Open up your mind and say, ahh...

The first photos of Motorola’s next big Android 4G LTE release, the Droid4, have surfaced, just one day after the handset manufacturer’s super-thin, super-light, 4G-sporting Motorola Droid Razr went on sale at Verizon.

The biggest difference between the Droid Razr and the Droid4 is the slideout QWERTY keyboard. According to Droid Life, which obtained the images, the Droid4 also boasts a 4-inch Super AMOLED Advanced screen, a non-removable battery and two cameras, one of which (presumably an 8-megapixel) is capable of recording 1080p video. The device runs Android 2.3.5 (Gingerbread).

The dimensions and processor have not yet been identified, although we can expect the former to be thicker than the Droid Razr, and the processor to be at least as good as the 1.2 GHz dual-core processor that the Droid Razr uses.

Plug-in hybrids that can run on electric motors or internal combustion engines may soon be able to pick and predict their powertrain use depending on location and past driving habits.

It’s part of a collaboration between Ford, with their years of driver behavior research, and Google Prediction API, which can make useful predictions in real-time using that historical data.

Ford first announced that collaboration at Google I/O back in May. Today, the automaker will demonstrate the technology publicly for the first time, showing off a cloud-connected prototype Escape plug-in hybrid at the World Congress on Intelligent Transport Systems in Orlando. With no driver input, the Escape can automatically turn its gas engine on and off depending on whether it’s entering a dense urban zone where only EVs are allowed. Such “exclusion zones” are common in Europe, where Ford debuted their new, highly-connected Evos concept (above) earlier this year.

Most cars equipped with navigation can already let drivers know where burning fossil fuel is verboten, but the prototype Escape goes one step further, using historical data to predict whether a driver is going to be traveling though an exclusion zone and adjusting the powertrain accordingly. That way, the driver won’t run out of juice in EV-only mode. Similarly, the car may be able to optimize its hybrid drivetrain for the highway and back road portions of a commute, or keep the battery topped off in anticipation of a stop-and-go slog.

Ford vehicles equipped with Sync are already cloud-connected. But the use of such technology for purposes other than driver convenience is a departure, and foreshadows a world of vehicles that connect with one another in addition to their drivers.

“Those services thus far have been used for infotainment, navigation and real-time traffic purposes to empower the driver,” said Ford Vehicle Controls Architecture and Algorithm Design technical expert Ryan McGee. “This technology has the potential to empower our vehicles to anticipate a driver’s needs for various reasons, such as optimizing a vehicle’s powertrain efficiency.”

Back at Google I/O, Ford gave a rundown of how the technology could work. Each driver would have to opt in to an encrypted usage profile that securely collected data about driver behavior and habits. When the driver got into the car, the vehicle would access that data to predict where the car was about to be driven and optimize the powertrain accordingly. If the car had any questions along the way, it could ask the driver.

“Once the destination is confirmed, the vehicle would have instant access to a variety of real-time information so it can optimize its performance, even against factors that the driver may not be aware of, such as an EV-only zone,” McGee said.

Photo: Ford

Data is not useful until it becomes information, and that’s because data is hard for human beings to digest.

This is even more true if it’s news that contradicts what we’ve already decided to believe. Can you imagine the incredible mindshift that Mercator’s map of the world caused in the people who saw it? One day you believed something, and then a few minutes later, something else.

We repeatedly underestimate how important a story is to help us make sense of the world.

Jess Bachman wants to help you turn the data about the US budget (the largest measured expenditure in the history of mankind, I’m betting) into information that actually changes the way you think.

Hence Death and Taxes, which we’re publishing today. The new version belongs on the wall of every classroom, every public official’s office, and perhaps in the home of every person who pays taxes.

It is not possible to spend less than ten minutes looking at this, and more probably, you’ll be engaged for much longer. And it’s definitely not possible to walk away from it unchanged. That’s a lot to ask for a single sheet of paper, but that’s the power of visualizing data and turning it into information.

Kobo Vox, a competitor to the Amazon Kindle Fire, will go on sale Friday. We got our hands on the seven-inch ereader tablet, and here are our first impressions.

LIke the Kindle Fire, the Kobo Vox will retail for a relatively low price of $199 and does not come with 3G, a camera or an external microphone.

But Vox’s approach to the affordable tablet — which costs $300 less than the cheapest iPad 2 — differs from Amazon’s in that it sticks closer to the traditional tablet script.

Vox runs Android. And it looks like it runs Android. While the Kindle Fire’s Android interface looks like a bookshelf, Vox’s has the familiar app-icon layout. The home screen highlights books that have been read most recently, but when you swipe to other screens you might confuse Vox with any other Android tablet.

Borders-backed Kobo doesn’t vend non-book content like Amazon does, so the apps that come loaded on the device to provide media such as periodicals and music are from third parties. Newsstand apps Zinio and PressReader provide access to newspapers and magazines. Rdio provides the tunes.

In regard to hardware, Vox has three distinctions among other tablets: It is slightly lighter than most (14.2 ounces vs. Kindle Fire’s 14.6), allows you to add digital storage with an SD card, and its screen uses a different type of anti-reflective tech. While most screens have an anti-reflective coating, says Welch, Vox’s screen has anti-reflective properties baked in. It’s the same material used for screens in airplane cockpits, and it should make the device easier to read outdoors.

But, as usual, Kobo’s biggest departures from other ereading devices are in its software. One of these departures is that Kobo allows readers to take their content away from Kobo readers and apps.

“When you buy your first Kindle, you are marrying Jeff Bezos,” says Kobo General Manager Matt Welch.

The other departure has been a focus on social reading. In December 2010, Kobo became the first major ebook vendor to introduce a social reading app, Reading Life. The app adds statistics and badges to ebooks. On Vox, Kobo takes the “social reading” concept a step further with a product it announced at F8 called Pulse.

While Reading Life’s social features were largely contained within a separate dashboard of the Kobo app, Kobo Pulse inserts them right into books’ pages.

On each page of an ebook, there’s a button (“a pulse”) that glows stronger when there is a lot of social activity on the page. Tapping it pulls up a bar that shows how many of Kobo’s 5 million users are reading and discussing the book, how many have liked it, and how many comments the page has. Dragging it upward pulls up a dashboard that keeps track of the conversation happening throughout the book, displays reader reviews and recommends new books.

The feature will soon be available as part of the Kobo apps on iPhone and iPad. As far as I can tell, the Kobo Vox‘s biggest feat — and if it isn’t planning to get into the business of selling other types of media, Kobo’s motive behind it — is to make its social reading features accessible on a tablet device that is more affordable than an iPad.

(Is it that you can’t do it or perhaps you don’t want to do the work?)

When I was in college, I took a ton of advanced math courses, three or four of them, until one day I hit the wall. Too many dimensions, transformations and toroids for me to keep in my head. I was too stupid to do really hard math so I stopped.

Was it that I was too stupid, or did I merely decide that with my priorities, it wasn’t worth the work?

Isn’t it amazing that we’d rather call ourselves stupid than lazy? At least laziness is easy to fix.

People say that they are not gifted/talented/smart enough to play the trumpet/learn to code/write a book. That’s crazy. Sure, it may be that they don’t possess world-class talent, the sort of stuff that is one in a million. But too stupid to do something that millions and millions of people can do?

I’m not buying it. Call it as it is and live with it (or not). I’m just not willing to believe we’re as stupid as we pretend to be.

Coldplay isn’t making its latest album, Mylo Xyloto, available on Spotify or any other streaming music subscription service.

Fans will either need to purchase physical copies or MP3 downloads from places like Apple’s iTunes store, Microsoft’s Zune store or Amazon.

The reason for the decision isn’t entirely clear. An anonymous industry source told Cnet that Coldplay wants Mylo Xyloto to be heard as “one cohesive work” — which hardly makes any sense, given that the songs are available for individual purchase online.

The decision is more likely financially motivated. As one of the world’s bestselling music artists, Coldplay stands to make a great deal more money by encouraging the tens of millions of consumers who have streaming music subscriptions to purchase the songs.

Recording artists only make about three-tenths of a cent every time one of their songs is streamed, and 20 cents for every song sold on iTunes, according to estimates published in Rolling Stone.

The decision not to stream appears to be an effective one, as The Guardian points out. Adele’s latest album, 19 — which hasn’t been made available on subscription streaming services — recently broke sales records worldwide. And Mylo Xyloto is on track to hit number one.

SEE ALSO: 11 Apps and Services for Sharing, Discovering and Organizing Music

In an emailed statement, the band’s record label, EMI, said, “We always work with our artists and management on a case-by-case basis to deliver the best outcome for each release.”

Spotify, for its part, said that it respects Coldplay’s decision not to have its music on Spotify, whatever the reason. “We do however hope that they will change their minds as we believe that the Spotify model is adding, and will continue to add, huge value to the music industry,” a spokesperson said. “Right now we have already convinced millions of consumers to pay for music again, and… As we increase in scale, we will continue to re-educate millions of additional consumers as to the value of music, and we will thereby revitalize artists’ ability to make music and make money from it.”

Rhapsody declined to comment.

Should Artists Delay Album Releases on Streaming Services?

This is not necessarily the case for less established artists. Speaking of its client Idle Warship‘s decision to distribute its latest album on Spotify three weeks before its official release, Element 9 VP Stu Pflaum said, “I think we gain more than we lose, especially with an underground project like Idle Warship where it’s not that well known. Just getting the music in people’s hands is the ultimate goal.”

“Our web traffic has more than tripled in terms of site visitors and discussion,” he said in a separate interview with Billboard. “Nobody is pirating the album even after we’ve distributed promo copies. And most importantly, we’re getting real-time feedback from listeners on which tracks they favor and are able to adjust our marketing accordingly with most of our budget still intact. The group and the album have a legitimate buzz now.”

It will be interesting to see whether a trend is established between bestselling and lesser-known artists, and the timeliness with which each group releases new songs and albums on streaming music services.

The StreetScooter is a $7000 EV with a 74 mph top speed and 80 mile range. It relies on leased batteries and uses a heat pump for heating and air conditioning, and shipping company DHL has already ordered 3,500 of them — but the most interesting thing about the vehicle is how it came to be.

What began as a partnership of ten companies has grown to a collaboration among more than 50 auto parts suppliers, tech companies and software developers. Each one of them had a hand not only in building the StreetScooter, but in creating it.

Traditionally, cars are built from a top-down approach. The original equipment manufacturer (OEM) designs a vehicle and dictates design requirements to suppliers. There’s back-and-forth, but it’s clear who is in charge. Unfortunately, the process can overlook what efficiencies supply chains offer.

“The problem with this approach is that there are huge additional amounts of innovative ideas in the supply chain that could not be followed given this type of OEM focused development,” said Prof. Achim Kampker of Aachen University. He’s the managing director of the StreetScooter project, which implemented a collaborative approach that took into account the entire vehicle from design to disposal.

In business school jargon, that’s called product lifecycle management, or PLM. Each of the collaborators on the project was organized into a lead engineering group (LEG), made up of the foremost experts in each of the vehicle’s components including the exterior, powertrain and electronics.

“Everyone is on par with each other. Everyone can bring in ideas to radically try whatever makes sense. The subject matter expert comes to the table and collaborates with the other LEGs,” said Kampker. “In case of a conflict that cannot be resolved, the issue is sent to the team of leaders in program management and it is resolved at that level.”

The method that participants took to build the StreetScooter echoes the car’s design. It’s a modular vehicle, with parts that can be added, removed and reused depending on customer preference. Even the batteries are leased separately so that fleets don’t have to deal with maintenance. Kampker says that relying on the strengths of individual manufacturers to create their own modules doesn’t just maximize customizability, but also allows the StreetScooter to be built quickly and inexpensively.

“Individual functions are each integrated in a module and offer the possibility to adjust the vehicle to the individual needs of the buyer before and after the sale,” Kampker said. “The ability to reuse the components in the various models and in another vehicle also leads to significant increase in production volumes at an early stage.”

Despite a team that was made up of members from different countries who spoke different languages, despite each participating company having its own interests at heart and despite a collaborative approach that had never been tried before to build an EV, the StreetScooter was developed in about a year. It’ll be hitting the streets in Germany in the spring of next year, and there are plans to bring it to the US later on. Kampker thinks that was only possible thanks to the unique approach that put all participants on par with each other.

Could a traditional approach have yielded the same results? “In general yes, but rather than taking 12 months for the first physical prototype to be delivered, it may have taken 12 years,” Kampker said.

Photo: StreetScooter