On paper, the Tesla Roadster is the electric car that's finally going to revolutionize transportation. I want to see it happen. I hope it happens. If Tesla wants to change the course of history, it has to change the mixed history of electric vehicle (EV) cars. It certainly attracted a wide range of celebrities and tech fans to the launch at its Signature One-Hundred event.

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Tesla says it will ship its first Roadsters in mid-2007. The numbers are Corvette-like: 0 to 60 mph in 4 seconds, 250 miles between charges, and recharging in 3.5 hours. So says Tesla. The price however, is more Porsche than Corvette, with the Roadster estimated to sell for $80,000 to $120,000. People buying a Roadster are not clipping PriceChopper coupons.

The Roadster will employ a lithium-ion battery (same as in most laptops and cellphones) rather than lead acid, as used in most cars for starter motors, or nickel-metal hydride, used in most hybrids such as the Toyota Prius. To get the claimed 250 miles, rather than 60 to 100 miles from the previous iteration EVs, it will likely do what all other EVs do: charge the battery all the way up, to 100 percent, then run it all the way down to no charge (ideally you coast into the garage with the last burst of energy as the headlights go dim).

And that, claims Toyota, is the recipe for short-life batteries. At a hybrid technology seminar this spring, Toyota and Lexus said it can get essentially life-of-the-car performance from hybrid batteries, meaning 10-plus years, if they only live in the middle 60 percent of their charge range. That's easy to do when you've got a small gasoline or diesel engine that can go it alone should the batteries get down to 20 per cent charge. Treat rechargeable car batteries like laptop batteries and you'll get a couple good years out of them -- then you need to start thinking about a replacement, but for $2,500 a pop and more, not less than $250.

Electric vehicles get the best mileage when the passengers are uncomfortable. If you run the air conditioning in summer or the heater in winter (to say nothing of flicking on the heated seats) you're cutting into your driving range. Ditto for running 400-watt audio systems. Hills are tough on electric vehicles, too, unless you regenerate power the way hybrids do. Headlights after dark aren't good for driving range.

Electric vehicles such as the General Motors EV1 of the 1990s failed because they were just too limited in usefulness for real people to buy. It might serve you fine driving 10 miles to the office, but not for weekend trips to the beach, let alone on vacations or college-search trips.

Drive it kids-to-carpool-to-mall-to-home and you'd probably have enough juice, but it might struggle the last couple miles and the lights would be dimming. A lot of them were either bought by the government or with government subsidies. An EV is not, despite what proponents say, a zero-emissions car, because you're burning coal, oil, or natural gas somewhere to make the electrons that power your car. That said, it's probably cleaner overall that a fossil-fuel vehicle.

We'll have to see if Tesla fares better than its EV predecessors. Tech industry people aren't superheroes, but they more than the traditional automakers tend not to be phased by seemingly insurmountable problems.

The nothing-is-impossible attitude is working in other areas. Eclipse Jet Co. is underwritten by other tech sector millionaires and if it takes off, literally, it's going to rewrite the price/performance rules for small business jets. Mark Cuban is unlike anything else the NBA has ever seen. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is revolutionizing charitable giving. Car tech may be the next frontier for high-tech geniuses. And it's not like the industry is completely different. They already know how to make software crash.

Want to see what the Roadster looks like? Continue on to our visual slideshow of the Tesla Roadster...

The feeling was electric, and so was the drivetrain, when Tesla Motors unveiled the Tesla Roadster this week in Santa Monica, CA.

Created by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, the Roadster is a supercharged electric vehicle with the look and feel (and price) of a high-end sports car. The Roadster can get top speeds of over 130 mph, Tesla says, and does 0-60 mph in about 4 second with a whisper-quiet electric motor.

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Co-founders, Tesla Motors CEO Martin Eberhard and VP Engineering Marc Tarpenning, invited 350 guests to the Barker Hangar in a Santa Monica airport to see and test-drive the electric sports car. Celebrities in attendance included Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and "The West Wing" actor Bradley Whitford.

Eberhand and Tarpenning's vision was to create a high-tech, zero emissions sports car that's not dependent on fossile fuels except at the generating station. Tesla Motors believes most electric cars in the past treated the driving experience as an afterthought second to the environmental and efficiency benefits of an electric vehicle.

With the Roadster, Tesla Motors plans to provide a car with all the benefits of an electric vehicle and the sheer thrill of a high-end sports car. Last night's event was intended to educate, attract investors, and sign up "Signature One Hundred" people who will buy the first hundred Tesla Roadster's.

Ederhard is the former co-founder of two successful start-ups. He was CEO of NuvoMedia and Vice President of Electronics at Belfort Memory International before that. Tarpenning co-founded NuvoMedia, and oversaw the development of the electronic and software systems for the Roadster, website and back-end information systems, while a serving as a CEO for Tesla. Eberhard and Tarpenning provided the early funding for the company, and were joined in 2003 by Elon Musk. Musk, who is a CEO of SpaceX, is a major investor and serves as Chairman of Tesla Motors. Last month Tesla announced it secured an additional $40 million in financing led by Musk and VantagePoint Venture Partners.

The Roadster offers a 3-phase, 4-pole, 185kW electric motor. Unlike most car batteries that are lead acid or for hybrids nickel-metal hydride, the Roadster's Energy Storage System is powered by a lithium-ion battery. Typically electric cars last 60 miles before a recharge. According to Tesla, the Roadster can last 250 miles on a single charge. A full charge takes 3.5 hours. The Roadster comes with Electric Vehicle Service Equipment (EVSE), a home-based charging system as well as an optional mobile charging kit for powering up on the road.

The vehicle still needs to pass Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) implemented by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) before it can be sold to the public. Tesla plans to sell the Roadster for $80,000-$120,000, releasing it in mid-2007, first in California and then expanding to Chicago, New York, and Miami, then other cities.

Want to see what the Roadster looks like? Continue on to our visual slideshow of the Tesla Roadster...

D-Link recently came out with a Wi-Fi Phone. Now Belkin is joining the Wi-Fi phone market with the Belkin Wi-Fi Phone for Skype. With it, you can make free, unlimited domestic and International calls to other Skype users without the use of a computer. And just like D-Link's model, you can make calls to landline phones worldwide.

Making a call is just like using Skype: use the menu to find your contact and view your online availability. It also features WPA and WPA2 with PSK support for secure calls and 802.11b/g compatibility.

The Wi-Fi Phone will ship in North America in August 2006 and will sell for $149.99. You can preorder it now on Amazon.com.

It launches in Asia, Europe, and Australia soon after.

[via Belkin press release]

The nation's biggest cell-phone carrier, Cingular has had a tough time the past few years. They're

like the snake that swallowed the rhino - trying to absorb AT&T Wireless caused some severe

indigestion, including billing problems, dropped calls and annoying customer service issues.

But according to a conference call they had today, things are getting better. They added 1.5 million

customers in the past quarter, and lowered their "churn" -- the number reflecting how many people

leave Cingular -- to 1.7% from 2.2% a year ago. Only 12% of Cingular's network remains to be

integrated, combining the old "orange" and "blue" networks. This is important because integrated sites

have a 40% lower rate of blocked calls and a 20% lower rate of dropped calls than non-integrated

locations. If your bad memories of Cingular are more than a few months old, they'd also like you to know

they've integrated 28% of their network just in the past six months.

Integration also covers Cingular's billing systems; running 80 different billing systems has been a

big headache for both the carrier and its customers. That project is 96% done, Cingular says, with

only 2.1 million GSM customers remaining on old billing computers.

Cingular's making strides to get rid of the old TDMA system, too. A legacy of the 90s, TDMA is

crowding up spectrum that Cingular needs for high-speed wireless, but a lot of big corporate

customers were on TDMA, so Cingular needed to go a bit gently. Only 8% of their subscribers are still

on TDMA, which says they'll hopefully be able to free up some airwaves for better GSM and high-speed

signals.

Speaking of high-speed, Big Orange is way behind Verizon and Sprint in ramping up broadband wireless

networks. Where VZW and Sprint both cover more than a hundred US cities with their EV-DO networks,

Cingular's only barely hit two dozen, and that's with some creativity (like calling Phoenix and

Scottsdale separate cities. They ain't.) On the call, they announced their newest high-speed market --

Tucson, AZ -- and repeated that they'll cover "most major markets" by the end of this year, which

they've been saying for a while. We'll see.

If you want to read more from Cingular's presentation, you can see it on their Web site. Have things been getting better for you on Cingular? Tell us here.

Smile! It's the second best thing you can do with your lips. What's the first? Kissing of course!! But we all know that it sucks to kiss someone with bad breath. You don't want to be mean to your lover by not kissing him or her, but bad breath is just nasty.

Thankfully, SEJU Engineering developed the Kiss Me Meter: a personal bad breath detector. (Yes, things like this DO exist!) It uses an MEMS gas sensor, equipped with a re-calibration function, to detect 5 levels of mouth smell and displays those levels in different colors on the LED display.

The site doesn't say much more about it, but judging by the photos, it looks like it may hook up to your cell phone in order to view your readings. Stay tuned because I'm going to track down this Kiss Me Meter and use it on my boyfriend (sorry hun, sometimes your breath stinks).

The Kiss Me Meter sells for $39.95. Or, you can go the non-tech route and just pop a Life Saver.

[via TechieDivas]

Can there really be more to Spam than just processed food in a can or an inbox-clogger?

I do like the idea of "found art" evidenced by the spam clock (left) that sits on my desk. Some resourceful artist took an old spam can, added a battery and three hands, and voila: a fun and practical conversation starter.

But I never would have dreamed an artist would find a way to make e-mail spam into art. After all, it's one of the worst annoyances facing office workers, aside from soda machines that don't stock Dr. Pepper.

Artist Alex Dragulescu looks at it a different way. He uses algorithms to generate complex images based on spam content. (See image on right) "I have certain key words controlling, for example, the size. . .Like how many times is 'Viagra' in the text, and maybe it will control the size of the petals," he told the Christian Science Monitor recently.

It all started when he was in grad school--he and his friend used spam to create full multimedia presentations. He's currently at the Experimental Game Lab at the University of California, San Diego, where he continues to use spam as an artistic expression. Genius!

Sometimes commercials are more entertaining than TV shows these days. If you haven't seen "The Computer is Personal Again" HP campaigns yet, check them out. Each commercial features Mark Cuban, Shaun White, Jay-Z, and Mark Burnett in their own personal digital world.

My favorite HP Personal Again TV commercial is the one with Jay-Z. Noted as the CEO of hip-hop, he says that he likes playing chess online and taking photos you won't see in the tabloids (I'm assuming the "private" ones with Beyonce). As a bonus, if you go to the HP site and watch each ad, you can then view the celebrity's "personal desktop icons". On Jay-Z's, you'll find vacation pix, rocawear fall 2006 photos, best chess moves, and his resume. Holla!

HP's new ad spots show the roles a PC plays in each of their professional and personal lives (but I doubt they have the time to use them!). The interesting thing about these HP commercials is that you never see the spokeperson's face. C'mon, they're not that geeky-looking! (Unless the company was going for a more "Charlie Brown's teacher" touch.)

If you're a fan of Pharrell Williams (how can you not love that song, "Beautiful"), then you already know his new album, "In My Mind," will be released on July 25. As if he needs the publicity, he's also going to debut in the "The Computer is Personal" ad campaign. The commercial will be broadcasted at Vibe.com on Monday, July 24 and on TV Wednesday, July 26.

[via Vibe]