Tata Motors unveiled the 100,000-rupee car earlier today at the Auto Expo in Delhi today.

Tata Chairman Ratan Tata talks about his inspiration for the car:

Speaking at the unveiling of the car at a motor show in Delhi, Tata chairman Ratan Tata said: “”I observed families riding on two-wheelers – the father driving the scooter, his young kid standing in front of him, his wife seated behind him holding a little baby.

“It led me to wonder whether one could conceive of a safe, affordable, all-weather form of transport for such a family…” [Independent]

This is true. I once saw eight people on a scooter with a side-car, and routinely have seen five on one without one. I wasn’t too worried about them safety-wise, though. Traffic in Bombay is slow, and these dudes are smart and resourceful. They reach places significantly faster and more efficiently than any car would, in spite of their large loads.

I’m more worried about the Bihari dudhwala (milk-man) on his bicycle. Once one of them swerved in front of me when I was driving a moped on a busy street, and then swerved to avoid me when he realized I was blocked by a truck on my other side. People say they put water in the milk, but I’d swear this one was putting a little bit of narangi (local liquor) and toking a little on the side.

I don’t think that the dudhwala is Tata’s primary target, though. And given the amount of carbon and other pollutants in the air, I do see one advantage of owning the Nano. At least the family of eight will not have to inhale vast amounts of soot and shower after every ride on their two-wheeler to remove a nice thick layer of gunk on their faces and bodies, if they can afford the Nano. Even laundry costs will go down.

If they can fit eight on a scooter though, I wonder how many they’d be able to pack into the car. Many in India do still live in the joint-family system. My previous remark about local liquor notwithstanding, the joint-family system has nothing to do with marijuana. It just means that several generations, and siblings and siblings’ families live together in one house, or in several cases, a Bombay apartment. And many Bombay apartments are not too much larger than the inside of the Nano, which once again leads me to wonder how many they’ll manage to fit in there.

But (as usual) I digress. The nitty-gritties on the car were also talked about:

The car would be commercially launched in the second half of 2008, and would be produced at the Singur plant in West Bengal.

Speaking at the launch, Ratan Tata, said: “The car is powered by a 624cc, 30 bhp engine and will deliver mileage of about 20 kpl.”

The standard variant (without AC) of Nano is priced at Rs 1 lakh for dealers excluding VAT and transportation. There will be two deluxe variants with AC.

“The car has already undergone full frontal collision tests and will soon be undergoing side impact tests this year. It will be Euro-IV compliant and will meet all emission norms till 2010″, Tata said.

The car is 8% smaller in terms of length than the Maruti 800, but has 21% more room internally. [Business Standard]

Although it’s impressive that the emission standards are in line with European ones, it’s not going to be sold in the West as of now.

The irony of it all is that Ford talked earlier this week about launching their own small car, and Tata is now one of the front-runners in buying Jaguar and Land Rover from Ford. I guess this completes the circle.

The first wave of slicing up services work and sending it abroad has been all about business operations. Computer programming, call centers, product design and back-office jobs like accounting and billing have to some degree migrated abroad, mainly to India. The Internet, of course, makes it possible, while lower wages in developing nations make outsourcing attractive to corporate America.

The second wave, according to some entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and offshoring veterans, will be the globalization of consumer services. People like Ms. Yamaki and Mr. Tham, they predict, are the early customers in a market that will one day include millions of households in the United States and other nations. [link]

It being Halloween tomorrow, Google has decided to celebrate by changing its little Street View fellow into a witch. Now, you can fly on a broom-stick to whichever street you want to view.

Waking up at 5 a.m., while his wife and daughter are still asleep, he pads into the darkened kitchen, logs onto his computer and changes the Netflix order to put his favorite movies on top. He knows the warehouse ships the movies by about 7 a.m., so by the time his wife realizes what he’s done, it’ll be too late. “It’s not grounds for murder, but it is irritating,” Ms. De Chellis [the wife] says. [link]

Man, that’s devious. Fortunately, I control the Netflix in our marriage, so there’s no issue about choosing movies. Of course, a bad choice (i.e., one that the wife does not like) will lie there unwatched for months on end, but that’s for a different post. Getting back to the article, things get murkier as we turn to blogging. See what happens if the couple have a common blog:

They agreed to give each other veto power over posts, which he exercised when she wanted to shout out into the blogosphere about his failure to do the dishes. “That’s a real sensitive issue,” says Mr. Griffioen, 30… Readers of the site…would have blown it out of proportion, he says: “They’re going to turn it into this whole thing of how I don’t keep up my end of the relationship.”

Veto power rocks. The consequences of publishing a post on her husband’s failure to do the dishes would be devastating. Trust me, I have three sisters-in-law. I know. [Incidentally, if one of them is reading this - I'm just kidding! See the Humor tag below? It's supposed to be funny!]

As for starting a joint-blog? Well, I’ll let the article do the talking:

As for sharing one blog, the idea “never came up,” he says. “It would be like saying, ‘Let’s share our underwear.’ ” [link]

I’m a right clicka.
I’m an I-Book flippa.
Macs ‘n PCs – no fight gets bigga!

Hell yeah!

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The Cast and Crew

First off, we had a woman get frantic about the people circling her streets in vans while taking pictures of her cat. Sounds like 24? Well, think again. Here’s what she wrote to BoingBoing:

I’m all for mapping, but this feature literally gives me the shakes. I feel like I need to close all my curtains now. I’m going to look into whether it’s possible for a person to have pictures of their home removed from Google Maps. Meanwhile, I’m happy to show bb readers the photo in the interest of illustrating creepy privacy violations. Heck, the whole world can see him anyway. [link]

And here’s a picture of her cat.

[link]

Then there’s this article in the NYT about the woman, Mary Kalin-Casey, and how Google has invaded her privacy. If you ask me, the whole “privacy” thing is something Americans are obsessed with. Don’t ask me why because it is beyond me. To us desis, the concept of privacy is something that we never really gave much importance. And given the choice of being alone most of the time and having people around and poking their nose in my business, I prefer the latter. Maybe I’m biased. No, scratch that. I am biased. Privacy is nice, but the obsession with it is a little over the top. Something people with lots of time on their hands can indulge themselves in. Well, more power to you. Just let me take my showers in peace and you can look at anyone’s pussy cat all you want. [Apologies: I couldn't resist that one]

Ok, that’s all well and good. Then I come across a post on the Wired blog which has user-contributed images from the Street View feature. Here’s an interesting one – the Google van reflected in an office building’s window, while its taking its picture:

[link]

Then we have this post on Mashable.com with the Top 15 Street View sightings. Here’s one of my favorites – seems she has only half a face:

[link]

And finally to the source of it all. The Google VW Beetle. Well, it’s not really Google’s, it belongs to Immersive Media, but it’s still pretty cool. Click on the link below the image for the blog-post by PR. Differently (the image source) with a close-up of the patented (by Immersive Media) eleven-lens camera. [via]

[link]

Google Maps has just released a new feature: Street View. This lets you get really down ‘n dirty and actually check out pictures of a neighbourhood at street-level, as if you were walking around. It’s pretty cool – you can pan, zoom and even move in intervals of around 100 feet (or so).

The pics are also pretty recent, since on the fire escape of my building, there’s a dirty pink bucket which was placed there by my college kid neighbours. I think they use it to puke in, after their nightly drunken binges. They’re smarmy little brats who need a tight slap to put them in place. Of course, if I do it, I might be charged with assault, but if you’re in my area, feel free to drop by and kick them around a little.

See kids? The take-home lesson is this: When you talk like that, it means you’re getting old.

Check out Google Maps.

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Then, the NYT‘s Technology columnist David Pogue found out that:

Microsoft spokesman Tom Pilla on Tuesday confirmed with iPod Observer that his company initiated the creation of the iPod packaging parody video… ‘It was an internal-only video clip commissioned by our packaging [team] to humorously highlight the challenges we have faced RE: packaging and to educate marketers here about the pitfalls of packaging/branding,’ he said via e-mail. [link]

Now, over a year later, Microsoft is still laughing at itself (it obviously doesn’t have much else to do). It has come out with its own oFone, in answer to Apple’s iPhone. Check it out. It doubles as a boomerang!

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And, according to Todd Bishop’s Microsoft blog,

Microsoft showed the video during a keynote address by Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices Division, at the company’s Mobile and Embedded Developer Conference this morning. Some current and former Windows Mobile team members make appearances in the spoof. [link] [via]

Hm. Now, if only they would do something about the blue screen of death and the million or so other bugs in Windows.

In other news: Microsoft is not laughing at Linux. The bastards!

we can confirm that on July 20th, 2069, in honor of the 100th anniversary of mankind’s first manned lunar landing, Google will fully integrate Google Local search capabilities into Google Moon, which will allow our users to quickly find lunar business addresses, numbers and hours of operation, among other valuable forms of Moon-oriented local information.

Google is now regarded as almost-omniscient. By 7/20/2069, it will definitely be omniscient and omnipresent as well (what with Google Moon, Google Mars, etc.). In view of that, world super-powers (in particular, the US) are now scrambling to get to the moon (again). In fact, the US outsourced the moon landing to India according to this BBC News article.

Incidentally, did you know that the Indian version of NASA is called ISRO? I always thought an Isro was a Jewish guy with an Afro…