Was reading the Times Online article that the flying car from Massachusetts based Terrafugia is getting close to reality. The wings of the car fold up so that it's about the same size as a big SUV - all in about 15 seconds! An amazing feat of engineering and inventiveness.
 
My only concern would be safety. If this vehicle was treated as a plane, then I'm ok with it. I think airplane safety regulations are pretty strict so if any person who owned one of these needed to have a full pilot's license, that would be a must. As the old saying goes, nobody ever died when their car ran out of gas.

It's a great way to start what will be a hectic week. We're starting our big fundraising push tomorrow and while Ike is on the road, I'll be pushing out some interesting improvements to some of our core products. Good news is that January is shaping out to be a blockbuster month for us (best month of our existence!). The right combination of the post holiday credit card rush (always happens - people max out their cards and need more) plus news that the Fed lowered interest rates a few weeks back have opened up the floodgates for mortgage apps. Let's hope the remaining 19 days of the month are just as good as the first 12.

News came out last week from the Detroit Auto Show that Toyota and Ford will be looking to release pure electric vehicles (not range extending fakers like the Chevy Volt) in the near future - about 2012. It seems to be a theme at this year's show, as all other automakers were releasing some sort of hybrid version of something. The big question is whether next year's show will still have the same focus. As oil prices decline (I paid $1.89 per gallon the other day!), there will be less pressure for consumers to buy fuel efficient cars thus less incentive for automakers to develop new technologies. Do you think a company like Tesla Motors could have been built and funded in an era where gasoline costs $1.25 per gallon? Perhaps, but it wouldn't get as much attention as it does (and deservedly so, the Tesla Roadster is amazing). When you think about it rationally, there are many reasons to want to get a fuel efficient car, the least of which should be to save money. The environment and national security should be the top reasons but often times we only see what's directly affecting our wallets.

UPDATE: As a point of clarification, I don't mean to say that people shouldn't be cost conscious in these difficult times.  My point is that not buying a hybrid because it may cost more initially is not a good argument.  The cost of buying a hybrid versus a non-hybrid compact or mid-size car is not that great plus the savings in gas over time will minimize that gap even further.  If you don't want to buy a hybrid because you need to haul kids, groceries, lumber, etc. that's fine.  However, if you're waffling over whether to get a Corolla, Focus, or Jetta, buying a Prius or a Civic Hybrid isn't much of a stretch.  Trust me, you'll make that money back in about 4-5 years.

CrunchGear has a demo video from CES of the Palm Pre. Overall, I think it looks pretty cool. Definitely a huge step up from where the PalmOS was before, but I can't help but feel like it's a very "Me, too" product. The Card View method of viewing applications is nice and there are some pretty nice innovations on the Contacts side of things. If you don't currently own a touch screen smart phone, I think the Pre is a very viable alternative to the iPhone, Blackberry Storm, or anything from HTC.
 
Rumor has it that they are going to price the phone at $399 SUBSIDIZED, which would put it at the high end of touch screen smart phones. A quote from Palm CEO Ed Colligan, as reported by Peter Kafka, when asked if Palm considered pricing the Pre at $200 or below to compete with the iPhone was "Why would we do that when we have a significantly better product?" Well Ed, you don't really have a significantly better product. You can make the argument that the Pre is as good, at best slightly better than the iPhone (though I wouldn't). In other words, I wouldn't switch to the Pre from my 1st generation iPhone because there's nothing that much better in the Pre. And let's not forget that anything that can be claimed to be better on the Pre can easily be copied in future iPhone software updates.

As someone who has had a litany of smart phones, it took a significant feature or service improvement from one device to another for me to make the switch. I started with the original Sidekick, moved to a color Sidekick (for the color, of course), then to a T-Mobile MDA (Edge performance increase plus more flexibility in adding apps on Windows Mobile), and finally to an iPhone (my first video iPod plus all the amazing UI features). I even bypassed an upgrade to the 3G iPhone because faster data speed wasn't enough for me to pay extra for essentially the same UI. Suffice it to say, simply being a little bit better (if at all) is not enough for someone to want to pay $100-$200 more for a Pre than a 3G iPhone.

I wrote a post a while back where I did a back of the envelope calculation of Facebook's valuation - somewhere between $1.5 to $1.75 billion. I based it on revenue numbers of about $300M to $350M (5 times revenue was my rationalization) and if Facebook revenues are higher, I'll revise that estimate up.
 
I was watching Tech Ticker today where Sarah Lacy was interviewing Paul Kedrosky about Facebook's outlook for 2009. The question of valuation came up and Paul stated his estimate was about $500M to $600M. Though I don't agree with that valuation, I can see how he came up with this number. The online advertising market has contracted since last year so even though Facebook may be growing in revenue, I don't see how it can grow in the most important number of revenue per user. Sarah's response showed she was well on the other side of the fence in her defense of Facebook, which I don't agree with, as well. Her argument that Facebook was still an early stage private company in product development mode and not focusing on revenue is a bit off. Facebook has been around since 2004 and has made a few attempts at monetizing its traffic with no real success. Her other assertion that Facebook was similar to Google and that eventually they'll pull it off is also a stretch. Google did not raise $516M (it raised about $25M) and in its 5th year of operation made almost $1.5B in sales and over $100M in net income. I don't know what Facebook's revenues are like but I doubt it's more than $400M-$500M and they're most certainly not profitable (break-even at best). The fallacy in comparing Facebook with Google is that it costs Google far less to support each user on its system than Facebook AND it generates far more revenue per user than Facebook does. Until Facebook can find the magic bullet, I can't justify giving it a higher valuation.