Renault used the Paris Motor Show to demonstrate this future concept car. So as you might guess it cannot be bought, but still we liked lots of the ideas - incl. in-car multimedia - and decided to make it our "virtual" Gadget of the Week. Renault says, too, that this concept will be more or less what the real car will look like. Availability for Europe is mid 2007.

Twingo Concept - a communicating car with a racy, sports pedigree

Renault has chosen the 2006 Paris Motor Show to unveil Twingo Concept. Firmly grounded in a youth culture of sport, music and fashion, Twingo Concept is powered by the new turbocharged 1.2 16V TCE 100 engine. Twingo Concept boasts a host of multimedia features and a high level of equipment...

• After Siemens BenQ (3'000 employees) declared bancruptcy today in Germany the Siemens BenQ employee representation announced that it was fighting this, claiming that Siemens had tricked them by selling Siemens' mobile phone unit to BenQ at the time. Looks like this will be a rough time ahead for Siemens management, who are currently under heavy criticism after raising board member salaries by 30% last week. But they are probably also walking around with a smile at not having to shut down that unit themselves.
• Virgin Mobile is expected to launch its Mobile TV service in the UK next week. This was announced already at the 3GSM event in Barcelona this year. Partners are HTC and Microsoft as well as Mobio TV - BT’s wholesale mobile broadcast entertainment service. So some big launch event as usual for Virgin companies can probably be expected next week in London.
• Now Lenovo and IBM are also recalling laptops due to faulty LiIon batteries.
• OpenBC to become "Xing" - no, not a new company, but a new brand name - and with that they are tryinig to reposition themselves as an online marketing place. I was never a friend of Open BC and from what I saw in the initial videos don't get what is new here... take a look yourself. Also the name is actually not new at all - see this press release about another company named Xing. What is OpenBC doing here? Seems quite "peinlich" (embarassing).
• Microsoft matches Apple with its Zune prices. If it can match Apple's success needs to be seen though. $249.99
• MultiSim is a new service from T-Mobile in Germany. As you might have guessed these are multiple (3) SIM cards that can be used with one number in different phones. I could have needed such a card in the past and was looking for it so think this might be a good idea for many others too.

IBM seems to be publishing its patent filings (and a doc is posted here). Something one would think should have been done quite some time ago.

I have a special story to tell here from my time in Silicon Valley working for a data networking startup around 1999. One day our CEO got visitors from IBM who just dropped in asking if they could have a word with CEO. They were in the area and would like to have brief talk only. Surprised about this, our CEO agreed and welcomed them in. I guess also because at the time IBM was the foundry partner for a set of super complex ASICs.

Now the smart-looking guys (IBM patent laywers) came to the matter of their visit straight away. One guy said to the CEO: "You know since you are developing a datacom router it is clear to us that you are violating a range of IBM patents, so we are here today to start discussing how we can negotiate a deal." Our CEO - quite surprised since we had just started filing a set of patents ourselves - asked them if they could detail what IBM patents would be violated. Then the other guy said: "We don't know but also don't really care."

Needless to say that the CEO had enough of this and got a bit loud asking the guys to p. off... Now I am glad, 7 years after this incident, that I was told about first hand, IBM seems to have a more open approach in mind, also probably because they got burned too often themself with long-lasting and expensive litigation. At the time IBM had a yearly revenue of about 1bln USD - I think - just from patent royalties. Unsure how much it is today, but probably not less... Of course it is also obvious that the US patent laws are - to say it in a friendly way - a bit antiquarian. See this funny story here from a small eastern Texas town (25k inhabitants) which has become the US number one place for patent lawsuits.
I guess a great income source for the place since the top law firms coming in ever so often will leave some money in the hotels and restaurants etc.

An article in the NY Times suggests that according to a report from the US government, the US is leading in nanotechnology research. At closer look what they really mean is that they are leading in total expenditure but since no-one can really tell what nanotechnology is, it is also impossible to say if this effort will have an impact. In other words, there doesn't seem to be a measure yet that says how efficient and successful the program is.

Other countries - notably Switzerland and Japan - are also heavily involved in programs that try to bring nanotechnology research and application commercial success forward.

The US seems now more concerned about the fact that they don't want to simply throw money at a "problem" or "opportunity" that is hard if not even impossible to define. Like e.g. the following comment, which shows quite clearly how difficult it is to address any issue (here health concerns) in this "field":

“I have to tell you that this area is so complex that I don’t know of any person or a small group of people who would be smart enough to be able to identify all the risks, set the priorities and lay out a so-called game plan,” said the expert, Arden L. Bement Jr., director of the National Science Foundation.