DeLorean Goes Electric: Company Plans New Model Of Iconic Gullwing Car

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Enlarge Jerry S. Mendoza/AP

A 1981 DeLorean is seen in a commemorative cruise in Michigan. A Texas company plans to make electric versions of the iconic car.

Jerry S. Mendoza/AP

A 1981 DeLorean is seen in a commemorative cruise in Michigan. A Texas company plans to make electric versions of the iconic car.

There's a new DeLorean DMC-12 coming out — or rather, there's a new version of the same stainless steel wedge of a sportscar that became an icon (and perhaps the lone representative) of '80s cool. But it won't run on gas — it'll be electric.

And unlike the DeLorean that played a vital role in Back to the Future, this one won't require a nuclear reaction that generates 1.21 gigawatts.

Instead, the prototype runs on batteries, which currently give it a range of between 70 and 100 miles. But the company says that its second-generation prototype should have a greater range, thanks to more efficient batteries and a lighter frame.

But as DeLorean CEO Stephen Wynne tells Autoweek, that doesn't mean the car's body isn't made of stainless steel — only the underpinnings have been changed to lighter materials.

"I know my market well, and there are certain things we won't mess with," he says. "It will keep the stainless-steel exterior. We still want it to be a real car."

The car comes as electric vehicles are rising in popularity — and overcoming early doubts about their performance capabilities. As NPR reported back in 2009, there's even a niche group of drag-racers who convert old cars to run quick quarter-miles on maxed-out electric power.

DeLorean Motor Co. announced the new car this past weekend, unveiling the electric model for fans who had gathered in Houston, where the revamped car company was holding an open house. It anticipates putting them on the market in 2013, for a retail price of around $90,000.

Enlarge Michael Stravato/AP

Stephen Wynne walks through the shop at the DeLorean Motor Company in Humble, Texas, in 2007. Wynne purchased all remaining factory parts of the DeLorean line — enough for several hundred cars.

Michael Stravato/AP

Stephen Wynne walks through the shop at the DeLorean Motor Company in Humble, Texas, in 2007. Wynne purchased all remaining factory parts of the DeLorean line — enough for several hundred cars.

The original company's founder, John DeLorean, died in 2005. Since the late 1990s, Wynne has been rebuilding old DeLoreans, as well as building them from scratch — he owns the remaining DeLorean parts inventory, as well as the DeLorean logo.

DeLorean Motor says it will also be converting existing DMCs to run on electric power.

On DeLorean's webpage announcing the news, Joshua Inglima writes:

I would love to convert my 83 to be electric.

I'm also thinking that the front hood could be converted to a substantial solar panel... probably get nearly 200W out of it.

The car could probably top off the batteries sitting in the parking lot while I'm working for the day.

In the meantime, if you'd like a wallpaper image of a DeLorean spreading its wings for your phone, the company can hook you up.

The DeLorean has been a cultural touchstone ever since Michael J. Fox drove one into history — and back — in Back To The Future. As noted in the NPR photo blog The Picture Show, the film even inspired a photographer to create a series of images that recreate moments in her subjects' past.

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TECHNOLOGY, NASA cloud architect forms company for private cloud

Chief Architect of NASA-cloud platform, spun in the open-source OpenStack cloud operating system, a new company and product launches to help companies more easily build private clouds.
Piston cloud computing sell a OpenStack distribution, which provides automation for ease of deployment, security features, to the needs of the security-conscious organizations and interoperability with public clouds, based also on OpenStack.
"The reasons for the foundation of the society is that the options for deploying private clouds are complicated, difficult to configure, get time-intensive and not necessarily scale particularly well," said Joshua McKenty, CEO of the cloud and cloud earlier piston architect and technical manager at NASA.
While many have begun the contribution to the OpenStack company on public clouds, McKenty wanted to use also OpenStack to ensure that businesses can, so that public and private clouds could be interoperable. He would also, of course, there was the unique challenges that companies facing, security, regulatory compliance, and integration with other enterprise systems products. "It's another animal as a public provider," he said.
PentOS said a private cloud from which the "bare metal", is required on all of the software he. It begins required with a Linux distribution that contains only the components, to run from OpenStack, a OpenStack distribution and a number of automation tools.
It is designed to be used with low-cost servers and hardware components, he said.
Typically, companies, private clouds on the OpenStack distribution professional services group, providing high availability, load balancing node node for storage create, including blade servers for computing and storage performance, he said. "But you're not really take advantage of the elasticity of the cloud", he stressed.
With PentOS, users can purchase requires to run a single class of the server and use the software to automate things such as a database, the high reliability on each server, depending on the capacity and reliability of the hard disk. He said "We the dependence on high availability are hardware process automation".
PentOS automates the installation. PentOS is packaged on a USB stick, the administrator can configure to a laptop.
Administrators have to choose not much if you have to configure their systems however. Entrance area of the Internet Protocol (IP) used, choose groups of users from Active Directory in the cloud permissions have settings to VLANS and configure the switch itself, how such as administrative passwords for this set.
"We have tried the software so opinionated as possible", he said. "There are no options to which database to use, or hypervisor."
PentOS works with the KVM hypervisor and MySQL. "We want people not bound in a number of licensing discussions", he said. "It's always a challenge." "If you give people a ton of options, give them many opportunities to reduce the performance of the system and some of the ways to improve the it."
If an administrator sets the configurations, the USB stick can be inserted in the server rack PentOS detects the hardware and installation and configuration of the operating system.
The installation process can eliminate a major security hole: the insider attack. Because the hardware from a USB stick is configured, a company cannot be only the most reliable administrator password. Additional administrators do not have applications to the hardware, because the Setup is done automatically, he said.
PentOS can add companies also only five servers at the same time.
Companies can buy additional PentOS modules, compliance with certain guidelines, such as for health organizations HIPAA and FISMA for government agencies.
Pistons plans for a limited offer of a preview version of PentOS-Monday, 29 followed by general availability of November.
McKenty claims that company CloudAudit, is PentOS of the first implementation of a set of common interfaces for automation of cloud features such as testing and quality assurance. This means that corporate users can choose to work with a public cloud provider, which is also CloudAudit and be sure that all of their cloud operations required such as HIPAA requirements.
McKenty is not only former developers of NASA cloud to create tools help companies trying to build private clouds. Chris Kemp, the former, CTO of NASA, which also helped build the cloud, it started a company called fog, an appliance, which aimed at easier for companies, private clouds build developed.

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TECHNOLOGY, When a Company Gathers Info About You, Is that Invasion of Privacy?

If someone shadowed your digital footprints, making notes of who you became a "fan" of on social networks, keeping records where you were checking-in via mobile devices, compiling your data to decipher your intent, would you consider that collection to be tracking your personal info? If that same entity followed you home and gathered more info on what your interests were, would you feel a bit like you were being stalked or your privacy invaded? What if that so-called stalker were not interested in you personally, just the how's of making money off your "intent"?
Microsoft and others have invested $61 million in Adchemy advertising technology. Microsoft entered into an "expanded technology partnership" with Adchemy that will deepen Adchemy IntentMap technology to "help Microsoft adCenter customers create more relevant ads based on consumer intent." According to Rik van der Kooi, corporate vice president of the Microsoft Advertising Business Group, "Microsoft Advertising is committed to enriching the online ad experience for consumers and helping deliver more effective campaigns and higher ROI for advertisers and agencies. The key to this is to have a deeper understanding of consumer intent so that the ads users see are engaging and relevant."
Murthy Nukala, founder and chief executive officer of Adchemy, said, "Moving away from keywords and focusing on a consumer's underlying intent is a massive paradigm shift that radically simplifies ad campaigns and enables advertisers to address consumer queries in a significantly more relevant way, at a scale unprecedented in the industry."
Your digital identity is considered Personally Identifiable Information (PII) by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget. As is your IP address in some cases. PII is defined as data "that can be used to uniquely identify, contact, or locate a single person or can be used with other sources to uniquely identify a single individual."
Adchemy has warned that by using consumer PII to "highly customized ads and offers," marketers "risk alienating consumers and harming their brand if they go too far with personalization and customization." It claimed to have a platform that "nutures" the relationship with consumers. In fact, Adchemy claimed to collect or use no PII. (See also "Protect Your Online Privacy (Without Reading All the Fine Print).")
In a past Digiday Q&A about the future of privacy and consumer targeting, Adchemy claimed that instead of using consumer PII, marketers could target consumers by using consumer intent. "Consumers express their intent across all channels -- such as searching for a product, browsing interesting websites, checking-in on a mobile phone, or becoming a fan on a social media site. Technology that works maps a structure of keywords, check-ins, social interests, anonymous demographic data and more across channels to recognize consumer intent patterns, without needing PII data. This is what Adchemy's technology aims to do. "
How can intent be tracked without connecting the dots of a user's movements across the Web? Adchemy claims to gather "intent data" from different market "silos." Gathering from varying stages of intent -- latent, activation (via product research and peer reviews), active, fulfillment (via mobile search and check-ins on social applications) -- "can be used to create anonymous, actionable target-audience segments across channels." MediaPost reported, "Consumers and marketers now meet on Facebook and other social-media outlets. As potential buyers show brand allegiances, interests, preferences, and "likes," marketers can again match products and services to the latent and developing intent expressed through these social actions."
If a company is scraping info together about you, what you "like" and mutual digital friendships on social networks, sites you visit that show your "social interests," your browsing and mobile history, your IP . . . is that not invading your privacy? I consulted a very wise person about this who told me while this may not be breaking the letter of the law of PII by correlating a person's name/address/social security number, advertisers snooping around to collect an individual's online habits most certainly breaks the intention of a Do Not Track policy.
This is a screengrab about Adchemy according to PrivacyChoice. Jim Brock clarified via email, "As for Do Not Track, our statement means that we don't find a statement in their privacy framework that they recognize the DNT header (such as implemented in Firefox). We don't have any way to independently verify whether they are or are not actually honoring it." Brock also wrote, "When an opt-out is not verified to stop tracking, this means that we have not tested to determine whether any unique identifier is left after the opt-out is put in place." PrivacyChoice says that data collection consists of "browser cookies, IP addresses and HTML5 Local Storage." Adchemy is listed as a fully compliant member of the Network Advertising Initiative (NAI).
I asked Microsoft if it sees no potential privacy issues with the Adchemy/Microsoft partnership and using "intent-driven" technology. A Microsoft Spokesperson replied:

The Adchemy IntentMap does not:
- Utilize Cookies
- Use PII
- Track consumers across queries

The Adchemy IntentMap infers consumer intent from anonymous queries and then maximizes the relevance of ads and landing pages, using that intent. As such, the Adchemy IntentMap actually helps advertisers serve more relevant ads while protecting consumer privacy.
Yet Adchemy's technology platform privacy policy states, "Our technology platform uses cookies to facilitate our licensees's advertising.... Your cookie information could consist of: the time of day an advertisement is displayed, an advertisement id that shows which advertisements you have viewed or clicked on, your IP address that may be mapped to your general geographic location, and the referral id that shows the URL of the web page where you clicked on the ad." You can opt-out. Otherwise the data retention policy is "cookies that we use have a lifespan of 3 years. The opt-out cookies have a lifespan of 5 years. Log files may be kept in our system for a maximum of 2 years."
Info posted on Evidon, a "self-regulatory program for online behavioral advertising" site, states that Adchemy "ad delivery includes online audiences across search, display, social, and mobile channels." While the data collected is listed as anonymous, pseudonymous, there is also a link to the Ghostery browser extension to help protect your privacy.
I've been using Ghostery for a long time now and this screengrab is an example of how well it works, blocking 34 of 34 trackers on a particularly invasive site. I have no mercy when it comes to tracking if I feel like my privacy is violated; I block all trackers, block all ads, use Google-sharing or Tor, or other proxies, and HTTPS Everywhere, but as fast as Firefox updates . . . not all add-ons can keep up with compatibility. Marketers have to make money, I understand it, but "intent-driven" technology sort of creeps me out and still clangs privacy alarms in my head.

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