Automakers Getting into Wi-Fi in a Big Way

Automakers are getting around to putting WiFi in their products, but is it too late?

American and German car and truck manufacturers have announced a big push toward making their vehicles "rolling hot spots," the kind of Internet connectivity point that moves along the modern person's increasingly mobile lifestyle. One key concern, though, will be cost. Specifically, if you have a smartphone for which you already pay a data plan fee, would you shell out some extra cash to ensure that you have Wi-Fi in the car as well? Depends, I suppose, on how badly you depended on Internet access 24/7 for your job, family, Facebook needs.

Still, those are details that are sure to be ironed out later, once everybody gets a whiff of a full outlay of MyFordTouch, which sidesteps that thorny extra Wi-Fi issue by simply allow passengers and drivers to plug their Internet-capable devices straight into the car's computer. Ford has offered a few Internet-capable vehicles before, but the push is really getting going now, along with progress from GM, Daimler, Honda, Hyundai, Toyota, and Volkswagen. Nokia has helped in that regard by introducing a Car Connectivity Consortium, the members of which have common technical standards.

Of course, there is the basic, stripped-down model and then there's the other end of the spectrum. Audi has created a car that offers a factory-installed mobile hotspot that allows up to eight devices to be connected at the same time. Talk about draining the battery! Given that the car is an Audi, it's not exactly a people-mover, either. Even in a six-passenger vehicle, that's more than one device per person.

Going a different way, as usual, is Saab, which has gone and come up with their own idea, an operating system based on Google's Android protocols, complete with the flexibility of third-party developers doing the heavy post-installation lifting by designing apps. The Saab system even has a cool name: IQon.

Stay tuned.

No Cash for Girl Scout Cookies? They Take Credit

There's modern and then there's modern. Now, the Girl Scouts are modern.

Capitalizing on a trend away from carrying around cash in your clothes, wallet, or purse, the Girl Scouts have now found a way for all of us to part with our money even if we don't have any money on us at the time.

They now take credit cards.

Want that extra box of Thin Mints for your friends or neighbors? Now you can get that extra box — and another two or 10 — as long as the Girl Scouts have a smartphone and a GoPayment device strapped to the top of that smartphone.

That little add-on, courtesy of the IT company Intuit, enables the virtual purchasing of cookies in a way never before seen. Break out the plastic, get a few boxes of goodies.

So the $714 million business will get even bigger. Yep, that's the annual take of the Girl Scouts in exchange for all those cookies. (Take away the production costs and you probably end up with less than the whole $714 million, but the final figure will still be a lot more than the Girl Scouts would get from donations that gain their givers nothing in return.)

So far, the idea has proved monetarily successful, as initial reports of troops selling out of existing stock more quickly. The trial is on in a couple of states now; but if current success is anything to go by, then the rollout nationwide can't be too far behind.

The play's the thing, all 39 of them

"Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, Romeo?"

One place the noble yet doomed Montague can be found every year is at the Atlanta Shakespeare Company, which produces the famed Romeo and Juliet every February to keep the locals, especially school groups, happy as they watch the familiar tragic story of Juliet and her love, the self-styled "fortune's fool."

The Atlanta company recently made a splash for being the first American Shakespeare company to have produced all 39 plays written (at least in part) by William Shakespeare. "All the world's a stage" indeed.

Traditionalists, in the winter of their discontent, might object to the number 39, since scholars through the "vale of years" have traditionally ascribed 37 plays to the Bard. Yet in recent years, many scholars have added The Two Noble Kinsmen and Edward III to the canon, on the theory that enough of each of those plays is Shakespearean enough to have been written by Shakespeare himself.

With Edward III, the company's founding and artistic director, Jeff Watkins, has completed the 39-play cycle. The Atlanta company began in 1990, with a production of The Tempest. By putting on such favorites as Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Hamlet, the company is able to make enough money to also produce some of the lesser-known plays like Pericles and The Winter's Tale. If those are obscure, then Edward III, about a 14th Century monarch, is really obscure. Edward was certainly not "the noblest Roman of them all." Yet it completes the "new" canon, and so it was produced, and so it was seen, and so it goes.

"A thousand times good night!"

Rent Your New Movies, Virtually

Zediva might be a synonym for ingenious, if the company has its way. However, if copyright lawyers have their way, Zediva might also be synonymous for defunct company.

The company, a Sunnyvale, Calif., startup, has devised a method of movie rental such that fans can rent newly available movies online without having to wait the requisite 28 days by which competitors such as Netflix are constrained. How does Zediva do this? They get away with it by "renting" a DVD and a DVD player virtually. Records still show that Joe Vloggs the movie fan rented both the disc and the player, but neither item shows up in Joe's house; rather, the company applies the rental idea virtually, by making that movie available for live streaming online. The only thing that changes hands is money to cover the rental fee.

Joe can "rent" for four hours at a time, for $1.99 each time. Once the movie has started, he can pause the movie once in those four hours. He can also "keep" the DVD and player for up to 14 days without paying any extra money.

In that scenario, Joe is happy because he can see something like The Fighter not long after it came out, in the privacy of his own home, on DVD-quality transmissions (in other words, no bootlegging involved). Zediva likes it because it has Joe's money and hasn't had to spend a dime in shipping costs.

However, Netflix doesn't like it, and neither does Blockbuster.

No company has filed a lawsuit (yet). In fact, movie studios have refrained from commenting on the issue (probably because they're waiting for a risk analysis from their copyright lawyers).

Meanwhile, Joe can be happily munching on his handheld goodies as he watches the latest flicks in his mancave, enjoying (while he can) this innovative new approach to movie rentals.

He might want to hurry, though. Once the big-time copyright lawyers get their ducks in a row and their guns loaded, Zediva won't be around to service Joe anymore.

Pi Day: a Thrilling Slice of Life

Nothing says mathematics like hot dogs, lemonade, and Pi. Wait … Surely that's a mixed metaphor, or a mangled algorithm, or a nonwhole number.

We're not talking about a collection of fruit, yeast, and sugar here. No, we're talking about something far more fundamental to the psyche of the average bear. We're talking about the circumference of a circle!

That number that doesn't have a finite amount of numbers after the decimal point yet we still refer to it as a known entity? That's Pi. It's most often shortened to 3.14, for rational reasons, even though the number itself is irrational. Some bright light in a computer somewhere has now calculated the value of Pi out to more than 1 trillion digits past the decimal. That calculation probably took a bit of time and electricity, but never mind.

What we're here to talk about today, on March 14, is Pi Day. Yep, if you put the number instead of March, you get 3 14. We commonly write that as 3/14 (or 14/3 if you're in England-inspired countries that didn't declare their independence in 1776 — although the joke's on them because technically, they don't get to celebrate Pi Day because they never write the date that way).

Why do we have Pi Day? Well, it was made out of whole cloth only in the late 20th Century, so it's not like the ancient Greeks had a festival for it anything. Pi Day was first celebrated officially in 1989, in San Francisco. (The Exploratorium still trumpets this celebration every year, by the way.)

What do we do on Pi Day? Well, most of us probably do nothing. The wily among us get together for circle-measuring parties. The film-obsessed among us watch the movie Pi. The literate among us might get together to talk about Life of Pi, although that book had a main character named Pi and didn't have all that much to do with mathematics, except the ones needed to describe how that main character kept himself alive in a small for so long with the dreaded Richard Parker.

Organizers of Pi Day — and there are a few — point to Leonhard Euler as the first popular adherent to the symbol invented by William Jones, a Welsh mathematician, in the 18th Century. Organizers also point to the need to discuss Pi as if it's a matter of world importance. (I suppose it is, in that you can't really go on with living in the technologically advanced world of today without seeing wheels in all manner of places and atmospheres and stopping, at one point or another, to wonder, "Now how far around is that circle?" Thanks to Jones, Euler, and a whole host of mathematicians and mathematics teachers and fans who followed, you don't have to do the calculations yourself. All you have to remember is 3.14.

Sweet, just like pie.

P.S.: More here: The Amazing History of Pi.