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It’s not quite fair that this commercial featuring Apple greats Burrell Smith, Andy Hertzfeld, George Crow, Bill Atkinson, and Mike Murray never aired, but it’s easy to see why. In it you meet some of the creators of the Mac who go on to offer some insight on the design process and end with the tagline “Insanely Great.” Arguably, this sort of self-promotion is a little gauche, but it’s definitely nice to see these boys in their prime, talking about something they loved.

For context, Smith designed the Mac motherboard while Hertzfeld created many of Mac OS’ UI components. In short, these are the Young Turks of the proto-PC/Mac era.

Sadly, the commercial only aired at Apple sales events where this team of Apple Avengers got to tell their tale.

BONUS: Check out Hertzfeld’s design for Frox, a home computer that looks more like a mutated Wii than anything available back in 1990.

via 9to5mac

Google’s self-driving car project is probably one of the most audacious experiments the company has embarked upon. Today, Google announced another milestone for this project: its fleet of about a dozen autonomous cars has now driven 300,000 miles without a single accident under computer control. While this is obviously very positive news for the project, Google warns that “there’s still a long road ahead.” The cars still need to learn how to handle snow-covered roads, for example, and how to interpret temporary construction signs and other situations that could throw its systems for a loop.

It’s not clear how many of these 300,000 miles were driven on Google’s secret racecourse, by the way.

According to today’s update, Google also plans to soon let some of the team’s members drive the cars solo for their daily commutes. Currently, the cars are always driven by at least two people, but the team apparently feels that the project has reached a point where it’s safe to just have one person operate the cars.

Google also announced that it has added the Lexus RX450h hybrid car to its self-driving car family.

“One day we hope this capability will enable people to be more productive in their cars,” said Chris Urmson, Google’s engineering lead for this project, in a blog post today, “For now, our team members will remain in the driver’s seats and will take back control if needed.” There have, of course been some accidents that involved Google’s self-driving cars in the past. All of these, however, happened while humans were in control of the cars.

Little Baby's Ice Cream, a small chain in Philadelphia, made a couple of weird ads recently. But they're not as scary as some people are suggesting, unless you're frightened of hipsterish forced wackiness. The concept of Malcolm, the chain's official spokesthing, who supposedly grew out of a failed batch of Duck Sauce Vanilla ice cream, is cool in theory. But the initial surreality of watching Malcolm eat himself gets annoying after about 30 seconds or so. It's not unlike the initial excitement of seeing Neil Gaiman, followed by the disappointment when Amanda Palmer shows up, too. Second spot after the jump.

Watering plants is tough to remember. You’ll find all types of tricks out there to do it automatically, but Instructables user randofo’s Arduino-powered system might be one of the more ambitious. More »

Social video startup SnappyTV launched last year with a platform for making clips of live videos and then sharing them on social networks. Now it’s moving beyond custom implementations and launching a platform that will allow any video publisher to enable real-time clipping and social sharing of those videos on Facebook and Twitter.

SnappyTV already works with some major TV networks and media companies, offering up tools to allow their viewers to quickly and easily share video moments with friends and followers on social networks. Using SnappyTV’s editing tools, TV networks, online video publishers, and sports leagues have published and pushed clips onto Facebook and Twitter virtually in real-time, making them instantly shareable.

With its new self-service video clipping and sharing tools, small and medium-sized companies can easily integrate the SnappyTV platform with their video delivery systems. That includes working with major live-streaming providers, as well as YouTube and video content management systems like Brightcove and Ooyala. While SnappyTV has been working with major media companies on custom implementations, now basically anyone can deploy the same technology.

That technology can be used by companies to share live video clips during live-streaming events, such as conferences or other programs. It was used during TechCrunch Disrupt, for instance, to share more than 350 clips on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

With the new product, SnappyTV has introduced three offerings, in addition to its custom enterprise services. There’s the $49 a month Express offering, which supports recording and editing of live events and social sharing. The Pro offering, which is prices at $499 a month, enables editing, scheduling and publishing to social networks, as well as importing to YouTube and content management systems like Brightcove and Ooyala. And its conferences and live events offering makes the came capabilities available to conference promoters on live streaming platforms. That costs $999 per event.