T. Boone Pickens, is investing $10 billion to build the world’s largest wind farm near Pampa, Texas.

Even though it has been demonstrated over and over again that wind power is one of the cheapest and cleanest alternative for oil, many people are against wind farm projects because they say they are ugly and pollute the scenery of country roads.

Wind turbines don’t necessarily have to be cold and ugly as their detractors say. I’ve just seen very imaginative and beautiful wind turbines designed in Europe which resemble moving works of art blowing in the wind.

You can take your pick from 3 megawatt offshore monsters, to zero energy windmill skyscrapers, kite flown turbines and giant seabed anchored super-turbines, held aloft by blimps. Please click here to find a picture gallery of the most futuristic and quixotic designs for wind turbines. By far the most beautiful way to harness energy.

Enjoy and please spread the word for the adoption of clean energy resources in your neck of the woods. With imagination, they can also be works of art in motion. Adios!

After Fidel Castro stepped down as the active head of Cuba’s government, his less charismatic brother, Raúl Castro, is loosening up some control of the country.

Cubans are now allowed to buy cell phones and personal computers as well as other luxury products like toasters and perfumes. These “capitalist items” were prohibited during the tight control period of Fidel Castro’s administration.

Another indication that Raúl Castro is slowly improving communication conditions in Cuba, is the recent agreement between Cuba and Venezuela to lay a new undersea fiber-optic cable to help provide high-speed Internet access to Cuban citizens by 2010.

The United States economic embargo against the island nation has forced the communist country to rely on slow and expensive satellite links for Internet connectivity. Even though it would cost less and be more efficient to lay a new cable between Cuba and the U.S., which are only 120 kilometers apart, Cuba is working with Venezuela to lay a 1,500-kilometer cable to get high-speed Internet connectivity.

The proposed cable, which is being deployed by CVG Telecom (Corporacion Venezolana de Guyana) and ETC (Empresa de Telecomunicaciones de Cuba), will also provide high-speed Internet access to Jamaica, Haiti, and Trinidad.

Cuba has traditionally kept a tight lid on Internet access in the country. In 2003, the government cracked down on ordinary Cuban citizens, who were accessing the Internet over the government’s painfully slow phone network.

Even though Raúl Castro is not moving very fast to improve living conditions in the communist island, the fact of the matter is, that some progress is being made. It would be interesting to see how far Raúl is willing to go after his older brother dies and a new president is elected in the United States at the end of the year.

"You can tune a guitar, but you can't tuna fish. Unless of course, you play bass." —Douglas Adams

I think that Apple’s phone is wrongly called the iPhone, because truth be told, Apple’s gadget is much more than a phone. It's a hand held computer. Apple has launched a brand new category in computing. First we had the “desktop”, then it got smaller and evolved into a “laptop” which now, with Apple’s help, has evolved again into a “palmtop”.

If you take a close look, the iPalm can do anything a desktop or laptop can do and a lot more. You can browse the Web with it; you can send and receive e-mails with it; you can listen to music with it; and you can run almost any application with it. Plus, you don’t have to be sitting in a chair while using it. You can use the iPalm anywhere, everywhere you happen to be. It represents the total liberty all-purpose device. Isn’t that cool? You bet.

Even though the launch of Apple Inc.’s much-anticipated new phone turned into an information-technology meltdown, as customers were unable to get the phones working, in the final analysis, it was a huge success. Even days after launch day, July 11th, people were lining up at Apple’s retail stores in an effort to put their paws on a second generation iPhone. This extraordinary demand was not even anticipated by Apple’s Guru, Steve Jobs. It was as if the iPhone had a life of its own.

What kind of applications are out there for the iPhone? Quite a lot and the list is growing even as we speak. Apple turned on the tap for its iPhone Application store last week, unleashing more than 500 applications for iPhone users. If you have an iPhone, you just might forget the device is capable of making phone calls, since you’ll be so busy updating your favorite blog’s pages, coveting your neighbor’s co-op and wielding your handset to swerve around virtual racetracks.

Steve Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, is hoping to expand the iPhone’s appeal by luring software developers to create programs for it. John Doerr, the venture capitalist, is adding an incentive: his firm is putting up $100 million to invest in the work of those programmers. This will add an interesting flow of applications to the iPhone in the upcoming months.

The App Store is simple to use, thanks to its elegant and intuitive interface. Many of the applications are free, and most cost $9.99 or less (although a select few cost as much as $79.99).

Here are the twelve best applications currently available for the iPhone according to The New York Times:

1. Best in Business - Recorder (99 cents): Have a brilliant strategic insight while waiting on line at the airport? Whip out your iPhone, hit one key, and record it before you forget. Recorder does one thing—record voice memos and even meetings—but it does that with single-button simplicity. Use it for reminders, personal and professional. You can’t e-mail or move the memos to your computer, but for most short reminders, it’s all you need.

2. Best in Education - Math Wizard ($1.99): Whether you’re a grade-school student looking to develop math skills or a Baby Boomer aiming to tone your brain, Math Wizard has you covered. Disguised as a game, this application pops up a series of math problems. Enter the correct answer and you are rewarded with another. You can chose between 10 levels of play.

3. Best in Entertainment - BoxOffice (Free): BoxOffice takes advantage of the iPhone’s GPS capabilities to find movies near you. You can browse by theater, movies, showtimes and distance. When you find what you want, BoxOffice provides a micro-synopsis of each movie and ratings from Rotten Tomatoes, a movie review site. It will also display the address of the theater, and locate it for you on Google Maps. You can even link to Fandango for ticket purchases.

4. Best in Finance - Puluwai Real Estate Search (Free): If you’re on the prowl for a new home, or simply want to know what your neighbor is asking for his two-bedroom co-op, Puluwai is for you. The app employs the iPhone’s location-aware capabilities to find homes near a particular address. Puluwai enables you to scout by price, number of bedrooms and keywords, such as “Chelsea.” The photos are slow to pop up, but when you find something you like, you can save it to a favorites list and then tap the Map It! Button for driving details. You can also e-mail the listing or contact the Realtor.

5. Best in Games - Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart 3D ($9.99): Flip your iPhone horizontal and hop into a hot rod with the crusading Crash Bandicoot. The iPhone’s accelerometer enables you to steer your car by tilting the phone to the left and right. The game offers 12 different tracks and environments, as well as plenty of opportunities to blast through opponents and crates of fruit. The graphics are mighty impressive, but be warned that this game will drain your battery faster than you can blink an eye.

6. Best in Healthcare and Fitness - Epocrates Rx (Free): This prescription-drug database comprises data on more than 3,300 brand-name and generic drugs. While it’s designed for healthcare professionals, Epocrates delivers a wealth of information for that’s useful to consumers, too. For instance, Epocrates spells out common medication dosages for adults and children, possible side effects, possible interactions with other medications and even photos of the pills to help you identify or verify medication.

7. Best in Lifestyle - Yelp (Free): Yelp fuses social networking, user reviews and local searches into one easy-to-use app that’s essential for any iPhone on the roam. This portable version of Yelp.com, a Web portal that has been around for a few years, has a substantial stock of user reviews (with ratings) and content. You can use GPS to search for nearby restaurants, bars, coffee and tea joints, banks, gas stations and drugstores. Click the Map button and Yelp will display all search results on a Google Map.

8. Best in Music - Tuner ($4.99): When you get tired of your own tunes (remember, the iPhone is also an iPod), turn on Tuner, an application that serves up thousands of Internet radio stations in a format that makes it easy to find exactly what you want to hear. You can either browse its incredibly comprehensive genres section, check out the Top 500 list, or simply search for your own favorite station. As with most Internet radio stations, the sound isn’t CD quality and the volume is sometimes a bit low, but the selection is massive.

9. Best in News - Associated Press Mobile News Network (Free): If you like your news comprehensive, you’ll want the AP Mobile News Network. The opening screen delivers the day’s top news stories and photos. After getting the big picture, you can tap to Local, Sports, Showbiz, or More, which comprises categories such as technology, business, elections, lifestyle, and wacky, among others. You can save any story for later, or e-mail or text it to a friend. The Mobile News Network also contains daily photos, which can be viewed as slide shows, and daily videos. The videos can be painfully slow to load, unless you’re connected to a Wi-Fi network.

10. Best in Photography - Exposure (Free): This simple application connects with Flickr and enables you to do one thing very well: Browse Flickr photos. You can browse by photosets, recent photos, ID tags and favorites. You can’t upload photos taken with the iPhone to Flickr, but the application works reliably and quickly. Its coolest feature: Tap the Near Me button and the program displays images taken near your current location.

11. Best in Sports - MLB.com At Bat ($4.99): Stat-happy baseball fans will cheer for MLB.com At Bat, which delivers real-time scores of all Major League Baseball games. Click a game (they’re organized by date) and you’ll get an inning-by-inning rundown of runs scored, as well as stats on the winning and losing pitchers. Each game includes eight or so video clips of the day’s highlights (they look great on a Wi-Fi connection but woefully choppy on AT&T’s 3G network).

12. Best in Weather - WeatherBug (Free): WeatherBug wraps your local weather conditions in an attractive package that includes temperature, wind speed, precipitation and other current conditions. It goes a little deeper than the Weather application built into the iPhone by delivering information like severe weather alerts, heat indicators, dew points and even radar images.

After getting your feet wet with some of the iPhone’s applications, you’ll forget you have a phone in your hands; it’s a lot more—it’s a palm computer.

Source: The New York Times

A very shy guy goes into a bar and sees a beautiful woman sitting at the bar. After an hour of gathering up his courage, he finally goes over to her and asks, tentatively, “Ma'am, would you mind if I chat with you for a while?”

She responds by yelling, at the top of her lungs, “No, I won’t sleep with you tonight!” Everyone in the bar turned and stared at them.

Naturally, the guy is hopelessly and completely embarrassed and he slinks back to his table.

After a few minutes, the woman walks over to him and apologizes. She smiled sweetly at him and said, “I’m sorry if I embarrassed you. You see, I’m a graduate student in psychology and I’m studying how people respond to embarrassing situations.”

To which, he responds at the top of his lungs, “What do you mean, $200?”  "Do you think I'm Onassis?"