are we ready for the shift?

source site - Official Debut: MINI Coupe Concept

yet again, BMW has come up with another mouth watering concept. this time it is the MINI brand. this looks good.

BMW has followed up the M1 homage concept with a daring green and mean concept car. In one go, this concept - the Vision EfficientDynamics - concept vaults BMW straight into both the supercar and green vehicle categories in a single leap.

i do hope that this car makes it into production as the images are hot.

I like this one on retro technology...

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid452319854?bctid=1135486277

I found this incredibly amazing technology which is able to put a massive number of images together and link each image on a relational basis. it also has huge zoom in and zoom out capabilities. what this means for example is that you can view an piece of text on a book right from an individual letter that fills the screen and seamlessly zoom out to (say) view it from a 100 meters away.

this video describes it best.

Recently BMW Malaysia concluded the "BMW Shorties" competition gaining 74 entries. The initiative was perhaps a welcome injection into the local film making & creative industry.

A friend of mine shared the following link.

http://www.netevents.tv/docuplayer.asp?docid=75

It is an interesting coverage of the one laptop per child project entitled "No lap un-topped - the bottom up revolution that could re-define global IT culture". The presentation was made by Nicholas Negroponte, who is a Motorola Director and Chairman Emeritus MIT Labs & Chairman One Laptop per Child. The presentation was dated 2 December 2006. More on Nicholas.

This site and many of my other website projects are run on the Drupal content management engine.

Therefore, i am excited that the new drupal 5 release is now out. For information, this site and my main "live" website my-kart.org are both using drupal 4.7.

4.7 is a fairly stable release and i am happy with it. however, version 5 comes with additional features (naturally), and productivity improvements such as a better user management system (something very useful for me). the rest of the improvements are contained in the release announcement.

Internet ventures have long been a phenomena that is very difficult to understand. On one hand, the internet or the web has been wildly successful that there is a wealth of information (and disinformation) at the click of a mouse button.

Yet, on the other hand there have only been very few successful businesses. The successful ones are the likes of Google, Yahoo etc, but very few others.

So what drives venture capital funds to the web?

The dotcom bust in the early 2000s brought things back to reality. Yet, now we see the second wave of the web... called web 2.0.

I found some good collection of Villeneuve racing videos at YouTube.

Check out some of the fantastic stuff there. The Villeneuve name was what first got me into F1 in the late 70s, when Gilles was wow-ing the F1 world with his daring driving.

His son Jacques came into F1 and almost won on his debut and clinched the world title in his second year in F1.

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