Sharing

Some readers may be familiar with the car2go car-sharing system, which is now in use in several cities around the world. Users locate the closest available car via the internet or a telephone call, go to it, unlock it with a chip card, enter their PIN on its keypad, then drive it wherever they want (within its range). When done, they just leave it at the closest designated car2go parking spot, where the next user will pick it up. It’s a pretty neat idea, so if it works for cars, why not bicycles? That’s where the fledgling sobi (Social Bicycles) project comes in. Read More

The Internet allows us to connect with friends in every corner of the world, but sometimes a physical, tangible link in the communication can make its absence felt. A nightstand with embedded printer and scanner, John Kestner's Tableau puts a physical experience in networking with family and friends, and makes viewing and sharing photos via Twitter as simple and natural as opening and closing a drawer. Read More

Electric rental cars are set to take to the streets next year with both the Hertz and Enterprise Rent-A-Car companies committing to adding electric vehicles to their fleets. Next week (December 15) Hertz plans to begin its ConnectByHertz car sharing program in New York City with the service expanding to San Francisco, Washington D.C, Texas, London and China by the end of 2011. Meanwhile Enterprise has announced that from January 2011 they will begin rolling out EV rentals in Phoenix, Tucson, Knoxville, Nashville, San Diego, Los Angeles, Portland and Seattle, although it is not clear how many vehicles will be available at each location and from what date. Read More

Last year in the German city of Ulm, Daimler started up an experimental car-sharing system called car2go. It incorporated a fleet of 50 smart fortwos, that users could pick up in various locations, drive as long as they wanted, and then leave within the city. Ulm’s program is now up to 20,000 members and 200 cars, while a younger sister project in Austin, Texas, is up to 10,000 members. Given that success, Daimler has just announced a new “car2go edition” of the fortwo, designed specifically for use in the program. We got a look, at the 2010 Paris Motor Show. Read More

USB sticks are great for file sharing, apart from a couple of drawbacks. Sometimes you want to share only some content of the drive, or the drive just isn’t big enough to hold all the information you want to share. The Infinitec Infinite USB Memory (IUM) drive provides you with a way to share absolutely all, or just selected content, wirelessly to any device with a USB port. You can even use it to stream movies from your laptop to your TV. And while it is being marketed as the world's first infinite memory USB memory drive, the device doesn't actually store information, it's really a wireless network device with similar "infinite memory" functions to the Eye-fi Pro X2 we featured earlier this year. Read More

Lacie continues to bolster the media streaming market and has recently introduced another model into its LaCinema range which, like most of its predecessors, was inspired by designer Neil Poulton. As such the new Mini HD sports a familiar sleek, piano-black design with front and rear USB ports to connect media for local playback, HDMI 1.3, RCA and optical audio along with 100Mbps Ethernet for connecting to a wired network. Read More

car2go, the innovative car sharing program first seen in Ulm, Germany, has launched in Austin, Texas. A joint partnership between the City of Austin and Daimler will initially see 200 smart fortwo vehicles made available 24/7 within the city to a select group of city employees and their relatives, with plans to increase the number of cars and make them accessible to all Austin residents and students in early 2010. Read More

Opera's powerful content sharing technology, Unite, has now been fully integrated into its desktop browser with the release of Opera 10.10. Opera lovers can also enjoy visual tabs to view thumbnails of pages in open tabs, a page-loading turbo boost, web navigation with mouse gestures and a customizable speed dial interface. Read More

A lesser-known fact about the operator of the world's most popular Internet search engine is that it's been running a small fleet of hybrid vehicles for the past few years to support its effort to reduce CO2 emissions, cut oil use and stabilize the electrical grid by accelerating the adoption of plug-in electric vehicles. Google engineers have put the cars through numerous tests to both prove and improve electric vehicle technology whilst publishing the results on the Internet. More recently, Google has confirmed that the fleet is currently running smart software to enable communication between the grid and the vehicles. Read More