Open up your mind and say, ahh...

BMW pulled the covers off of the all electric ActiveE that will be offered to a limited number of customers beginning later this year. At its main Manhattan showroom, the German car maker debuted the 1 Series based coupe in North America just a few days before the New York Auto Show.

The ActiveE isn’t a true production vehicle. Instead it is another test bed similar to the Mini E offered for lease to 450 customers in the U.S. The ActiveE will find homes with 700 customers and is again being used to further field test the electric vehicle concept for BMW.

The feedback received from Mini E drivers has been used to advance the company’s electric system installed in the ActiveE. With the Mini E, drivers liked the regeneration system that acted as a brake as soon as a driver let up on the gas pedal according to Rich Steinberg, BMW North America’s manager of electric vehicles. But on the freeway he says, the regeneration was too aggressive causing unwanted slowing while driving at higher speeds.

“So we’ve actually added an in between layer, a freewheeling effect” Steinberg says. If you lift off the throttle a little bit, it won’t regen, if you lift off a lot, you get the full regen.”

With a 170 horsepower under the hood and a 33 kilowatt-hour lithium ion battery, BMW expects a 0-60mph time under nine seconds and around 100 miles of range. Though we’re guessing these two specifications are mutually exclusive. Top speed is limited to 90 mph.

Steinberg says the powertrain in the ActiveE is the same that will be found in the i3, the aluminum and carbon fiber production electric car BMW expects to begin selling in 2013. A seven kilowatt dedicated charger will top off the ActiveE in 3-5 hours according to Steinberg.

Like other electric vehicles, the ActiveE can preheat (or cool) the car, including the battery, while the car is still plugged into the wall to save battery power for driving.

The car will be offered for $499/month with a $2,250 down payment. But the car will only be offered in Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Sacramento, New York, Boston and the state of Connecticut.

Photos: Jason Paur/Wired.com

Popular dating site Match.com will start screening its members against the national sex offender registry following a suit from a woman who claims she has been raped by a person she met through the service.

The woman claims she has met a man through Match.com who had six convictions for sexual battery. She claims the man had followed and raped her on their second date, and thinks it could have been avoided if Match.com had the screening process in place. The man plead not guilty, claiming the sex was consensual.

Match.com has agreed to implement the screening process, although the site’s officials still don’t think that screening is the best option to prevent cases such as this one.

“We’ve been advised that a combination of improved technology and an improved database now enables a sufficient degree of accuracy to move forward with this initiative, despite its continued imperfection,” said the site’s president, Mandy Ginsberg, in a statement to Associated Press.

“We want to stress that while these checks may help in certain instances, they remain highly flawed, and it is critical that this effort does not provide a false sense of security to our members,” she added.

The screening process is expected to go live on the site, which boasts some 20 million members across the world, in two or three months.

This outcome of this case could have a big impact on other dating sites as well, which might also start screening its members for sexual offenses.

What do you think? Can the screening process on dating sites help prevent future sexual offenses? Could it give the members a false sense of security? Please, share your opinions in the comments.

Thousands of doctors have signed up for a service that, among other things, they can use to try to prohibit patients from posting reviews. You can read a bit about it here.

In Iowa, in a surprisingly similar move, the state government is moving ahead with a law that will make it a crime to take or possess videotapes of factory farming that might harm the commercial interests of the farmer.

In both cases, an organization is trying to maintain power by hiding information from the public. Can you imagine being arrested for possession of a photo of a pig?

It’s easy to argue that from the public’s point of view, laws like this are a bad idea. The public certainly benefits from the outing of bad doctors and from the improved hygeine of factory farms. In that sense, it’s unethical for doctors and legislators to subvert their responsibilities by ordering the unempowered to shut up.

I think it’s interesting to think about from the doc’s point of view (and the chicken farmer), as well. The temptation is for those in charge to defend the status quo by fighting transparency. This ignores a simple truth:

When book reviews are posted, book sales go up.

Yes, the argument of fairness matters. The patients have no choice, the chickens certainly have no choice and the consumers don’t have much choice either. There’s an argument that goes beyond choice, though… it turns out that transparency increases profitability.

If every chicken coop has a video camera in it, quality will obviously go up. Confidence in the product will go up. Employee behavior will improve as well, because it’s hard to torture a chicken if you know you’re going to get caught.

But wait, you might argue… if we have to take better care of the chickens, our costs will go up as well.

Here’s the thing: when consumers get used to transparency, they’re also more interested in the quality of what you sell, and are more likely to willingly pay extra. They’ll certainly cross the street to buy from an ethical provider. And once people start moving in that direction, the cost of being an unethical provider gets so high that you either change your ways or fade away.

Chicken farms don’t need a law prohibiting possession of images. They need a producer who will make a ton of great (true) chicken movies. Inundate us with images of cleanliness and quality instead of blacking us out. Don’t race to the bottom (you might win). Instead, force your competition to race you to the top instead.

Aside: the same objection happened when we started regulating hygeine in restaurant kitchens. Yes, it got more expensive to clean the pots and kill the rodents, but it was okay, because post-Duncan Hines, demand for quality went up enough to more than pay for it.

The same argument holds true for doctors. Once information about good doctors becomes widespread, patients will be more willing to seek out those doctors, rewarding the ones who consistently take better care of their patients. The entire profession doesn’t suffer (we’ll still go to a doctor) merely the careless doctors will.

One more: A leading politician in India is arguing that bribery (in certain transactions) ought to be legalized. Why? Because if the briber feels free to rat out the bureaucrat, bribery goes down.

In all three cases, sunlight is an antiseptic and the marketplace rewards those that behave–and the entire market grows when the standards increase.

Consumers and those that want their admiration ought to reward those in favor of transparency (what a great opportunity for McDonald’s). And the antidote for speech a provider doesn’t like isn’t a contract or a law. The antidote to speech you don’t like is more speech.

It’s reported that student debt in the USA is approaching a trillion dollars, five times what it was ten years ago.

Are those in debt buying more education or are they seeking better branding in the form of coveted diplomas?

Does a $40,000 a year education that comes with an elite degree deliver ten times the education of a cheaper but no less rigorous self-generated approach assembled from less famous institutions and free or inexpensive resources?

If not, then the money is actually being spent on the value of the degree, on the doors it will open and the jobs it will snag. If this marketing strategy works big, it pays for itself in no time.

A marketing tactic might move the dial, but that doesn’t mean it’s always worth the money.

The question is whether a trillion dollars is the right amount for individuals to spend marketing themselves. What would happen if people spent it building up a work history instead? On becoming smarter, more flexible, more self-sufficient and yes, able to take more risk because they owe less money…

There’s no doubt that we need smarter and more motivated people in our organizations. I’m not sure we need them to be better labeled or more accredited.

Why is Twitter so interested in acquiring TweetDeck? To answer that question, one has to dig deeper into Twitter’s complicated relationship with “frenemy” UberMedia.

Earlier today, The Wall Street Journal published a story claiming that Twitter is in talks to acquire TweetDeck, the most popular third-party client on Twitter’s platform, for around $50 million. This wouldn’t normally surprise us; however, TweetDeck was reportedly acquired for $30 million by Bill Gross’s UberMedia in February.

There’s a lot of backstory between Twitter and UberMedia. UberMedia, founded just a few months ago as an Idealab company, is the owner of UberSocial, Twidroyd, Echofon and UberCurrent, a combination that accounts for more than 11% of all tweets sent. It was founded by serial entrepreneur and Idealab creator Bill Gross. Idealab is the Pasedena-based incubator behind a wide range of companies including Picasa, Compete, Citysearch, eToys.com, Answers.com and Netzero.

There has been recent friction between Twitter and UberMedia. In February, Twitter banned UberSocial and Twidroyd for API violations. This was just weeks after the rumors about the TweetDeck acquisition first hit the wires.

According to two sources close to the situation, both of whom spoke on condition of anonymity, UberMedia and TweetDeck were indeed talking about an acquisition. But either the deal never closed or it closed and then fell apart shortly afterward.

Then, last week, CNN first reported that UberMedia was building a Twitter competitor, one that could possibly remove the 140-character limit restriction on messages. From what our sources tell us, CNN’s report is accurate: UberMedia has been working on a direct competitor to Twitter. (As expected, Bill Gross wouldn’t say anything about the rumors surrounding UberMedia when I visited Idealab last week).

We don’t know very much about the UberMedia competitor, but we don’t believe Bill Gross’s goal is to destroy Twitter. Instead, it’s more likely UberMedia’s Twitter competitor is a backup plan in case its apps get banned from Twitter’s platform for some reason. Our belief is that Bill Gross would much rather work with Twitter than compete with it.

That brings us to today’s rumors about Twitter’s interest in TweetDeck. Recently, Twitter’s Ryan Sarver advised developers not to create Twitter clients that reproduce “the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience,” so it’s natural to think that Twitter is simply trying to consolidate its fragmented ecosystem by acquiring TweetDeck.

However, this acquisition is more likely a defensive move by the microblogging platform to keep TweetDeck out of UberMedia’s hands. Twitter simply doesn’t want one company controlling more than 20% of the ecosystem; that acquisition would give UberMedia way too much leverage and influence over Twitter’s platform. That’s why Twitter is willing to dish out $20 million more than UberMedia’s initial offer to TweetDeck.

Now for the big question: How will this piece of Twitter theater end?

The answer to that question lies with TweetDeck founder Iain Dodsworth, who will ultimately decide whether he wants to sell. He hasn’t confirmed or denied any rumors yet, but we’ve reached out to him via email and will update you if and when he responds.

Guest post by Nancy Duarte, founder of Duarte, author of Resonate and Slide:ology. Follow her on Twitter and read her blog.

Social media has forced presentations to become an interactive conversation. Presenters who embrace audience participation are connecting their audiences to their ideas in a more meaningful way. Using social media as a connection tool goes beyond just looking at the twitter feed to assess if you were boring or not. There are six ways to utilize social media while planning your presentation that will ensure an authentic connection and relevant conversation occur.

1.) Listen: The first step is to know your audience. Really know them. Listening to social media channels is the perfect way to find out what your audience is like. Where do they hang out (in life and on the web)? What unites them? What incites them? What keeps them up at night? When you know who you are talking to, you’ll come across as a friend to them when you present. It’s easy to persuade a friend. Genuine empathy with them will help you be perceived as sincere. Identify what your audience is currently believing or how they are behaving, and then develop a clear Audience Journey toward the transformation you envision. Next, you need to look at the context of your topic, community, or industry. What’s the story landscape of your competitors? Do you stand out? Is your approach better? Create a matrix for each channel through which your competitors communicate. Is their message clear? Could you tweak yours to contrast more?

2.) Create: Establishing the context above enables you to create your most resonant message. After you develop your narrative arc, yes, create some traditional slides, but don’t stop there. You need to also craft portable visual and word-based social media objects that can be distributed across channels. These might include: repeatable sound bites, viral infographics, slideshare documents or video. The best pick-up happens on social media channels with a well-crafted message. So hone a message and then sharpen it more by testing it with some friends and even test it by dropping soundbites on microblogs to see if they get repeated. Another way to build conversation is to present a partially developed idea and let your audience, through social media objects, migrate and refine it into a brilliant idea that spreads. Shareability is, of course, the essence of social media.

3.) Present: When you’re on the stage, embrace social media in the moment too. Some presenters hold a clicker in one hand and a feedback stream in the other. You can also insert slides at appropriate moments that display an array of live chatter. Or auto-tweet live from the stage by pre-writing tweets that get sent out when you click to advance your slide. Enlist a photographer to keep the Flickr stream full of images before, during and after your talk. Feeding your audience social media objects they can forward around or react to makes them feel like part of the story. During the presentation, hire live-sketchers or visual note-takers to tweet images of what they see while you talk. Don’t let the conversation happen behind your back, deliberately create objects that fuel overt conversations.

4.) Broadcast: Hopefully you already have well-developed channels to spread your message through. The currency of social media is reciprocity. So if you haven’t yet spread the ideas of others, yours might not get much traction. You can have great objects and smart concepts, but if you haven’t built a community on the various channels your idea might not go very far. To broadcast video, you can livestream it or capture and post it as archival on YouTube and Vimeo, and also syndicate on sites like fora.tv. Give permission to the audience to microblog plus invite bloggers and media to cover your presentation. Hire a fun person to host a video crew to capture the audience reaction and post it immediately following your presentation. E-mail your base to look at and expose your idea. There are endless ways to get the ideas from your presentation out there.

5.) Measure: The most important component of assessing effectiveness isn’t necessarily how many people you reached—but did you reach the right ones? Did your messages stick, stay intact and resonate? The integrity of your story can be as important as the population it reaches. Digging through the statistics generated from your talk can be daunting. I heard Katie Paine once say that you need an Abby (from NCIS) to dig into your data to really understand how well you connected to your audience. This step is often overlooked, but it is very valuable.

6.) Adapt: Armed with insights into how the social web treated you and your language, you can make informed decisions on how to modify your message, delivery and visuals so you resonate more deeply in the future. Capture and apply those findings immediately to make an even more meaningful connection with the audience the next time around.

If you look at TED as a media phenomenon, there have been 400 million presentations viewed so far. When a presentation is developed and distributed with an eye to these new strategies it can change the world. (Click image below for full size).

Digital print-at-home coupons get more first-time buyers to try a product, but they aren’t as cost-efficient as standard coupons, according to a new report.

Analyzing data from a panel of 23 million loyalty card shoppers from 2008 to 2010, Knowledge Networks found printable digital coupons generally performed better than standard coupons. The company reports that such coupons were more likely to attract new consumers — 46% of digital coupon redeemers hadn’t bought the product before, compared with 34% of standard coupon redeemers. Overall, digital coupons drew more new buyers than print coupons did by a margin of 35%.

Digital coupons also drove incremental redemptions (purchases that wouldn’t have occurred without the coupon) at a greater rate — 77% versus 68%.

But such coupons yield 18% less return on investment than standard coupons, the study found. Knowledge Networks attributed the lower ROI for digital coupons to the “historically low distribution costs” for standard print coupons. According to the report, Baby Boomers and large families were the biggest users of both types of coupons.

The report, which will be released Tuesday, is available here. The research did not look at mobile coupons.

Image courtesy of Flickr, sds2027

TED is offering anybody the opportunity to join the ranks of Bill Gates, Al Gore and Jane Goodall as a TED speaker. Starting this month, the organization will begin accepting auditions via YouTube and Vimeo videos for its TED2012 conference.

“We’re holding this audition to give a chance to the undiscovered talent we know is out there — and especially talent that can help us continue to reinvent the ancient art of the spoken word,” reads the online application.

Hosting open auditions fits with the conference’s 2012 theme, “Full Spectrum,” which TED describes as a focus on using creative methods to reach an audience. Some suggestions the application gives for fitting this theme include adding a custom-animated movie, improv or more images than words to a presentation.

Public auditions also fit in nicely with the organization’s attempt to spread its reach beyond the 1,300-attendee, five-day elite conference for which it is best known. In an effort to become more open, the conference started posting talks online in 2006, hosts a translation project that helps provides access to non-English speakers, and launched a Q&A platform in February that encourages users to engage with TED speakers and other thought leaders.

This is the first time that the conference has held public auditions. You can submit yours by uploading a one-minute video to YouTube or Vimeo that explains your idea, and then linking to it in the online application.

Finalists will give their presentations live in New York on May 24, and the best auditions will be posted on TED.com. One winner will be chosen to give a main-stage presentation at TED2012 in California.

Hamilton Chan is CEO and Founder of Paperlinks. With the free Paperlinks iPhone app, featured previously by Apple as the #1 New & Noteworthy app, consumers can scan and view QR code content with a native app experience. Paperlinks also provides a powerful platform for generating QR codes, hosting content, and tracking their performance.

The QR code: A thing of beauty or an eyesore? The magical barcodes that can be scanned by a smartphone to launch an offline-to-online experience are often criticized for their black and white checkerbox appearance. Those who doubt that QR codes will go mainstream are quick to point out that the look of QR codes will deter marketers and advertisers from using them.

Fortunately, QR codes are malleable and can be redesigned in truly extraordinary ways, while still maintaining their scanability. The truth is, QR codes no longer have to be checkerbox in appearance. We’ve entered a new phase of “designer codes” that can be integrated into marketing campaigns in an attractive way that isn’t an eyesore.

QR codes have so much potential from a design perspective, so let’s take a look at a few tricks and techniques you should keep in mind when designing a code to enhance your brand and appeal to your audience.

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1. Add a Color Palette

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The easiest way to add branding power to your code is to add color to it. Your QR code does not have to be standard black and white in order to be scanned. You can embed multiple colors and apply a color gradient without affecting scanability. The only rule of thumb is that the code color should generally be dark and placed against a light-colored background. Make sure the contrast is sufficient, or the code will be difficult to scan.

A “reversed out” code, where the background is dark and the boxes are light colored, is generally not recommended. Only a small handful of QR code readers can treat such codes as a film negative and properly interpret the data.

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2. Soften Hard Edges with Round Corners

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One of the QR code’s greatest aesthetic flaws is its numerous hard edges. You can dramatically lessen the severity of this look by strategically rounding some corners. It is not necessary to round all of the corners but softening up the edges will definitely make the code appear more friendly and approachable.

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3. Incorporate Dimensionality for 3D Impact

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One high impact way to brand your QR code is to obstruct some of the boxes with imagery, such as a logo. By placing an image in front of the code, you imbue the code with a sense of depth. An ordinary barcode suddenly becomes a form of artwork, and you can really make a statement with the way you melt boxes together or choose to obstruct aspects of the code.

Fun ideas include adding a logo to the center of the code, but you could also add interesting elements to the corners or the sides for an even less standard look. Adding images or characters between the boxes is another playful way to dress the code with personality and style.

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4. Use QR Codes With 30% Error Correction

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If you decide to add in a logo to create a 3D feel for your QR code, you need to decide which part of the coding to obstruct with your logo. The key to creating these eye-popping designer codes is to take advantage of the fact that up to 30% of a QR code’s data can be missing or obstructed, and still be scanned. QR codes can be generated with 0%, 10%, 20% or 30% error correction rates built in. Building in the 30% error correction rate adds more noise (extra boxes) within the code, but those extra boxes within the code can then be removed to make way for a logo or other interesting imagery.

If you use a QR code with 0% error correction, the code will look more streamlined, but opportunities to brand the code by adding in a logo are very limited. Removing or obstructing a single box within a 0% error QR code could render it unscannable.

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Apply a Trial-and-Error Process

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Technically, it is possible to mathematically compute which boxes in a QR code are the buffers that can be removed, but such computations are generally unnecessary. By applying a simple process of trial-and-error, anyone can begin applying their design techniques to a code and then test for scannability.

Be sure to test your code’s scannability with multiple QR readers, ideally three or four. Some readers may be able to overcome some stylistic elements of your designer code, whereas others will not. Deploying your code without testing for scannability is designer malpractice and can cause serious heartache with clients. It is true that even with reasonable precautions, designer codes may still be difficult to scan, so you must always weigh the costs of scanning difficulty against the benefits of designing a code that is eye-catching. If a designer code takes more than a few seconds to scan, it probably needs to be redesigned.

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Conclusion

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In the end, creating branded QR codes is as much art as it is science. The mathematical qualities of a QR code and the impact of a clever design can truly elevate a QR code to the point where the code becomes the central artwork of a piece of marketing collateral. Applying designer best practices will enhance scanning conversion rates and effectively augment an offline item with online capabilities.

It is only a matter of time before QR codes hit mainstream. Knowing how to innovate both in technology and design, and how to implement a QR code in the right way for your business, will keep your brand on the cutting edge of marketing and technology.

It’s no secret that China is one of our biggest trading partners. In fact the country is second only to Canada in terms of the value of goods traded. But space is one sector of the economy where for all practical purposes no trade exists between the United States and China.

China would like to warm the space trade between the two countries, but officials with the China Aerospace and Space Technology Corporation (CAST) recently admitted they won’t be able to match the prices of California based upstart SpaceX.

Founded by Elon Musk, SpaceX recently announced plans for a heavy lift rocket capable of sending payloads to low earth orbit under the long sought after rate of $1,000 per pound. The company recently received praise after launching the first private spacecraft to be successfully retrieved back on earth after an orbital flight.

At a space symposium last week in Colorado, Lei Fanpei, Vice President of CAST, says he hopes to open the doors to trade with the United States in space related products including solar arrays according to a story in Aviation Week and Space Technology. But in the same article, unnamed officials within the Chinese space industry say they are skeptical of the low prices being advertised by SpaceX. The same officials concede the current generation of Chinese Long March launch vehicles could not match the private company’s low rates for LEO payloads.

China is currently developing the Long March 5 which it says will be capable of delivering 25,000 kilograms (~55,000 pounds) to LEO. The new Falcon Heavy rocket from SpaceX is being designed to carry 53,000 kilograms (~117,000 pounds) to LEO.

Animation of Falcon Heavy Rocket: SpaceX