As The Wall Street Journal points out, this isn’t the first time the carmaker has taken a pass on the game — it also bowed out in 2009.

But the news adds some context to the earlier Facebook news. GM is overhauling all of its ad spending plans, so if you’re a Facebook bull you might find the carmaker’s high-profile sub easier to stomach.

It’s here.

Facebook, the 900-million-strong social network that knows more about us than even our closest friends, will become a publicly traded company within the next hour.

Private equity dealmakers will celebrate alongside cadres of newly minted millionaire engineers in Menlo Park, Calif., while retail investors the world around will clamor amongst themselves, tooth and claw, for the chance to share in a mere fraction of the riches.

And yet, after a year of watching tech IPOs — Zynga, Groupon, LinkedIn, Yelp — let’s all admit that it kind of borders on anticlimactic.

We know we’ll most likely see a nice pop in the share price after Mark Zuckerberg rings in the Nasdaq bell remotely from Facebook’s spanking-new HQ in Silicon Valley.

From there, like a floating jump ball up for grabs, the social networking giant’s closing stock price is anyone’s guess — and by the looks of my Twitter feed, everyone’s guess. There’s already a site dedicated to tracking what price Facebook’s stock will settle at when the markets close, a page peppered with numbers posited by the digital elite.

Today is about the money. And yet it is also more than just sitting and watching the ticker tape roll by. For the first time, Zuckerberg’s vision of making the world a more open place will finally apply to his own company.

We got our first taste of it when the company filed its S-1. It’s where we saw that more than half of Facebook’s 900 million monthly visitors are visiting the site via mobile devices, a channel in which the company has yet to figure out a coherent or viable monetization strategy.

We saw that Zuckerberg retains a tight grip on the company’s future — tighter than most CEOs, akin to the likes of Google’s co-founders — holding voting rights on 57.1 percent of Facebook’s mighty class-B shares. He is so tied to his company that he is cited as a risk factor in Facebook’s S-1, of course.

And now we’re witnessing the first defectors from Facebook’s nacent advertising strategy, as with General Motors pulling its $10 million dollars in advertising on Facebook earlier this week, citing it as an ineffective use of the company’s massive marketing budget.

What we’ll soon see is Facebook’s less-pretty public profile, so to speak, with Zuckerberg holding court over earnings calls every quarter, taking heat from investors who expect returns. We’ll be given insight into how the company plans to monetize its different products, and how they actually fare.

Just as Facebook knows so very much about each of us, we, too, will begin to learn a lot more about Facebook.

And yet, through all of this, no matter what grim forecast Wall Street projects, no matter what executive decisions or company road maps the media decries, Zuckerberg’s message is clear — so much so that he made it the poster for the pre-IPO all-night hackathon:

“Stay focused and keep hacking.”

Good luck with that.

(Images: (top) Morin Uwole/Facebook; (bottom) Victor Luu/Facebook)

But there’s one thing that even the most ardent Facebook fan can’t argue with: Facebook advertising is very much a work in progress.

Don’t take my word for it. Listen to Facebook itself: “We believe that most advertisers are still learning and experimenting with the best ways to leverage Facebook to create more social and valuable ads,” the company says in its IPO filing.

If you’re a Facebook bull, those words sound reassuring. Facebook sold $3 billion worth of ads last year, and it’s just getting started. Imagine what happens when things really kick in.

But if you’re a skeptic, and there are lots of them, that uncertainity is a real problem. When Google went public in 2004, it had already built AdWords, the search ad engine that still generates the majority of its revenue today. Facebook doesn’t have an AdWords, so it doesn’t have a tried-and-true plan it can present to advertisers: Put dollars in here, see results over there.

Instead, Facebook marketers try different things over time. A few years back, they were all building Facebook apps. Then they started concentrating on amassing fans/followers. Now, digital marketing people tell me with confidence that all of that thinking is outmoded, and that the real Facebook pros are the ones who create “engaging content” on the site, then buy ads to “amplify” that message.

Facebook’s challenge gets even tougher because instead of search ads, whose success and failure are easy for advertisers to evaluate — Did someone click on my search ad? If they did, did they buy something or fill out a form once they got to my site? — Facebook aspires to the big branding dollars that advertisers spend on TV. And those are much harder to score. So convincing GM or anyone else to move big money from traditional ads, which marketers are at least comfortable with, to the wild world of social, requires a lot of work.

The good news for Facebook is that it’s so big that it might succeed even if it never cracks the social ad code. Any Web site with 900 million users and counting, who spend a ton of time there, is going to pull in a lot of ad dollars through sheer force of gravity. If Facebook can keep its users happy, it may get away with muddling through on the ad part.

But being a big, lumbering giant that attracts ad dollars without knowing what it’s doing isn’t the message Facebook wants to sell to advertisers. Or to investors.

OK, on to the “this isn’t that big of a deal” arguments. I’ve heard a bunch, all of which come from (different) people who don’t want to be quoted.

• Obviously there’s a backstory here. If GM didn’t want to keep advertising on Facebook, it didn’t have to announce that three days before an IPO.
• Big Fuel, GM’s social media ad agency, didn’t do a good job. That’s why GM fired them in December. For the record, here’s a quote from a Big Fuel rep: “GM never seemed persuaded of the value of social media in general and Facebook likes in particular. In a sales-driven culture, it is very hard to wrap your head around putting money in places where you don’t see immediate results in an uptick in sales.”
• Starcom, GM’s media buying agency, didn’t do a good job. That’s why GM fired them in January.
• How the heck did GM spend $3 on Facebook “content management” for every $1 it spent on Facebook ads, as the WSJ reports? That’s a sure sign that someone was doing something wrong.
• Ford loves Facebook.
• GM is pulling $10 million out of Facebook. Facebook did more than $3 billion in ads last year.

Again, all of those may be valid points.* But if Facebook really wants to allay outsiders’ fears, it needs to be able to prove conclusively that its ads work, in a scalable way, for a wide variety of advertisers. It can’t do that yet.

*I’m totally amazed by the $3-to-$1 ratio, and am wondering if it’s not to late to pivot myself into a “Facebook content creation consultant.” Those numbers also remind me very much of the late 90s, when companies like Organic went public based on the fact that they knew how to build Web sites and their clients didn’t, and they could charge accordingly. That didn’t last long.

The largest U.S. auto maker will continue to expand its use of marketing through Facebook’s pages, in which companies can display content at no cost, these people said.

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It’s the typically newsless time around Christmas and New Year’s, but for once there has actually been a lot going on at Yahoo.

Last week, the Silicon Valley Internet giant’s typically moribund board decided to move ahead with negotiations to sell part of its stake in China’s Alibaba Group, as well as all of its shares in Yahoo Japan.

While that is still not a done deal, it adds clarity to the Yahoo mishegas, as current leaders there seek to turn around the company’s lagging fortunes.

Now, as Yahoo continues to contemplate a pair of partial investment bids by private equity firms Silver Lake and TPG Capital into 2012, more focus will be on the selection of a CEO candidate to take over, sources said.

While I have floated some names that have been contemplated — such as Hulu CEO Jason Kilar, Juniper CEO Kevin Johnson, former aQuantive and Microsoft exec Brian McAndrews, and board member David Kenny — I have collected some more that seem to be getting the once-over and are being mentioned internally as well as externally.

Sources said that the Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee at Yahoo, which is run by independent director Patti Hart, has been looking for someone with definite public company experience, as well as expertise in large-scale management.

As to talent, candidates seem to be either good at running big platforms, or deeply knowledgeable about advertising and media as well as technology.

Another important criteria, said sources: Someone who is “collaborative” and nonconfrontational. As in, not like the former and very pugnacious CEO Carol Bartz, who was fired in September.

Thus, here’s another trio of candidates to consider, while we wait — and who knows how long that will be given that the Asian activity could have tired out for a bit this usually slow-moving board:

Chris Liddell: The former CFO of Microsoft is an interesting name that just popped up recently, and it makes some sense when you think about the possible mindset of the Yahoo board.

Liddell, who has a charming New Zealand accent, did a short stint, from January of 2010 to March of this year, as CFO at General Motors. Recently married to another former Microsoft exec, he has since been living in New York.

He apparently loves living in the Big Apple.

But when he left GM, Liddell made it clear he wanted to go for a top job next. He was among the candidates for a recent search for a CEO of Time Warner’s Time Inc. (an effort that was run by exec search firm Heidrick & Struggles, which is also conducting the Yahoo hunt).

Known as tough and decisive, he certainly is qualified to deal with complex financial situations, such as the one in which Yahoo now finds itself knee-deep. One knock: Little product or advertising experience.

Laura Desmond: While certainly a dark horse, Desmond has been queried by Heidrick, said several sources.

She is CEO of Starcom MediaVest Group, a subsidiary of Publicis, one of the largest media planning and buying agencies, making Desmond one of advertising’s most prominent players.

Well-known in Yahoo’s key market, she is considered a savvy and smart exec with a wry sense of humor.

I happen to particularly like one line from one of her bios:

“Ms. Desmond’s career has been driven by two caveats: Take intelligent risks and learn more from failure than from success.”

She could learn a lot at Yahoo. (I know, easy jab, but it works!)

David Rosenblatt: The former DoubleClick CEO, who went on to a big ad job at Google after it paid $3.2 billion for the company, is also a long shot, mostly by his own choosing.

The sharp exec is always on the short list of CEO candidates for a lot of big, splashy online jobs, but he seems to want to swim his own way.

Case in point: He was recently named CEO of New York-based 1stdibs, a relatively obscure online marketplace known among antique dealers and interior designers looking for one-of-a-kind furniture, art and lighting.

Yes, that’s right: Fancy lamps.

Rosenblatt also serves on the boards at Group Commerce, Twitter and IAC.

All that Internet ad and e-commerce experience is exactly why Rosenblatt would be one of the better choices for CEO of Yahoo. But, for him, I would guess taking such a job is probably in the life’s-too-short category.

More to come, obvi!

The contract, however, requires Google to meet certain requirements before GM makes a final decision to deploy the software, these people added.

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General Motors Co. on Wednesday is expected to disclose an alliance with RelayRides, a San Francisco start-up that helps car owners rent their cars when they don’t need them. GM will modify its Onstar communications system to enable RelayRides members to unlock cars using their cell phones in place of a $500 device now used for remote unlocking.

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Originally, the new Kindle was supposed to be available on May 3, but Amazon’s SVP and CFO Tom Szkutak confirmed that it will start shipping tomorrow.

The device, called Kindle with Special Offers, comes at the lowest price yet at $114, which is $25 cheaper than the Wi-Fi-only version.

While the hardware on the new e-reader is identical, it’s cheaper because it is being subsidized by advertising. Initially, sponsors include General Motors, Proctor & Gamble and Visa.

“The team did a nice job of moving the dates up,” he said.

The e-reader will be available from Amazon, Target and Best Buy.

While the new price only represents a drop of $25 (and Amazon promises the device will never be free), it will likely drive additional sales of the already popular e-reader. Sticking with tradition, Amazon did not disclose how many had been sold to date. “We are incredibly excited with Kindle because we see that customers are buying a lot more books….We continue to invest in that business,” Szkutak said.

Also during the call, Amazon hinted at how fast its physical retail sales are growing. Szkutak said it may build more than the nine distribution centers it had been planning on building this year. Already, one has opened, and about five are expected to be based in North America with the remainder opening up internationally.

Analysts watch Amazon’s investments carefully because it affects the company’s profitability. Right now, it is investing heavily, leading first quarter profits to fall despite a 38 percent surge in revenues year over year.

Separately, the company said revenues were hurt internationally by the earthquake in Japan. Had it not been for the natural disaster, it said international revenues would have grown by 32 percent instead of 27 percent.

But will the Kindle ever be free?

“It’s not possible. The economics don’t work,” Jay Marine, a Kindle director said in an interview. “At $114, we think it is the best deal for a consumer electronic. We sell a lot of consumer electronics, so we should know it’s a good deal.”

What if it were tied to other offers, like Amazon Prime, which costs $79 a year and offers free two-day shipping and access to free streaming movies?

“I don’t know how to do it. I would not get your hopes up,” he added.

Three years ago, the first Kindle went on sale for $399, and each subsequent price drop led to a spike in sales.

Last year, when Amazon dropped the price to $139 for the Wi-Fi model and $189 for 3G, it became the company’s best-selling product in history. What’s more, robust sales helped catapult Kindle books to become the most popular format on the giant bookseller’s site, surpassing hardback and even paperback books.

The new Kindle introduced today will cost $114 when it comes out on May 3. That’s roughly the same price as 10 paperbacks. It will be sold by Amazon, Best Buy and Target.

Marine’s comments aside, it appears Amazon is doing everything it can to bring the price of the device down. This time, it has squeezed another $25 out of the system with assistance from advertisers.

The Kindle at $114 will display full screen ads on the home screen, and a much smaller banner ad will appear at the bottom of the screen when using the menu. Ads will not appear inside books (and nothing changes for the more expensive Kindle models). Initial advertisers that have signed up include General Motors, Procter & Gamble and Visa.

At the new price point, the Kindle will inevitably attract a few more hold-outs. But without hitting the $99 sweetspot, it’s questionable whether it will be enough for the masses, especially since it will now ship with advertisements. ”We know price matters. We expect people to love it,” Marine said.

To be sure, Amazon is trying to make the experience sound as painless as possible.

For starters, the Kindle with Special Offers will have the exact same hardware that’s on sale at $139. It includes the same battery life, storage capacity and screen resolution.

And, the advertisements themselves are being sold less like a display banner and much more like a daily deal that a user has opted into, much like what Groupon and LivingSocial are offering today via email. The name “special offers” says it all. In fact,  Amazon will offer $20 gift cards for $10, a near-identical deal to the one LivingSocial offered earlier this year, which led to more than one million sold.

Marine said there’s no direct connection between LivingSocial and Amazon today despite the company’s $175 million investment in the company.

Other specials include: $6 for six Audible books (normally $68), $1 for an album from Amazon MP3 Store and $10 for $30 of products in Amazon’s Demin Shop. Users will also be able to help dictate what ads end up appearing on their homescreen by placing votes on a system Amazon calls the AdMash.

Not once has Amazon revealed how many devices it has sold, preferring to speak in vague terms, such as millions of sales, or Kindle sales eclipsing “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” the seventh book in the children’s series.

Maybe that will change now that Amazon will have to respond to advertisers, who want to know the size of the audience it is reaching.

Nah, probably not.

Japan in 2010 accounted for 35 percent–or $11 billion worth–of the $31.5 billion global market for automotive infotainment electronics, iSuppli says. On top of that, Japan is responsible for about one-third–$7.3 billion–of the $23 billion market for chips used in cars overall. Aside from chips, Japanese companies produce LCD panels and optical sensors used to make in-car systems.

ISuppli says Renesas Electronics, Texas Instruments, Freescale Semiconductor and Fujitsu, all of which supply components to the auto industry, have all been affected by shipping problems and difficulty in obtaining raw materials. The problems could last weeks or months.

Problems like this aren’t just hitting infotainment systems. As The Wall Street Journal reported today, shortages of a single electronic part made by Hitachi Automotive that measures airflow in car engines have forced companies like General Motors, Toyota and PSA Peugeot-Citroën to cut their output at auto plants in the U.S. and Europe. The plant that makes the component is located to the north of Tokyo and has been shut down. Hitachi makes about 60 percent of the world’s supply for this type of part. The Journal said Toyota on Wednesday warned employees to expect a production halt at some plants in the U.S. and Canada.

Meanwhile, Japanese automakers have stopped production at several plants in order to conserve electricity following the loss of generating power from the troubled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. There has been a 10 percent reduction in electrical capacity, iSuppli says. Additionally, companies like BMW, Volkswagen, Continental and Bosch have removed their expatriate employees from Japan.

Separately, Dow Jones reported yesterday that ZTE Corp., a Chinese maker of networking gear, is suffering quake-related supply problems. A company exec said it expects the problems to last as long as six months.

In recent weeks, an ad with “230″ appeared on television and the Web. The number appeared on a bright green background, with a smiling electrical outlet in place of the zero. At the bottom, the numbers 8-11 hinted at its reveal date.

AdAge reported Thursday that GM was behind the campaign, though the car manufacturer and its agency, Starcom New York, wouldn’t spill details.

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Toyota (TM) is considering close NUMMI, a Fremont, California vehicle-assembly plant that it has been operating jointly with General Motors. The revamped GM has decided to pull out of the venture, New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. (ergo, NUMMI) and now Toyota may close the doors on the operation, which employs 4,600 people.

“We need to determine whether it can be economically feasible to contract with NUMMI without GM,” Toyota said in a statement, according to the Wall Street Journal.

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“Chrysler’s bankruptcy and announced factory shut-down will impact second quarter numbers by reducing the number of prepaid bundled subscriptions associated with the production and shipment of new cars,” Jim Meyer, Sirius’s President of Operations and Sales, said during a conference call last week. “There will be a noticeable hit to subscribers in the second quarter, as a result of these production halts.”

A noticeable hit. What does that mean? Sirius didn’t say at the time, but a filing the company made with the SEC today gives us a clearer picture–and it’s not a pretty one. Chrysler sent quite a bit of new business Sirius’s way. From the Risk Factors item in the company’s 10-Q filing:

We do not expect to generate a significant number of new subscribers from Chrysler while its plants are closed. During the year ended December 31, 2008, Chrysler produced approximately 900,000 vehicles which included a satellite radio and a prepaid subscription to our service. These subscribers represented approximately 16% of our gross subscriber additions in 2008.”

 
Now, there’s no telling how long the Chrysler factory shutdown will last, so it’s impossible to know how much of an impact it will have on Sirius. That said, if the company’s bankruptcy proceedings drag on for any length of time, it obviously does not bode well for Sirius, especially since XM is potentially facing a similar scenario with General Motors (GM). Again, from the Sirius 10-Q:

There is also significant uncertainty surrounding General Motors’ future and potential filing for bankruptcy protection. A bankruptcy filing by General Motors could have similar effects on our subsidiary, XM.

And that would be grim news indeed. Because while Sirius has stopped counting on its auto partnerships to drive sales, it hasn’t yet established other means of driving subscriptions.

Yesterday, BoomTown decided to start a new “Twitter Business Plan Count-Up” because the fine folks over at the hot-as-Alabama-in-July start-up were taking too long to do so.

Oh, they’ve been promising for a while to deliver the financial goods, but Twitter still has a devil-may-care attitude toward its lack of revenues.

(Who do they think they are? General Motors?)

My first idea was simple, taking advantage of the excessive hype around Twitter in the media by charging pundits, television anchors, bloggers and anyone else, a small microfee every time they mention Twitter in the vain hope of seeming hip, happening and relevant.

Last night, I was lucky enough to grab drinks with two of Twitter’s major venture investors and board members: Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures and Spark Capital’s Bijan Sabet.

While we had a lively discussion about a lot of stuff, they had just come from a Twitter board meeting, but would tell me bupkis about their money-making ideas.

Thus, I foisted my next one on them: A wearable Twitter-branded device and fleece blanket outfit that vibrates every time you get tweeted.

Bear with me.

First, it links two completely overhyped trends: Twitter and a Snuggie. Enough said.

Second, Snuggies get boring after a few wears–I have one, so I speak from experience. But one that lets you know you are being bombarded by meaningless online chatter in real-time translates to endless fun.

Third, it’s a little naughty. A few days ago, watching “The View,” the group was chattering about Twitter and could not get through a three-minute segment without making wink-wink-nudge-nudge comments about “getting tweeted” or declaring, “Careful or I might twitter you.”

Combined with a Snuggie and vibrating, it’s a multimedia experience everyone can make giggly jokes about.

Lastly, imagine the extensions that are possible of a whole line of Twitter devices. A George Foreman grill that tweets everyone about how much fat you are cooking off your burger. A twit-on-twit-off light switch called the Tweeter.

And, of course, the Chia-Twit.

CBS (CBS) says it has locked up AT&T (T) Coke (KO) and General Motors’ (GM) Pontiac as “presenting sponsors.” And Comcast (CMCSA) is paying to associate itself with the Webcast’s “boss button,” which you’re supposed to hit if one of your remaining superiors waddles by your cube while you’re watching the Duke game.

Chris Albrecht at NewTeeVee thinks CBS will need to take some of that extra dough and plow it right back into bandwidth bills, since the company is using a high-end player from Microsoft (MSFT) to stream the games this year. I’m not so sure about that–last I looked, Microsoft was still trying to persuade companies to use its player instead of Adobe’s (ADBE) Flash, and I have to believe it’d be willing to make it worth CBS’s while to do so.

Besides getting, well, the whole country to run today, President Barack Obama is now taking a geek-tastic new ride down Pennsylvania Avenue to his new home, which should more than satisfy his clearly gadget-loving persona.

Obama, who has an ongoing obsessive relationship with his BlackBerry, much as the rest of us do, just got a spanking new presidential limo (pictured above), which the Secret Service is calling the “Beast.”

The last time General Motors (GM) improved on the car was at outgoing President George W. Bush’s 2005 inauguration, which means the struggling automaker is faster at upgrading than Microsoft (MSFT) is with Windows!

But, let us just say, it’s not very Prius-like, despite Obama’s speech today about focusing on the environment.

Indeed, the Cadillac limo has heavy armor five inches thick, run-flat tires, bullet-proof glass, an interior that seals, in case of a chemical attack, and other stuff that is too top secret to apparently reveal.

BoomTown is thinking, um, working Wi-Fi?

Refrigerated cup holders (and more of them, please!)?

A food machine that makes pizza from thin air like on “Star Trek”?

Or, miracle of miracles, that giant Apple (AAPL) iPod embedded in the steering wheel?

Post your suggestions as to what gadgets should be in the President’s new ride below.

As noted in an AP story picked up by the Wall Street Journal, SolarWorld said it intends to offer one billion Euros, including 250 million in cash and 750 million in credit lines, for four German production facilities and Opel’s development center and headquarters in Ruesselsheim.

The goal: to create Europe’s first true “green” auto company, with a focus on building electric and hybrid cars.

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This contrast has appeared sharper in recent years, as Microsoft’s Windows Vista operating system received a tepid critical response compared with Apple’s Leopard platform and as the company’s Live Web search service has slipped further behind Google’s. In addition, Microsoft’s cellphone software, Windows Mobile, looks old and creaky compared with Apple’s sleek iPhone and Google’s forthcoming Android mobile operating system.

But innovation does exist at Microsoft’s sprawling Redmond, Wash., campus. For instance, last year’s daring and radical redesign of Microsoft Office has been a critical and commercial success.

Now, there’s a sort of guerrilla team inside Microsoft designed to churn out innovative products more often and more rapidly. Called Live Labs, the unit is a small operation that aims to turn technology theories into real, Web-based products relatively quickly. It has only about 125 employees, and even that modest number is broken up into smaller teams tackling specific projects.

This week, Microsoft Live Labs is releasing its first broad consumer Web service, called Photosynth. This service turns multiple photos of a scene or site — say, an art gallery or a building — into a 3-D scene you can virtually “walk” through on the Web.

Unlike a simple 2-D panorama, which many photo programs can create from several pictures, a Photosynth creation, called a “synth,” is a virtual 3-D environment. It gives you the feeling you are in the middle of a room looking around, or circumnavigating a building or object. You can travel through a scene both laterally and vertically, and zoom in to see detailed, higher-resolution views of objects inside the synth, such as paintings on a wall.

For instance, you don’t just see a long, flat picture of Stonehenge or the Grand Canal in Venice. You are made to feel you are there, moving through these places, looking up at the sky or down at the ground, and pausing to examine more closely a particular stone, boat or building.

Such 3-D walk-through images have been around for awhile; they are used on some real-estate Web sites, for example, to show houses virtually. But Photosynth allows anyone to create them using any standard digital camera, and even using pictures you already possess that weren’t created with Photosynth in mind. You could even use photos of the same site taken by several people. The software will analyze the pictures, figure out which ones overlap and in what order, and then turn those shots that match up into a 3-D synth.

Photosynth, based on technology Microsoft acquired in 2006, is entirely free, and it’s entirely based on the Web, at photosynth.net (where it will be launched at midnight EST Thursday). At that site you can view not only your own synths, but the synths created by every other Photosynth user.

I’ve been testing this service for about a week, and while it has its flaws, I believe that Photosynth offers a dramatic new way to use your photos and to share them with others.

Photosynth works within a Web browser, using a small plug-in you install. Currently, it works only in Windows, using Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer browser or its rival, Firefox. A Macintosh version is in the works, but for now, you can’t even view others’ synths in the Mac operating system.

When Photosynth works right, the results are wonderfully satisfying. But it takes some skill to get a set of photos the service can match up well, a quality Microsoft calls being “synthy.” Ideally, portions of each slice of a 3-D scene should show up in at least three photos, with 50% overlap between them. After you upload your pictures and Photosynth does its best to make them into a 3-D scene, the service assigns them a percentage number that indicates how synthy they were.

In my tests, I tried both collections of photos I already possessed and some I snapped with Photosynth in mind. My pictures of a piazza in Verona, Italy, were only 38% synthy, while ones I took of a hotel room specifically for Photosynth use were 73% synthy.

One gripe I had was that Photosynth doesn’t tell you how synthy your pictures are until after you have uploaded them and waited until the system merges them, a process that can take a long time over a slow Internet connection. It would be much better if the service could tell you in advance how synthy the pictures are. Another objection is that Photosynth has no privacy settings. All your synths are open to viewing by everyone who uses the service.

But, overall, Photosynth is an impressive new way to view and share photos, and an encouraging sign that innovation and creativity still live in Redmond.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos online, free, at the All Things Digital Web site, walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080820/microsoft-live-labs-creates-web-synth-for-3-d-photo-tour/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080110/ddv20080110/ http://allthingsd.com/20080110/ddv20080110/#comments Thu, 10 Jan 2008 19:00:27 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20080110/ddv20080110/

[ See post to watch video ]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080110/ddv20080110/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080108/rick-wagoner/ http://allthingsd.com/20080108/rick-wagoner/#comments Wed, 09 Jan 2008 03:36:49 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20080108/rick-wagoner/

So General Motors Chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner says the company expects to have driverless cars on the road by 2018.

Now, I know the autonomous Chevrolet Tahoe SUV that GM developed with Carnegie Mellon University (pictured above) did win the Urban Challenge competition held last fall by the U.S. Defense Department’s research agency. And I know too that this is CES, an event founded on breathless pronouncements about the future of technology. But driverless cars on the road in another 10 years? Seems an irrationally exhuberant prognostication to me. But hey, when you’re the first auto executive ever to speak at the Consumer Electronics Show, you’ve got to come heavy, right?

And Wagoner came heavy, all right. He took the stage in a Chevy Volt, the gas/electric car GM debuted in Detroit last year. “The Volt is a powerful example of beauty and brains,” he said. “It looks on the outside and the technology under the hood is truly revolutionary. We’re now over a year into our production engineering for the Volt … and we’re moving as fast as we can to bring it to market.”

Wagoner went on to offer a brief overview of some new OnStar features–among them, “Stolen Vehicle Slowdown” and GM’s new collision-avoidance technology before moving on to flex-fuel vehicles. “There’s a huge opportunity to reduce the growth in oil consumption, oil imports and reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” Wagoner said. “And it lies in the fuel used by our cars and trucks. Ethanol offers tremendous potential here. … There are already many flex-fuel vehicles on the road right now that could be running on ethanol, if it were more readily available. … Now, if all of the flex-fuel vehicles that the major carmakers have already built–plus those that we’ll build over the next 10 years–were to run on ethanol, we could save 22 billion gallons of gasoline annually. … And that’s billion with a ‘B.’ “

And what of those autonomous vehicles Wagoner mentioned? Well, they’re still a ways off. But they’re coming (supposedly). And when (and if) they finally arrive, they’ll be God’s gift to terminal commuters. Said Wagoner, “Autonomous driving means that some day you’ll do your email, eat breakfast, read the newspaper–while commuting to work. Essentially, you could do all the things you do right now while commuting to work, except you could do them safely!”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080108/rick-wagoner/feed/ 3 http://allthingsd.com/20080108/rick-wagoner-2/ http://allthingsd.com/20080108/rick-wagoner-2/#comments Wed, 09 Jan 2008 03:36:49 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20080108/rick-wagoner/

So General Motors Chairman and CEO Rick Wagoner says the company expects to have driverless cars on the road by 2018.

Now, I know the autonomous Chevrolet Tahoe SUV that GM developed with Carnegie Mellon University (pictured above) did win the Urban Challenge competition held last fall by the U.S. Defense Department’s research agency. And I know too that this is CES, an event founded on breathless pronouncements about the future of technology. But driverless cars on the road in another 10 years? Seems an irrationally exhuberant prognostication to me. But hey, when you’re the first auto executive ever to speak at the Consumer Electronics Show, you’ve got to come heavy, right?

And Wagoner came heavy, all right. He took the stage in a Chevy Volt, the gas/electric car GM debuted in Detroit last year. “The Volt is a powerful example of beauty and brains,” he said. “It looks on the outside and the technology under the hood is truly revolutionary. We’re now over a year into our production engineering for the Volt … and we’re moving as fast as we can to bring it to market.”

Wagoner went on to offer a brief overview of some new OnStar features–among them, “Stolen Vehicle Slowdown” and GM’s new collision-avoidance technology before moving on to flex-fuel vehicles. “There’s a huge opportunity to reduce the growth in oil consumption, oil imports and reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” Wagoner said. “And it lies in the fuel used by our cars and trucks. Ethanol offers tremendous potential here. … There are already many flex-fuel vehicles on the road right now that could be running on ethanol, if it were more readily available. … Now, if all of the flex-fuel vehicles that the major carmakers have already built–plus those that we’ll build over the next 10 years–were to run on ethanol, we could save 22 billion gallons of gasoline annually. … And that’s billion with a ‘B.’ “

And what of those autonomous vehicles Wagoner mentioned? Well, they’re still a ways off. But they’re coming (supposedly). And when (and if) they finally arrive, they’ll be God’s gift to terminal commuters. Said Wagoner, “Autonomous driving means that some day you’ll do your email, eat breakfast, read the newspaper–while commuting to work. Essentially, you could do all the things you do right now while commuting to work, except you could do them safely!”

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