First, let's begin with a number of disclosures. Something that you would think the $100 million-valued Huffington Post would require of their authors but apparently that's not the case. Calacanis' company Mahalo has received funding from Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk. In addition, Jason's brother-in-law and Mahalo investor Ryan Scott is also a Tesla Motors investor. Boy that's something the readers of the Huffington Post piece should know, right?

As many of you know, I am a public transportation junkie. My belief is that all (or most) government funding should be used towards pushing mass transit. Creating cars powered by batteries, water, or anything else won't fix our growing traffic issues. Take the millions and billions of dollars and create better transit systems in cities across this country. There's so much that can be done with transit to create real environmental and human savings.

If we are going to look at ways to save oil, why not spend the money creating more efficient air travel? I have to imagine that the savings up in the sky would be larger than those on the ground but yet I never hear anyone talking about fixing air travel.

Ok, now let's talk about cars and what appears to be the hot trend now, battery-powered cars. I am no expert in battery-technology but if the concensus is to move forward building batteries for cars, I am all for it. However, instead of dropping hundreds of millions into Tesla, put it into the great universities across this country. Create a cross-university research center where students, scientists and industry professionals can work together to create the battery technology. Once it's perfected, then it could be sold/leased/provided to companies like Tesla. This would be a much safer investment than giving money to frankly any auto-company at this time. I bet this type of research project could even draw in some of our worldwide allies and help slowly regain some of our lost status in the worldwide community.

I haven't seen anything from Tesla that speaks to the average American family. A $60k sedan isn't for the average American family. Calacanis' math is interesting -- a person making $80k should be able to easily afford a $60k car. Boy that's exactly how we got into the mortgage hell we are in now - people living beyond their means! And Tesla hasn't displayed the leadership that would be needed for me to believe that they would be able to remain a going concern long enough to repay any loan. How many CEOs have they been through so far?

At the end of the day, we need better ways to move people from place A to place B. All transportation options should be considered and creating expensive cars isn't the way to accomplish what we're looking for.

Update: Philip James points us to this illustration of why we need more transit:

It’s pretty simple, really. If you’d like to cast your vote for the best How To site online, simply:

1. Choose your favorite from the nominees below

2. Select that site in the widget’s dropdown menu

3. Enter your email address

4. Click Vote

5. We will send you a confirmation email. Be sure to click the link to verify your vote!

The How-To site with the most votes proceeds to the finals next week. Voting ends at midnight PST tonight. Good luck to all the nominees!

The Contenders

A Full Cup - offers how-tos for those seeking coupons and discounts.

Bright Hub - shares information about how scientific facts evolve into the latest technology.

Bukisa - lets you share your knowledge and then get paid when others access it.

Church Media Design - offers tips and tricks for the church media designer in video podcast format.

College-Cram - social learning site that allows students to organize their schoolwork.

eHow - provides video and textual tutorials on hundreds of subject areas.

Howcast - offers professionally made and user generated how-to videos.

Makezine - features thousands of DIY projects for the hands-on enthusiast.

MyTechOpinion - provides product reviews, how-to articles, and technology-specific strategies for real estate professionals.

RepairPal - an in-depth how-to site for car maintenance and automotive repair.

WonderHowTo - a video how-to site.

VOTE NOW: One Vote Per Category Per Day

Now it’s time to vote for your favorite How-To site in the first of two voting rounds. You can vote for one company per day until midnight on November 30th (that’s today!).

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At the peak of the violence, more than one message per second with the word 'Mumbai' in it was being posted onto Twitter, a short-message service that has evolved from an oddity to a full-fledged news platform in just two years.

Those descriptions and others on Web sites and photo-sharing sites served as a chaotic but critically important link among people across the world - whether they be Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn tracking the fate of a rabbi held hostage at the Nariman House or students in Britain with loved ones back in India or people hanging on every twist and turn in the standoff while visiting relatives for Thanksgiving dinner.

The Times highlights one specific citizen, Harvard Medical student Arun Shanbhag. Here's where Arun is on the Web:

• Twitter
• WordPress
• Flickr

Our take on Twitter and the attacks is that once again, Twitter proved itself as a site people go to during widely-discussed events and that the company should take advantage of that behavior by creating branded sites around certain topics -- like Twitter did with elections.twitter.com -- and funnel users to them through Twitter search.

In a case such as the attacks in Mumbai, Twitter might not sell an ad (though the New York Times does) but it could donate space to the Red Cross and help users help.

See Also:
What're People Most Thankful For? Twitter Knows

WePapers describes itself as a place where everyone (especially students) can expand their knowledge and share their wisdom for free. The startup is a convenient place for sharing your enthusiasm about knowledge as you can become a teacher, guru or a mentor. WePapers provides quality information through its papers, that you wouldn’t find anywhere else on the Web.

You can also discuss your work with other people using WePapers, and get useful feedback about it. One can also find help for their studies and increase chances of getting better grades. The founders of WePapers: Ehud and Hanan, came up with this startup realizing there was a need for such a service.

We want to make an impact on the way people learn, acquire knowledge, and help make the world a little bit cleverer.

---
Related Articles at Startup Meme:

The competition, now in its second year, involves Max putting together a killer PC system (this year a Media Center) with components suggested (and sometimes disputed) by the community. The selfless guy then gives the finished system to one lucky random winner from the pool of users who contributed at least a comment. Not bad since all you do is suggest the most expensive components you can find. Microsoft’s paying right?

So far they’ve picked a case, CPU and motherboard. Currently discussing memory.

Students from any country can participate. Head over to the Channel8 site for more details.

Now seems to be an awfully good time to be a student. If the HP Magic Giveaway has got your heart pumping for some high-stake freebies and you’re currently enrolled in a higher education (college, university or technical school) institution, then Max Zuckerman from Microsoft’s student Channel8 community has an offer for you.

The competition, now in its second year, involves Max putting together a killer PC system (this year a Media Center) with components suggested (and sometimes disputed) by the community. The selfless guy then gives the finished system to one lucky random winner from the pool of users who contributed at least a comment. Not bad since all you do is suggest the most expensive components you can find. Microsoft’s paying right?

So far they’ve picked a case, CPU and motherboard. Currently discussing memory.

Students from any country can participate. Head over to the Channel8 site for more details.

Some of these images date back as far as 1750 and others are as recent as the 2000’s. You may browse through photos grouped by people (FDR), places (Taj Mahal), events (the Kentucky Derby), sports, or any cultural keyword you can think of.

For example, here’s a word that’s been thrown around lately: “depression.” Type that in to find photos from the Great Depression of the 1930’s.  You can start from http://images.google.com/hosted/life or simply add “source:life” to the search box on any Google Image Search page. Framed copies of any photo you find are available for purchase.

Other Image Collections

It should be noted that Life’s sister publication, Time, also has an extensive (but not yet Googleized) photo archive dating back to 1999. It can be found on the Time homepage, but here’s a direct link. You may also use the site’s search function, where photo essays will show up on the right sidebar.

National Geographic magazine offers thousands of beautiful stock photos at NationalGeographicStock which can be searched by keyword. You may also specify whether you want royalty-free images and/or images which may have their rights managed.

NASA’s Johnson Space Center has a collection of over 9000 press-release photos of America’s manned space program. More can be found here. Both can be searched by keyword.

America’s National Archive has but a fraction of its materials in its Archive Research Catalog. However that still amounts to over 140,000 digitized photographs and documents which can be searched by keyword, or leisurely browsed.

Rounding out our list, Image Services at the University of Pennsylvania Library has archives in several categories: Fine Arts, Chemistry, South Asian, or Shakespearean. Certain large images are only permitted for use on UPenn’s domain, however all images can be viewed from outside UPenn.

There’s some beautiful stuff and potential desktop wallpaper to be found in these collections. You may find some more wallpaper fodder via this February article by Tina.

Do you know of any other media treasure-troves?  Do you have any favorites?  How else can we use archives such as these? Let us know in the comments.

(By) Tim Watson is a freelance 'blogger, part-time Web addict, full-time father, and Aperture Science test subject (but only on the weekends). His 'blog and projects can be found at Twenty Ounce Enterprises.

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The demand for iPhone developers exceeds the supply and I don't see that changing anytime soon. The going rate for iPhone developers, at least the developers I know and trust, is $125/hour and up. I have some friends who are booked out at $200/hour for the next few months, although $125/hour seems to be the going rate in my network. At that rate, a full-time contract iPhone developer costs $5,000/week and it may take four to six weeks for an application to be developed. Sometimes it will take less and sometimes it will take more. Add to development the other costs - project management, design, QA, and marketing, to name a few. It's not uncommon to spend $30,000 and up on an iPhone development project. iPhone applications are not cheap.

College students: Take that iPhone class! If you work 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, a $125/hour job is $250,000 a year. A $200/hour job is $400,000 a year. Those rates will inevitably fall, but a skilled iPhone app maker is a rare, valuable person these days.

See Also:
Google: Yes, We Broke iPhone App Store Rules
Another Apple iPhone Advantage: Mac Software Companies
Online, Multi-Player Gaming Comes To The iPhone