Archive for February, 2011

Sadly I never even finished my 3 post text-heavy coverage of the Detroit Autoshow from January, but at least I can do up some brief coverage of the Toronto Autoshow. Tom and I did our yearly pilgrimage last weekend. As always, the show was packed, in fact its a much ‘larger’ show than Detroit, all be it less important to the industry. Detroit also lacks the hooligans posing on the hoods of cars throwing up gang signs, go figure on that one.

ANYWAY… here we go.

We started off with the boys at Mercedes. The C/A4-A5/3-series segment has, as always, been one of the most important to the industry. Mercedes face-listed C63AMG is really looking fantastic, and is the real ‘heavy hitter’ in the segment:

I'd still buy the M3...

Onward to Volkswagen, who is intent on making more and more crap in our market to become the next Toyota. Aside from joining into an argument with a *very* rude Volkswagen rep who was intent on explaining that the Routan was not really a Chrysler (well not so intent after being argued with he said he ‘Didn’t care what we thought’), Volkswagen was debuting (well Canadian debut) the 2012 Big-Jetta, er Passat.

The 2012 Big-Jetta

Having sat in one in Detroit, the interior quality is worse than the previous gen Jetta, as are the engine choices and suspension. The only ‘decent’ engine is the TDI. Onward to the real Toyota, who is too boring to really discuss. One of their most boring displays was the Lexus LS, who’s interior seems to wow people who like “80s luxury” (how could you even compare it to an S-class, 7-series or A8) and who’s engine bay is as sterile as can be:

Wheres the 'no user serviceable parts' sticker?

Tom had snapped the one side back down, someone had obviously pried it up. They had some (tons of) other cars too, but I’m totally not interested in discussing them. Next up was Audi. Audi had two big unveils, the A7 and the TT-RS. The front of the TT-RS was pretty mean looking, and the current (2nd gen) TT isn’t as terrible a Golf derivative as it’s first version was (a fancy leather wrapped Beetle)

Don't call me a fast Golf!

The A7 was a nice looking car, but kinda boring drivetrain options considering its market position. Not totally sure where it slots between the A6 and A8, a sportier (but still 4 door A8?). It’s not even one of the now-trendy 4-door coupes. Onto BMW, who I won’t spend too much time on. They had a lounge for customers which featured rather nice drinks and snacks. The 1-series M was of course the big draw, as was a matte finished M3. I hope to take a 1-series M out in May and review it, so we’ll discuss it then. The big reveal was the X1, an SUV for people who dislike station wagons, like this new pig-nose look, and don’t mind a lot of cheap looking plastic.

Because you don't like station wagons?

Buy a Volkswagen Golf Wagon (not the hatch, the wagon), it’ll be an equivalent drive, more space inside and frankly isn’t hideous. Spend the rest of the money on coke. Onward to Nissan who had some silly concepts (as they always do) as well as the unveil of the NISMO 370Z. Amongst the actually upgraded engine (software/induction/exhaust), brakes and suspension, you net yourself a ridiculous spoiler and a pair of coffee-can exhaust tips. I’m sure this was a big deal to the sort of people who drive around with sunglasses, a baseball cap and use way too much hair gel.

Rice rice baby

Next up is Hyundai, who I didn’t take any photos of. They were showing off the Genesis Sedan and Coupe they are so proud of. We were rather amused with all the electrical tape under the hood of a Genesis Coupe. Hyundai, who lacks an innovative bone in their corporate body, had their Genesis Coupe 3.8 painted in Interlagos Yellow. Onto their buddies over at KIA, who were showing off a bunch of dreadfully boring cars, including a “Toronto FC” edition of some SUV thing. I guess you might want a painted valve cover…. My big amusement was that their kiosks did not feature activated (cough pirated) versions of Windows…

KIA powered by warez Windows?

GM had all the Corvettes out. I have to say the Z06 is one awesome looking car now, and the ZR1 is an insane performer. I never thought I’d see the day where Corvettes were really appealing packages. They also had the coolest display of the entire show, a guy tearing down and rebuilding the LS7 (7L V8) from the Z06. He could do it in about 4 hours. Pretty awesome.

The 7L V8 of the Z06 is an awesome beast

Ford’s big thing was the new Focus, which I covered pretty well in Detroit. I really like the car. They had a video stream of Ken Block drifting the rally version on loop. The one cool display they did have was a cutaway of one of the hybrid+CVT four bangers they’re shipping. Was one of the best cutaways I’ve seen.

Fantastic cutaway

All and all was a good show. I will leave you with some car porn:

Not sure that'll take a speed bump...

What a beast!

The 250GT was a stunning car

The Giulietta is a seriously cute car

Abarth!

Proper GT500

As someone who’s been around the web application block a few times, I’m always on the look out for great web apps, and terrible web apps. I love great web apps. A great web app is attractive, responsive, intuitive, useful and secure.

Another thing I love are QR codes. Original created by DENSO as a way of streamlining their huge automotive parts manufacturing business, they are essentially a high capacity barcode. QR codes became popular in the land of cell phone cameras (Japan) to point URLs for extra product info, free ringtones, images and for contests. This trend has of course spread here and is a lot of fun.

The premiss is simple. Anyone with a camera equipped phone (and nowadays this is almost every phone) can take a photo of your QR code, then using one of many free apps, translate it into a URL. One of my favourite QR code contests involved finding five different ads (for different flavours) of Maynards candy. You had to plug an email in for each one, and when you had obtained them all, you would be entered into a draw to win one of several prizes. I scoured the subway car I was in to find all the different ads (which were all different sizes), I was involved, I was smiling, it was a good execution. Of course I didn’t win but I enjoyed it anyway.

I recently encountered another QR based contest which was a give-away for a clothing store. It was pretty simple, you had to scan the code on the back of the catalog, and they would give away one gift card every day for a month and a half. My love of QR codes and these mobile contests lead me to enter it. Upon scanning the code I realized that the URL I was pointed to was non unique, that is, every catalog had the same QR code. When my phone actually visited the URL I was told I was not a winner. The experience was simple and quick which is definitely good. However when I began thinking about it, the simplicity of this contest is a serious flaw.

Since the contest declares an instant loss (or win), someone would just have to hit the contest repeatedly, looking for anything but a loss. Throw in some common mobile phone user-agents and a small pool of IPs in a roulette, you no longer look like a bot. Throw in randomized but short delays in between attempts and you are beginning to look human, moreover, like many humans. Pretty soon our poor contest has little defense against even a novice hacker…

The whole premiss of this contest is that there is one winner a day, however since you are declared a loser (or winner) right away, how do they randomly chose a winner? Basically they are rolling a huge dice with a very large number of sides, say a hundred thousand. A winner could be declared a minute after midnight making the entire days contest moot, or a minute before midnight. Once a winner is found, the contest stops rolling and declares everyone a loser. A true daily winner would require selecting one from the true pool of entrants during a 24 hour period. Asking for an email and randomly picking a winner at midnight accomplishes the goal and has real advantages for fraud prevention. We’ll talk more about using an email address later.

I think the #1 concern of any developer of a contest (web or otherwise) should be how to stop gaming, hacking or fraud, whatever name you chose to give it. :) You need to be able to accurately track entrants, and for the web this can be accomplished in at least three ways. The first is through an IP address. However this becomes a problem since many ISPs use proxy servers to keep their transit costs down. It becomes impossible for a primarily mobile contest as most phones do not get a unique IP, they are NAT’d out one (or a small handful) or IPs assigned to a specific cell tower. The second way to track entrants is through a tracking cookie, however defeating this for someone interested in gaming your contest is trivial. Do not rely on cookies to declare someone unique! The third solution is utilizing some sort of external tracking method, that is, do not track them through their hit of the contest URL. The best way to do this would be actual unique QR codes tied to each consumer’s catalog, with some real cryptography behind the unique string. Unfortunately this would add to the cost of printing the catalogs and may not be an option. However there are alternative methods of tracking entrants external to the actual web hit.

With most web based contests you would require an email address of an entrant. Creating fake email addresses isn’t difficult, but its a good hurdle and one thats fairly easy to detect. (Did you see a million entries from zomg48.info? it’s probably junk, filter it. Do a daily report on top email domains: audit audit audit!) However, since this is a mobile contest an email verification might break the flow of the app since you no longer declare that instant loss (or win), and it requires a person to enter a potentially large string (their email address) on a cell phone.

Alternatively, if you must declare an instant winner, you can always use a captcha. Captchas are not fool proof, but they are certainly a hurdle that would dissuade most fraud. The real draw back to captchas is that they annoy users enough on desktop web applications. Mobile web apps needs to be streamlined, and easy to use on small screens. Captchas aren’t particularly good at either of these things…

I really didn’t like the email approach (breaks the mobile flow), nor do I like captchas on mobile platforms. In talking to my good friend Brandon, he had a good suggestion. When a user hits the QR encoded URL, take them to a page where they enter their mobile number. From there you can either declare an instant winner via SMS or even SMS them at noon the next day for a true daily winner. SMS them a secure unique URL to hit to fill in their personal details, then dispatch their prize. An instant SMS wouldn’t break the flow, since SMS delivery is pretty much guaranteed as a capability of anyone entering your contest, where as email isn’t reliably instant for non-savvy smart phone users. Compared to an email address, mobile numbers are also much easier (and quicker) for cell phone users to enter on a page.

I guess to summarize the above:

Two blog posts in one day!? (Yea its just another Youtube embed)

In a parody of Duke Nukem, Mega64 and GameTrailers have partnered to produce a trailer for Doug Huggem, a feel good game to be released soon… in March 2024….

Here is the extended video of Jon St. John doing a recording session. Priceless

I had intended to do some non-car blog posting next, but heres a quickie youtube gem explaining how a differential works thats too good to miss (via Tom)

I’ve embedded the video to start at a minute and a half as the intro is quite long. I you want to see an extra minute and a half of motorcycle formations, definitely start at the beginning. A truly fantastic video.