Wish You Were Here

McDonald’s asks “do you want a car charge with that”?

Wednesday 15 July 2009 00:00
Patrick Stafford  www.smartcompany.com

With all the talk about upcoming electric cars, some companies have already begun to develop plans for rolling out charging stations across the US and Australia.

But now a new McDonald’s restaurant in the US has beaten them to the punch. The new store will offer free car charging in its parking lot, one of the various ‘green’ features the store will promote.

The store, located in North Carolina, has been built with wood from forests certified by the Forest Stewardship Council and tables and chairs that have been constructed with renewable materials such as wheat board and bamboo, while the store is illuminated by natural light.

The preferred parking spaces will be tailored for hybrid and electric cars, with ChargePoint stations offering free electricity for cars that can ‘plug in’.

While a full charge may take longer than the amount of time it takes to eat a McDonald’s meal, emerging technology will surely improve charging times. Additionally, with the construction of charging stations at Swedish McDonald’s locations, the franchise may be preparing to roll the feature out across a number of countries.

Channel 10 according to Twitter was the only TV channel on air, according to the what’s trending cloud on Twiiter. The poular topics included Masterchef and a heap of trafic driven by Rove, including guests Bruno, Kevin Rudd, Krudd and Matt Preston. Twitter is creating a whole new realm of interactive TV – will it drive TV ratings in the long term – possibly, if not, it will drive a huge numbers of catch up TV viewing on You Tube and other video sites.

So the new iPhone firmware and software update is due out Wednesday (today). Great to see that the dev team have already cracked the new version. All the details available here.

We are just hours from the start of the Apple WWDC in San Francisco. What will be the WOW launch at this conference. For me, my hopes are pinned on upgrades to the iPhone. So will we get more than cut and past, will it extend to tethering your iPhone as a 3G modem or will Apple get adventurous.

Lets go past coloured cases and get onto the the big wins. For me these would include:

• The front facing camera and 3G video calling capabilities.
• Better camera resolution and maybe zoom.
• The ability for applications to run in background.
• A new software / hardware system that is faster in its response.
• Less call drop outs.
• MMS capabilities.

But the big question is will Steve Jobs appear – maybe on a 3G video call. In a few hours we will all know.

So I decided to enter the world of blogging! I wanted to share some thoughts and needed an outlet, plus in addition I wanted to test some theories on search engine optimisation and link building through social media.

The title refers to nothing more than the name of one of my favourite albums, one I still enjoy at least weekly.

For those interested, the URL and the blog took about an hour to set up. You can see its a .me domain – how vain, using wordpress and hosted by Webfirm.

I’m not sure about the theme at this time but let me know what you think. Drop by to say Hi from time to time.