| Shawn Stewart requested to add you as a connection on LinkedIn: Arjun, I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn. - Shawn
DID YOU KNOW you can use your LinkedIn profile as your website? © 2010, LinkedIn Corporation |
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My my my. The boys in Stuttgart have been mighty busy. It wasn’t enough that they built a super-sexy hybrid race car based on the 911 GT3 R. No, they had to build a plug-in hybrid supercar that might just displace the Audi e-tron as the object of our green car lust.
Porsche lifted the sheet on the 918 Spyder on the eve of the Geneva Motor Show and made some huge claims. A few things got our attention right off the bat — 500 horsepower, mid-engine V-8 and two electric motors. Oh … and 78.4 mpg.
We swoon.
As we said, Porsche’s making some big big claims with the 918 Spyder, saying it will do zero to 62 mph in 3.2 seconds, top out at 198 mph and lap the famed Nurburgring in 7.5 minutes, beating even the incredible Carrera GT. All that acceleration comes from the aforementioned V-8 and an electric motor at each end putting down a combined 218 horsepower. Porsche cites 500 horsepower for the car, and we’re guessing that includes the engine and motors combined. That engine, by the way, was pulled from the RS Spyder race-car parts bin and reworked for the 918.
Power from the engine and the rear motor hits the street through a seven-speed PDK gearbox. The front motor turns the front wheels through a fixed ratio. Juice for the motors is stored in a lithium-ion battery mounted behind the seats. No specs on the pack.
Porsche gave the car four modes. E-Drive is for tooling around under electricity alone, and you’ve got a range of 16 miles. Choose Hybrid Mode and you’re using gas and electricity as the circumstances dictate. Sport Hybrid mode tips the gas-electric equation in favor of performance, sending most of the power to the rear wheels and using torque vectoring to keep things under control. Flip the switch to Race Hybrid mode and everything is tuned to maximum performance. If the battery’s carrying enough juice, the motors provide a push-to-pass burst of energy at the touch of a button.
All the gadgetry sits in a carbon-composite monocoque, and Porsche made extensive use of magnesium and aluminum to keep things as light as possible – 3,285 pounds, which is impressive for a car hauling two electric motors, a battery and the related electronics.
People will either love the styling or hate it. We like the front three-quarter view, but the back end and wheels look better in the renderings than they do on the actual car. Whatever. Part of the point of a concept car is to get people talking, and this one definitely will.
A plug-in hybrid Porsche? A hybrid Ferrari? More electric Audis? An electric Mercedes AMG SLS? If this is the future of high-performance cars, we say bring it on.
Update: March 1, 2010, 6:25 p.m. This story was revised to incorporate more info from Porsche North America.
Photos: Porsche
I love the Germans — they have great beer, eat pork, and designed the car of my dreams. I hope to someday marry a German — you know, to show my appreciation.
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Rock Me
This is one of the greatest songs EVER!!! =D
It’s been almost a week since Google Wave went live; we’ve toured Wave inside and out, tried to help folks get invites, and even pointed you to the first Google Wave search you should know. But can you use it yet?
Did You Get a Wave Invite?(polls)So far the only people I know who’ve received their invites were people who were in the dev preview, people who were invited by someone at Google, and the rest of those who were part of the very early 100,000 invite pool. Which is to say, I don’t believe that anyone who’s been invited by another Wave user has gotten their invitation yet. I quickly sent out my Wave invites to my fellow Lifehacker editors as soon as I was in, but as of now none of them have received an invitation.
If you’ve gotten your Wave invite—especially if you were invited by someone who gained access to Wave just last week—tell us about it in the comments.
Update: Apologies for the prematurely closed poll—should be open now!
Well, I sure haven’t gotten mine, yet.
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10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint
Posted 5 days ago and seen 7106 times
I suffer from something called Ménière’s disease—don’t worry, you cannot get it from reading my blog. The symptoms of Ménière’s include hearing loss, tinnitus (a constant ringing sound), and vertigo. There are many medical theories about its cause: too much salt, caffeine, or alcohol in one’s diet, too much stress, and allergies. Thus, I’ve worked to limit control all these factors.
However, I have another theory. As a venture capitalist, I have to listen to hundreds of entrepreneurs pitch their companies. Most of these pitches are crap: sixty slides about a “patent pending,” “first mover advantage,” “all we have to do is get 1% of the people in China to buy our product” startup. These pitches are so lousy that I’m losing my hearing, there’s a constant ringing in my ear, and every once in while the world starts spinning.
To prevent an epidemic of Ménière’s in the venture capital community, I am evangelizing the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. It’s quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points. While I’m in the venture capital business, this rule is applicable for any presentation to reach agreement: for example, raising capital, making a sale, forming a partnership, etc.
Ten slides. Ten is the optimal number of slides in a PowerPoint presentation because a normal human being cannot comprehend more than ten concepts in a meeting—and venture capitalists are very normal. (The only difference between you and venture capitalist is that he is getting paid to gamble with someone else’s money). If you must use more than ten slides to explain your business, you probably don’t have a business. The ten topics that a venture capitalist cares about are:
- Problem
- Your solution
- Business model
- Underlying magic/technology
- Marketing and sales
- Competition
- Team
- Projections and milestones
- Status and timeline
- Summary and call to action
Twenty minutes. You should give your ten slides in twenty minutes. Sure, you have an hour time slot, but you’re using a Windows laptop, so it will take forty minutes to make it work with the projector. Even if setup goes perfectly, people will arrive late and have to leave early. In a perfect world, you give your pitch in twenty minutes, and you have forty minutes left for discussion.
Thirty-point font. The majority of the presentations that I see have text in a ten point font. As much text as possible is jammed into the slide, and then the presenter reads it. However, as soon as the audience figures out that you’re reading the text, it reads ahead of you because it can read faster than you can speak. The result is that you and the audience are out of synch.
The reason people use a small font is twofold: first, that they don’t know their material well enough; second, they think that more text is more convincing. Total bozosity. Force yourself to use no font smaller than thirty points. I guarantee it will make your presentations better because it requires you to find the most salient points and to know how to explain them well. If “thirty points,” is too dogmatic, the I offer you an algorithm: find out the age of the oldest person in your audience and divide it by two. That’s your optimal font size.
So please observe the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. If nothing else, the next time someone in your audience complains of hearing loss, ringing, or vertigo, you’ll know what caused the problem. One last thing: to learn more about the zen of great presentations, check out a site called Presentation Zen by my buddy Garr Reynolds.
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Vin Diesel At a very special lunch meeting today… my father said something so dead on… I wanted to share…
He said…
“Confidence is the most important thing you can teach someone… if you can teach them confidence, you don’t have to teach them anything else.”
Facebook | Vin Diesel (2 October 2009)
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Damn! I haven’t seen one of these since sometime in the 1980s. I didn’t know they were still in production. Well, for sure I’m getting one of these.
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A new age of porn has dawned.
I’m talking about fan pages.
You’ve seen them. They’re everywhere: YouTube, Facebook, MySpace.
Take this video from YouTube: cinemagraphic masturbation. Come on, people. There used to be a time when it was illegal to perform such acts in public. Remember Paul ReubensPaul Reubens?
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