Richard Read, Reporter
Articles
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Got A Great Idea To Make Driving Easier/Greener/More Fun? Enter The Connected Vehicle Tech Challenge Richard ReadThere are thousands of tech developers out there, trying to make driving more fun, more efficient, and less frustrating. Apps like DriveSafe.ly, Parking In Motion, and Waze are the fruits of their...
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Volvo Gives Baseball Fans Free MLB TV For The Month Of AprilPaywalls are a hot topic in mainstream media right now, but they're nothing especially new. The Wall Street Journal, for example, has been hidden behind a paywall for years, as have hundreds of niche news outlets. On the whole, subscriptions to those sites haven't fared well. The New York Times --...
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Switzerland Serves Google Street View Its Biggest Smackdown To DateHere in America, we think Google Street View is great -- all unicorns and double-rainbows -- but elsewhere in the world, folks have been significantly less enthralled. Germany ordered Google to let citizens opt-out of having their homes included on the service. England and Canada found Google...
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New Fast Five Trailer: 2011 Dodge Charger Proves That Car Chases Make Movies BetterEvery so often, movie directors find themselves in a bind. Maybe their budgets get slashed. Maybe their scripts aren't quite as awesome as they first thought. Maybe they wake up and realize, "Holy crap, we cast VINCE VAUGHN." That's when they start scrambling, throwing everything they can at the...
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Parking In Motion Tries Its Hand At Building A Useful Parking AppIf we were app developers, the next-to-last frontier we'd want to conquer -- right after organ donation -- would be parking. By their very nature, cars are constantly in motion, taking and leaving spaces in parking lots, garages, and on city streets. Maintaining an accurate database of available...
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Charlie Sheen Shifts To An Even Smaller Screen -- As An App DeveloperLike the streets of his beloved Hollywood Hills, Charlie Sheen's life is full of twists and turns. The actor has a reputation for being a party boy, and his tumultuous life has been well-documented in tabloids and tweets. But Sheen's recent meltdown gave him the opportunity to reinvent himself --...
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Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia is known for being a little maverick-y. Over the course of his career, he's developed a reputation as a very smart, highly opinionated guy who's not afraid to...
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More Things Lawmakers Will Hate: Cobra iRadar for Android Debuts April 4Last week, four U.S. Senators expressed outrage over smartphone apps designed to reveal the location of DUI checkpoints. As they said in letters to Apple, Google, and Blackberry, "Giving drunk drivers a free tool to evade checkpoints, putting innocent families and children at risk, is a matter of...
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Sprint Pre-Installing Android App To (Mostly) Disable Your Smartphone While DrivingIf you're the sort of person who's tempted to take calls while driving -- or worse, answer text messages -- there are dozens of apps to help curb your addition. Now, Sprint is making the process even easier by pre-installing the Drive First app on every Android phone. Drive First works like many...
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Yikes: Kate Middleton Comes To Wed In Assaulted Rolls-Royce, Leaves In Di's Wedding CarriageKate Middleton will arrive at Westminster Abbey for her April 29 wedding in the very same 1977 Rolls-Royce Phantom VI that was recently attacked by protesters angry with Prince Chuckles and Camilla. And she'll leave the ceremony in the same wedding carriage that carted the late Princess Diana off...
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Video: Remembering Elizabeth Taylor And Her Sunbeam AlpineAs a celebrity blog, it would be hard to ignore the death of one of the biggest stars of the 20th century -- and we're not: Elizabeth Taylor has died at the age of 79. Millennials and younger folk may not know much of Taylor. By the time they were born, she was best known as a friend and defender...
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Mon Dieu! France Fines Google $142,000 For Street View Privacy ViolationsThere's no denying that Google Maps is the king of online mapping services. It may have been slightly late to the party, but thanks to social features like sharable maps and the ability to drop in notes at specific locations, it quickly zoomed past competitors like MapQuest. One of Google Maps'...
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It's hard to think about Oprah Winfrey and motor vehicles without hearing THAT voice. You know the one: "And YOU get a car! And YOU get a car! And YOU get to pay tax on that car!"
Sadly, in this...
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GM, Honda, And Others Launch Car Connectivity Consortium To Set Standards For In-Car AppsNew technology is exciting, but like most exciting things it's also fraught with peril -- and that's doubly true for developers. Think of all the tsoris caused by the great VHS vs. Beta battles of the 1980s, or the far more recent Blu-ray vs. HD DVD war, both of which cost manufacturers billions of...
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Car Sales Guru Tom Stuker Gets A Reality Show On Spike TVTom Stuker may be the most famous person you've never heard of -- unless, of course, you're in auto sales. Stuker is to car dealerships as Tabatha Coffey is to hair salons: a highly sought-after consultant with the plainspoken, proven power to get stalled businesses moving again. Now, Stuker may be...
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American Idol's Stefano Langone, Nearly Killed By Drunk Driver, Has DUI Of His OwnWe're not going to sit here and pretend to hang on every word that drops from the mouths of American Idol contestants. We're not even going to pretend that we've watched a full episode of the show. But when it comes to competitors hiding portions of their past...well, we're all ears. During his...
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Good News, Bad News, And Worse For Ford And 'The Lincoln Lawyer'Good news: At a time when corporate marketing budgets are merely a shadow of what they once were, Ford will get a free ride in the new film, The Lincoln Lawyer. A Lincoln spokesman says that the company didn't spend a dime on product placement for the movie. Bad news: The Lincoln Lawyer features...
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Planning A Summer Vacation? Google Updates Street View To HelpDuring the recent recession, a new type of vacation was born: the relaxing but slightly saddening "staycation". Thankfully, many of the world's economies have begun to recover, so now that winter's chill is thawing, cabin fever victims in the northern hemisphere are planning real getaways for...
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Et alors, qu'est-ce que c'est? Why, it appears to be actress, model, and object of Jeremy Clarkson's undying affection, Ms. Keira Knightley, perched atop a Ducati in Paris' Place de la Concorde. But...
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Jewel Is Alive And Well, Thanks To Her Cadillac SRXWe haven't heard much from Jewel in a while, and many of us were beginning to think that she might've headed off to a retirement Vanagon somewhere in Alaska, bringing her chapter in American pop music (and her brief footnote in American poetry) to an end. But now we know that Jewel is still alive...
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Packing For SXSW? Grab These Two Apps For Motoring Around TownBack in the late-mid-80s, South By Southwest was a humble music festival. Then someone -- possibly Al Gore -- invented the internet, Austin became a second Silicon Valley, and today, SXSW (as it's now known) is a jumble of music, film, and interactive technology. For the traveler, SXSW is also a...
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Video: New FAST FIVE Trailer Raises At Least Six QuestionsIn chillier parts of the country, you might not believe it, but summer is a-comin'. And of course, with summer come action films. And with action films come fast cars, scantily clad women, and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson. Add all that together, carry the one, and you've got the new trailer for Fast...
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Cat Burglars Steal Guy Fieri's 2008 Lamborghini GallardoGuy Fieri: chef, TV personality, bona fide gearhead, consummate bro, and now, sadly, victim of supercar theft. As we understand it, Fieri's prized 2008 Lamborghini Gallardo was sitting at a Lambo dealership in San Fransisco, California early Tuesday morning, when a thief climbed onto the roof of...
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Hyundai's New Nav System Asks: Do You Want The Shortest Route Or The Greenest?Today's navigation systems are great at finding the shortest route between Point A and Point B. Some even integrate traffic data to identify alternate paths if the shortest one is congested. But Hyundai's newest navigation platform will also tell you which route is the greenest, keeping CO2 out of...
Richard Read