Open up your mind and say, ahh...

Photo: BMW

While BMW has outpaced its German rivals in getting apps into the dash, the brand is behind Detroit in the app space, particularly in spreading the love beyond Apple. Case in point: Owners of BMW models equipped with the BMW Apps options (and also Mini vehicles with Mini Connected) can now add Stitcher SmartRadio to the system’s handful of existing apps. This is more than a year and a half after Ford made Stitcher available for its Sync AppLink system and more than six months after GM added the app to certain Buick, GMC and Chevy infotainment systems.

As with those domestic brands, BMW’s Stitcher SmartRadio app allows drivers access to thousands of talk radio programs, live broadcasts and podcasts from around the world, including content from NPR, BBC, NBC and the Wall Street Journal. The app also includes Stitcher’s new Smart Station feature that recommends programs based on user’s personal preferences – similar to Pandora – and it’s operated via a BMW vehicle’s iDrive controller. “BMW Apps adopts the familiar BMW display and controls to ensure that all functions can be operated comfortably, simply, safely and intuitively while minimizing driver distraction,” BMW told Wired in an e-mail.

The free Stitcher app can be used in any BMW equipped with the $250 BMW Apps option (or again, with Mini Connected). But if you own a compatible BMW and don’t own an iPhone or iPad you can’t get access to Stitcher using BMW Apps – or any other ConnectedDrive-specific apps, including Facebook and Twitter integration. BMW recently announced that it will add Android compatibility for most of its ConnectedDrive features, although not until the middle of next year. Of course, there’s always Bluetooth streaming, although you lose the ability to use the car’s controls and instead have to fumble with the phone.

In the meantime, BMW is throwing a bone to its Android-toting drivers by giving them access to one ConnectedDrive feature. The free My BMW Remote app that allows controlling aspects of the car from afar can now be download from Google Play and used with compatible vehicles that have an active subscription to the BMW Assist telematics system. Features include the ability to remotely lock and unlock the doors, activate the horn and parking lights to help find a vehicle in a parking lot and adjust the climate controls and use a timer function to preheat or precool the car. The app will also show a car’s location on a map and guided the owner to it as long as it’s no more than a mile away, and can send points of interest found using a Google Local Search to the vehicle’s navigation system.

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Update 3:55 p.m. ET – Darkness and bad weather has hampered the search for the missing plane but more than 100 people on the ground are continuing to search the mountains where the airplane disappeared. Two helicopters had to end their search, but are expected to try again at daybreak.

A Sukhoi Superjet 100 is missing in Indonesia after departing Jakarta with 50 people on board. The Russian jet was carrying Indonesian airline representatives as well as other airline industry passengers on a demo flight during a tour of Asia organized by the Russian plane maker.

The Sukhoi jet is Russia’s most modern airliner and first flew in 2008. The narrow-body airliner is aimed at the regional airline sector and is designed to compete with the more popular airplanes from Bombardier and Embraer. The Russian company partnered with Italy’s Alenia Aeronautica on the Superjet 100 project and the engines are a French/Russian partnership.

Sukhoi hopes to sell the 68- to 103-seat jet throughout parts of Asia, Western Europe and North America, where Russian aircraft have yet to find any customers. The Superjet 100 is a modern design with fly-by-wire control systems. Sukhoi is hoping the airplane will help shake the troubled reputation Russian-made aircraft have for questionable quality and accident rates much higher than their Western competitors. Last year Sukohi announced plans for a longer-range, business jet version of the airplane.

The Indonesian demo flight was scheduled to last less than an hour, but air traffic controllers lost contact with the jet while it was descending in a mountainous area, according to the BBC.

Sukhoi has delivered eight of the regional airliners and says it has orders for 240 more, mostly to customers outside of Russia. Indonesia-based airlines had already ordered more than 30 of the airplanes.

When Walmart bought up a tiny Silicon Valley startup called Kosmix in April of last year, it left a lot of tech watchers scratching their heads. About nine months on, the little company’s role within the mega retailer is coming into focus. Kosmix–now called WalmartLabs–is leading mobile and social research and development at Walmart, with the goal of pushing the company forward in mobile and online retail. And increasingly, it looks like Kosmix will play a key role in the retail behemoth’s international efforts.

For Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman, the company’s two cofounders, Walmart’s purchase of Kosmix was their second startup deal. They’d sold their first company, Junglee, to that other massive retailer, Amazon. Kosmix became WalmartLabs and Harinarayan and Rajaraman joined Walmart as heads of mobile and online retail. The key, it seems, is that Walmart is giving the tiny crew the space to create and innovate. “We’ve been given a lot of flexibility… and been empowered,” Rajaraman tells Fast Company.

That independence has allowed WalmartLabs to innovate at a snappy pace. A few months into moving in at Walmart and a few weeks shy of Christmas, the Labs released their first product. Shopycat, an app for Facebook, made gift recommendations based on your friends’ tastes. It saw 120,000 downloads, which Harinarayan and Rajaraman consider a healthy success. The team also re-did the search feature on Walmart’s website. Last week, they launched an online contest called “Get On The Shelf,” where products could be voted on to be included on Walmart store shelves. It wasn’t specifically requested by Walmart–it emerged organically from a WalmartLabs engineer. Even so, “Walmart believed us and allowed us to launch this effort within a very short time,” Rajaraman explains.

WalmartLabs has also been actively beefing up staff. They’ve been hiring from competitors, and have been snatching up small companies, like iOS app maker Small Society, that have grown around the core Kosmix team. There the trick is to keep things personal and equitable, Rajaraman explains. A throwback to their days with Jeff Bezos at Amazon, projects are assigned to “two pizza teams,” groups of engineers small enough for them to be fed on two large pies. “We want the team to be flat and allow everyone to communicate with each other,” Rajaraman says.

In November last year, WalmartLabs announced that they were planning a second campus in Bangalore, India. “We’ want to find the most talented people wherever they are,” Rajaraman says–just as there’s a good concentration of such people in the Bay Area, so also there’s a healthy concentration in India’s IT capital. They’ve already hired their first dozen employees. “Our expectation is to be about 100 people in two years,” Rajaraman says. “It’s our second campus.”

Their second campus, Rajaraman admits, is conveniently located. With a core group of skilled tech folk in Bangalore, should Walmart think of dipping a toe in Indian turf, they can be of use to the San Francisco group while also remaining uniquely poised to take on India’s operations. “E-commerce in India is a very exciting area,” Rajaraman says. “That’s one of the reasons having a WalmartLabs in India makes sense.”

Image: Flickr users Walmart Stores, Akshay Mahajan

Nidhi Subbaraman writes about technology and life. Follow on Twitter, Google+.

Earlier this week, Google launched Search+, and immediately the tech world cried foul. The new features heavily promote content from Google+, the company’s social network, at the top of its search results, all but turning the search engine into a massive advertisement for one of Google’s own products–a big no-no if you’ve been paying any attention to Google’s antitrust hearings.

But Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt says the search engine isn’t favoring Google+ content; rather, it would treat content from Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks equally in its search results–that is, if Twitter and Facebook would only grant it access to their data.

It’s a smart but incredibly shady move on Google’s part. On the one hand, Google has made it sound like it has fairly offered to index competitor social data in its results; on the other hand, Google is essentially extorting these competitors for their social data. If Facebook and Twitter ultimately decide not to permit Google access to their data, that’s great news for Google, which will get to promote its own social network in the billions of queries it receives daily; and if Facebook and Twitter ultimately decide to permit Google access to their data, then that’s great news for Google, too, since Google will improve its social search, and eliminate any competitive edge from Facebook, Twitter, Bing, and any other social or search networks.

Today, we see the result of this new world Google has created. Foursquare unveiled its own personalized search engine on Thursday, taking advantage of the startup’s bread and butter: the 1.5 billion user check-ins it mines for location and merchant results. Now, by heading to Foursquare.com, users can search for local restaurants or bars or trips based on this data. Essentially, this is Foursquare’s version of Google Maps, and it’s an indication of how fragmented the future of search might become.

Before, search was always performed in one place. We’d head to Google, Yahoo, or AskJeeves, search engines that would crawl the web and index every page for us. But now, as the data these engines mine becomes proprietary and more valuable to its owners, Google and modern engines such as Bing are losing access to indexing that data. So, if you want to search the social graph, you must go directly to Facebook. If you want to see real-time news and status updates, you search on Twitter, which ended its data-sharing agreement with Google last summer. And if you want mobile and location data, does Foursquare have any plans to share its data with Google or Bing?

“No,” says Alex Rainert, Foursquare’s head of product. “We’re focused on search around the intersection of social and local.”

While Rainert says it’s hard to speak to the larger strategic question, as a consumer, he does feel that “you expect to go to a place like Google or Bing and find the best content you’re looking for.” But the more data becomes core to the businesses of Google’s competitors, the more fragmented search will become. So you’re not only heading to Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare for their social data, but you might also be heading to Kayak for travel searches or Instagram for images or LinkedIn for professional networking.

For this reason, these services can’t give into Google and let the search giant index their data. “In effect, Google would be forcing them to hurt their business if they were to open the data up,” argued M.G. Siegler in a blog post.

That’s why Google has developed Google+ to compete with Facebook and Twitter, and why it’s acquired companies such as ITA to compete with engines like Kayak. It’s why Bing has worked hard to partner with Facebook, Twitter, and Kayak.

And it’s why with Search+, Google has caused a tremendous amount of controversy, and potentially an issue with the FTC, for promoting its own product in its search results.

“For years, people have relied on Google to deliver the most relevant results anytime they wanted to find something on the Internet,” Twitter said in a statement. “Often, they want to know more about world events and breaking news. Twitter has emerged as a vital source of this real-time information, with more than 100 million users sending 250 million Tweets every day on virtually every topic…We’re concerned that as a result of Google’s changes, finding this information will be much harder for everyone. We think that’s bad for people, publishers, news organizations and Twitter users.”

Responded Google, in a post on Google+: “We are a bit surprised by Twitter’s comments about Search plus Your World, because they chose not to renew their agreement with us.”

If you want to find that post, feel free to search on Google.

Image: Flickr user CowGummy

As in, “that’s not a real football team, they don’t play in Division 1″ or “That stock isn’t traded on a real exchange” or “Your degree isn’t from a real school.”

Real contains all sorts of normative assumptions and implicit criticisms for those that don’t qualify. Real is just one way to reject the weird.

My problem with the search for the badge of real is that it trades your goals and your happiness for someone else’s.