EV WORLDwire: Tesla Receives First Panasonic Lithium-ion Batteries
via evworld.com
these new lithium-ion cells will produce the highest-energy density EV battery packs in the world.... AWESOME!
these new lithium-ion cells will produce the highest-energy density EV battery packs in the world.... AWESOME!
Elon Musk says Tesla Motors is “narrowly focused” on getting the Model S sedan built and it is working with Daimler on an electric Mercedes A-Class compact. Oh — and it plans to have new models rolling out beginning in 2013.
The entrepreneur laid out an aggressive timeline for Tesla’s growth during a speech Tuesday in Detroit accepting the automotive executive of the year award. We weren’t there, but according to Autoweek, Musk said the Tesla Roadster is the first in what will be a line of cars including the gorgeous Model S and a crossover utility vehicle. Future models also will feature all-wheel drive.
This isn’t the first time we’ve heard Musk talk about a crossover utility vehicle, but there weren’t any specifics beyond the claim we’ll see new models in 2013 and 2014. Musk concedes that “is a rapid pace.” No kidding.
Talking about models beyond the Model S seems premature given that Tesla hasn’t finalized a location to build the S, a car it promises to have rolling off the line in 2012. Tesla also has made big promises for the car, not the least of which are a claimed range of 300 miles, room for seven people and a sticker price of $49,900 after the $7,500 federal EV tax credit. At least he’s got a $465 million loan from the feds to help build the car.
As if building the S weren’t enough to keep him busy, Musk also is preparing to take Tesla Motors public.
Still, Musk has to be looking ahead because only by increasing volume can he hope to bring down costs to a level most of us can afford. The Roadster starts at $101,500 and the S will run about half that. Musk expects Tesla’s third model to be accessible to mainstream customers, according to Autoweek. And he’s got to keep pace with Fisker Automotive, which already is looking ahead to its second and third models. (Though it too might want to focus first on getting the Karma built.)
More interesting is Musk’s plan to expand Tesla’s role as an electric drivetrain supplier. Tesla already has a deal to provide drivetrains for the electric Smart ForTwo, and it is providing batteries to Freightliner Custom Chassis for an electric delivery truck. Musk disclosed on Tuesday that Tesla will supply electric drivetrain technology for the Mercedes A-Class EV. That would make sense, given Daimler owns about 8 percent of Tesla.
“The smallest effect Tesla will make will be the cars we make ourselves,” Musk said. “The biggest effect will be the cars [other companies] make.”
Yes, you read that correctly. Musk appears to be minimizing the role his company’s core product — cars — will play in its future. That begs the question of who, exactly, will be working with Tesla. Most of the major automakers are lining up partnerships with battery companies, if not launching battery operations of their own. Of course, highlighting Tesla’s potential as a drivetrain supplier may be a pitch to prospective investors.
Tesla Motors spokesman Ricardo Reyes was returning from Detroit and could not be reached for comment.
Photo of the Tesla Model S: Jim Merithew / Wired.com
this is going to be awesome! AWD and a Mercedes partnership are rumored!
Seppo from Self Aware Games turned me onto this video about leadership/innovation from the co-founder of Pixar. It is AWESOME!
My favorite quotes from Ed Catmull’s talk at The Economist:
On the Socratic ideal of admitting ignorance:
“We’ve got these successful things going on and we mis-perceive how we got there. Or who the influences are. And we draw these wrong ideas and we then make a series of mistakes which are not well grounded in reality. Which means the things that are happening now that are wrong at Pixar are already happening and I can’t see them. And I have to start with that premise. And through all the history.. there is something going on here and I don’t know what it is.”
On secrets and ‘the management’:
Part of the behavior is I don’t know the answers. And at first that seems a little bit glib. But after awhile people get that I really don’t know the answer to a lot of these things. So we set it up so that the management really doesn’t tell people what to do. We discuss, we debate, [but] people start to refer to ‘the management’, and I say come on guys, there’s three of us, we’re all in this together, and then we’re very open and honest about the problems. Everyone feels like they own it, secrecy is very good at Pixar, it doesn’t get out into the blogs because they all know what’s wrong and it would be an act of betrayal because they want to participate in the discussion and I want them to.
On protecting a vision:
I do believe you want a vision, so you start off with a person who has a vision for a story. And we do things to try and protect that vision and its not easy to protect it, because they feel these pressures. They also have misconceptions about the creative process sometimes. We do have these people who we give a chance to on the belief they’re right, and can rise to the occasion, and we are wrong sometimes, because we can’t see what goes on in their heads. And our measure, because we can’t see inside people’s heads, is the team. If the team is functioning well, and healthy, it will solve the problem.
The process of giving feedback:
One of the protections is the notion that they have the final say so. Now this is a very hard thing to say because we say we are filmmaker led. The reason its hard is if they can’t lead the team, we will actually remove the person from it. That’s our version of what a failure is… it’s hard because it’s a personal thing. Until you reach that breaking point, you have to do everything you can.. sometimes its adding people to the team, sometimes its removing them, but as leaders we don’t tell them what to do. We have a structure so they get their feedback from their peers… every two or three months they present *the film* to the other filmmakers… and they will go through, and they will tear the film apart. And it’s very important for that dynamic to work, because it could be a brutal process, there needs to be the feeling they are all helping each other who wants that help. In order for that to work its important that no one in the room has the authority to tell the director they have to take their notes [make changes]. So no-one is taking a list of what you have to do to fix the film. All we can do is give the feedback and he goes off with the feedback… our job as leaders is to protect the dynamic in the room so that they’re honest with each other.
The idea of honesty as an abstraction easy to ignore:
They don’t want to walk in and embarrass themselves, they don’t want to say anything stupid, they don’t want to offend anyone, so these personal pressures and responses start to emerge. So I do see it happen, and it happened fairly recently, and I walked out, and I knew they weren’t honest. So then you call them in, maybe two or three people, and say why didn’t you say what you thought. And it’s a personal thing. So we have to change the dynamic. When we have something tricky and that’s holding things back, we have to have a four person or five person meeting, where the dynamics are different. And sometimes where things are actually going pretty well, then you want to have a room of 25 people, see how it works, and let them express themselves and have them grow. But if you have 25 people in the room some of them then start to perform, rather than participate. So there is this balance, what is the state of the thing… we need to have honesty, we want to have honesty, but honest is a buzzword. Its one of these things we hear, everyone nods their head on, ‘it’s all true’, [but] the gap between the abstractions and where people actually do it is enormous. And people fill it in with all sorts of crap.
On the limits of platitudes:
I don’t like hard rules at all. I think they’re all bullshit.
Dealing with tough, competing constraints:
If I look at the range, you’ve got one [constraint] that is art school, I’m doing this for arts sake, Ratatouille and WALL-E clearly fall more on that side, the other is the purely commercial side, where you’ve got a lot of films that are made purely for following a trend, if you go entirely for the art side then eventually you fail economically. if you go purely commercially then I think you fail from a soul point of view… we’ve got these elements pulling on both sides, the art side and the commercial side… and the the trick is not to let one side win. That fundamentally successful companies are unstable. And where we have to operate is in that unstable place. And the forces of conservatism which are very strong and they want to go to a safe place. I want to go to the same place for money, I want to go and be wild and creative, or I want to have enough time for this, and each one of those guys are pulling, and if any one of them wins, we lose. And i just want to stay right there in the middle.
On firing creative geniuses:
[At Pixar] there is very high tolerance for eccentricity, very creative, and to the point where some are strange… but there are a small number of people who are socially dysfunctional [and] very creative – we get rid of them. If we don’t have a healthy group then it isn’t going to work. There is this illusion that this person is creative and has all this stuff, well the fact is there are literally thousands of ideas involved in putting something like this together. And the notion of ideas as this singular thing is a fundamental flaw. There are so many ideas that what you need is that group behaving creatively. And the person with the vision I think is unique, there are very few people who have that vision.. but if they are not drawing the best out of people then they will fail.
We will support the leader for as long and as hard as we can, but the thing we can not overcome is if they have lost the crew. It’s when the crew says we are not following that person. We say we are director led, which implies they make all the final decisions, [but] what it means to us is the director has to lead.. and the way we can tell when they are not leading is if people say ‘we are not following’.
On managers self-destructive tendencies for creative work:
The notion that you’re trying to control the process and prevent error screws things up. We all know the saying it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission. And everyone knows that, but I Think there is a corollary: if everyone is trying to prevent error, it screws things up. It’s better to fix problems than to prevent them. And the natural tendency for managers is to try and prevent error and over plan things.
Can companies turn confusion into a competitive advantage? It occurred to me when attempting to explain Facebook’s Open Graph this week that the social web has become increasingly complex — relating the full implications to a broad audience is a Herculean feat.
How do you explain the Open Graph to the average user so he or she can make an informed decision? Should we take pains to differentiate between the “Open Graph API” and the “Open Graph Protocol,” or should we just gloss over the specifics to make the story halfway digestible to a reader who isn’t either a web developer or a social media professional?
Every time Facebook changes its privacy settings, we write a 500+ word post explaining what all the dials mean. Every time, it’s massively popular — Sunday’s article “HOW TO: Disable Facebook’s Instant Personalization” has more than 4,500 Facebook shares. Why the high demand for an explanation of what all this stuff means?
Have the nuances of online privacy become so complex that they’re beyond the comprehension of mere mortals? I’m not saying that Facebook intends to cause confusion, but the complexities of the open vs. closed debate and the prescriptive vs. descriptive nature of the “everybody” setting effectively shut down public discourse.
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Perhaps this paves the route to success: After all, how can anyone stop Facebook if no one understands Facebook?
i wrote about this a few weeks ago, but what the hell is a "Social Graph" really?
Eleven months ago, the world had written off Facebook for dead.
As we described in a May 2009 post, the common "wisdom" about the company in those days included the following:
- CEO Mark Zuckerberg's a naive control freak.
- The ad inventory is lousy
- There's no real business model
- The new design sucks
- They're hemorraging cash
- They're running out of cash
- They've searched the entire globe for cash
- They can't recruit anyone and employees are leaving in droves
- The valuation has plummeted from $15 billion to $2 billion
- Crazy Mark Zuckerberg just rejected $200 million of capital at an $8 billion valuation
The point of our post was that Facebook was ridiculously underhyped. What the critics failed to notice a year ago was that Facebook was, slowly but surely, taking over the world.
Well, now it's 11 months later.
Facebook's critics have seen the (colossal) error of their ways. Mark Zuckerberg's talent for recruiting strong executives and building an enormous global business has become clear. And Facebook has gone from being underhyped to justifiably hyped to, once again, overhyped.
Check out some recent headlines:
- The Age Of Facebook
- Facebook Is The New Internet
- Facebook Is The Universe
- This is not just a company -- it's a transformational phenomenon
- Facebook Announcing Plans To Take Over The Internet
- Facebook Is Worth $25 Billion
And it's not just the headlines. It's the reaction among the digerati these days whenever anyone has the temerity to suggest that Facebook is NOT going to swallow the Internet, destroy Google and Microsoft, and become the most valuable company in the world. (Ridicule and disgust.)
Well, count us among those who think that Facebook's size and market power is nothing short of awe-inspiring. We were believers in the company a year ago, when the supposedly smart money was saying that Facebook was toast, and we're believers today.
We think Facebook will build a big, profitable business and will continue to revolutionize the way people share information and communicate. We also think Facebook will create enormous problems for remaining incumbent "portals" like Yahoo and other display advertising companies.
But...
We are not yet sold on the idea that Facebook will quickly become a $10-$20 billion revenue juggernaut that will show Google a thing or two about what it means to coin money. We're also not convinced that Facebook is obviously worth the $25 billion valuation the private market is placing on it.
Why not?
Because, if our information is accurate, the company has just north of $1 billion in annualized revenue. That's with a user base of 500 million people a month. That's just not a lot of revenue considering the humongous size of the user base. In fact, it's downright paltry.
Now, the counter-argument here is that Facebook is only now beginning to think about revenue. Google didn't think about revenue in the early years, and now look at it. And so on...
And that's reasonable. But in the past 15 years, the world has learned a thing or two about the types of online businesses that generate huge revenue online...and the types of businesses that don't. And, for the most part, Facebook still resembles the kind of businesses that don't.
At its core, Facebook is still a social network. It is about people communicating with people. With the exception of direct subscriptions (a la telephone and wireless companies), monetizing people communicating with people has proven difficult.
Yes, you can advertise to people communicating with people. And Facebook's self-serve ads and humongous traffic certainly make it an interesting and powerful advertising platform. But Facebook has been selling ads for a while now, and its ad revenue isn't blowing the doors off.
Why not?
Because, dare we say it, despite the amazing level of targeting possible with Facebook's self-serve ads, Facebook's ad inventory just isn't that good. Again, Facebook ads are placed next to people trying to communicate with people. And people communicating with people just aren't a particularly target-rich environment for advertisers.
What is a target rich environment? People looking for products. That's Google. That's why Google can generate so much more revenue per user than Yahoo, AOL, Facebook, Twitter, and all the other huge sites out there:
Could Facebook build its own search engine and kill Google? Could it team up with Bing and crush Google? Yes, hypothetically, it could. Anything's possible. But killing Google would be easier said than done, even with Facebook's huge user base. (500 million people already use Facebook every month--and Google is still cranking merrily along).
Now, Facebook has other potentially huge revenue streams, too. Like payments. Facebook now takes a huge 30% commission on all the virtual stuff people buy from participating game platforms using Facebook payments. And given the amount of virtual stuff people are buying, Payments could quickly become a big revenue stream. But not, in our opinion, $10-$20 billion big.
For example, we hear that Facebook may want to try to kill PayPal and take its payments system global and have people use it to pay for everything. And maybe Facebook will be able to do that. But it's worth noting that, 10 years after it began to take over the world, PayPal is now only a $3 billion business. And killing it may be harder than some Facebook boosters think. Especially because there are few other companies out there that might want to kill PayPal, or at least take a piece of its business. Like Apple, for example.
Are there other huge revenue streams that Facebook hasn't even begun to think about yet?
Yes, possibly. But the same can be said for most companies. We'll keep an open mind, but for now we'll just point out that we haven't seen them yet.
But wait, won't Facebook grow in the future? Won't its user base grow from 500 million people to, say, 2 billion people? Yes, probably. And if the next 1.5 billion users are as valuable commercially as the existing 500 million (highly unlikely), then Facebook's revenue might rise to $5 billion. And that's big. But it's still only 1/6th the size of Google. And, likely, far less profitable.
So, bottom line, we continue to think Facebook will revolutionize the world, and we couldn't be more bullish about the company's ability to change the way people communicate and share information. But we're still not sold on the idea that Facebook will become as big and amazing a business as it is a cultural phenomenon.
facebook is going to the moon.
Posterous
Entrepreneurs: Sachin Agarwal, 29; Brett Gibson, 29; Garry Tan, 29
Funding: $5.1 million from Redpoint Ventures, Trinity Ventures, Y Combinator, and angel investorsPosterous lets users quickly create their own Web sites, as well as post text, photos, and video to sites such as Facebook and Flickr (YHOO) by simply e-mailing them to Posterous. "People want to create Web sites, use Facebook and Twitter, but for most people it's too hard," co-founder Agarwal explains. The service is free, but the startup plans to roll out a paid version that will offer more storage later this year.
Toughest decision: "Recently we had to decide whether to sell our company or stick it out and make it huge," says co-founder Tan. "We decided that we believe in the vision and if we sell our company, it'd be a huge mistake."
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awesome! congrats guys!!!
