Fernando Alonso dominated the Bahraini Grand Prix at the Sakhir circuit on Sunday, winning his second race in a row and looking set to end Michael Schumacher’s reign as the King of Formula One. In many ways, there has been a significant changing of the guard, with Toyota’s second and fourth places netting the company’s best points finish ever and putting it in a clear second place in the constructors championship. Ferrari meanwhile is languishing in sixth place behind the increasingly consistent Red Bull. The ever-astute bookmakers now consider Michael Schumacher only 3/1 chance of retaining his title, with Alonso at long odds-on for the title. The stage is now set for an epic battle. Ferrari showed enough with the speed of the 2005 car’s first showing to suggest that it will have the speed to contest the remainder of the season fiercely. It’s now down to Bridgestone to provide competitive tyres for the less extreme temperatures of Europe.  Read More

Media creation and distribution is evolving rapidly, with the “contrived reality” genre dominating traditional mass media and a new groundswell of home-grown media produced on personal digital devices and distributed by email and the World Wide Web quickly evolving. With the device-formerly-known-as-the-mobile-phone quickly evolving into a multimediavideo/image/sound recorder, Siemens has come up with a novel way of promoting its SX-1 mobile phone with inbuilt “camcorder” functionality by sponsoring a new award category for budding and established film makers at the St Kilda Film Festival. The video-equipped mobile phone is likely to become an important conduit for creativity in the future, and Siemens’ promotion of a new category for 90 second micro-movies shot with a Siemens SX1 mobile phone is a portent if things to come.  Read More

Disintermediation is a term you’ll no doubt have heard and will certainly be hearing a lot more in the future. It means “to remove the middle man”, and it’s something the internet is incredibly good at. With close to a billion people connecting to the internet in the last decade, and computer-mediated anything just a few minutes of Googling away, radical new ideas can promulgate very quickly. And here’s one you’re gonna love … think of it as P2P money. Zopa hooks up creditworthy people who want to borrow money with people who are happy to lend it to them. And because there's no middleman (e.g. bank), the borrower just pays a 1% exchange fee upfront. Without the greed and inefficiency of a financial institutuion, both borrower and lender get a better deal than they would otherwise.  Read More

Smoke detectors are something you can do without if you have a death wish, sleep with one eye open like James Bond or have never had kids. That’s not to say that most people haven’t thought of doing without them on account of them being so ugly – they look like they belong in a prison cell, not part of the decor in one’s castle. On top of that, when you want to inspect or replace them, having them screwed into the ceiling is also a bummer. That’s why we love this idea. The Snap Alarm smoke detector simply clips to the chord of any light fitting. This means it can be retrofitted almost anywhere, in a few seconds, without the need for tools by someone with an IQ larger than their shoe size, and it sits in exactly the right place in a room for a smoke detector – high and central.  Read More

The MotoGP season starts again next weekend with Valentino Rossi and his Yamaha YZR M1 a raging hot favourite to take the title again. Rossi appears likely to face increased competition this year though, with at least ten riders looking capable of taking a race win during the season and with his most likely rival, Honda-mounted Sete Gibernau, already in fine form. Read our extensive 2005 season preview with in-dpeth coverage of the pre-season testing, bookies odds, links and background.  Read More

Updated April 1 2005 When Japan’s Nobuhiro “Monster” Tajima crossed the finish line of New Zealand’s annual ‘Race to the Sky’ hillclimb last Sunday, it was his sixth “King of the Mountain” crown in the fabled event. Monster’s Suzuki Escudo is almost as legendary as he is, producing 981 bhp at 8100 rpm and 95kg-m of torque at 6500 rpm from the twin-turbo 2.7 litre V6. The most amazing thing though, is the space-frame car with carbon fibre and Kevlar bodywork. Monster’s Monster weighs just 1020kg fueled up with Nobuhiro strapped in.  Read More

Sonance, the company that originated high fidelity in-wall loudspeakers some 22 years ago, has acquired the IP of its major competitor Sound Advance Systems for “invisible” loud speaker technology. These technologies offer a range of unique and compelling loudspeaker features in that they are completely undetectable and provide a wide, virtually omnidirectional sound dispersion pattern and are ideal for applications requiring background and foreground music, voice paging, surround sound, and multi-room systems. Sound Advance speakers can be found in such exclusive locations as the Dolce & Gabana, Luis Vuitton, Prada, Armani and Chanel boutiques in cities such as Milan, Paris, New York, Beverly Hills, and St. Moritz, and have been the centerpiece of numerous CEDIA Electronic Lifestyle award winning residential installations.  Read More

Monte Carlo is the place to be this coming weekend (April 2-6, 2005) for those interested in the future of transport. Monaco is the venue for the Electric Vehicle Symposium (EVS-21) and every major electric vehicle manufacturer on the planet will be there, with some new and exciting technologies to be showcased during the global get-together. As previously mentioned, the Venturi Fetish will be the most significant of the cars on show, being the first production electric sportscar, but one of the most significant showings will be that of Raser Technologies which will demonstrate its advanced motor and controller technology in a Formula Lightning car driven on the Grand Prix circuit. Raser Technologies claim the motor is capable of producing 500 bhp which, if true, means a whole new world of motoring is about to begin.  Read More

It takes but a glance at the Javelin personal jet to understand that it was born from the intense desire to offer military performance to the general aviation market. The existence of a market prepared to pay US$2.5 million for a two-seat jet aircraft capable of .925 Mach (1130 kmh) is now verified as the Aviation Technology Group (ATG) is holding 80 firm orders for the Javelin accounting for the entire first year of production. Initial customer deliveries of the FAA-certified Javelin are slated for early 2007 so if you get your order in now, you’ll still be waiting until 2008 to be the first in your neighbourhood to have one of these beauties.  Read More