Fact: folks living in “geeky” San Francisco Bay Area buy more electric and hybrid cars than elsewhere in the world.
Fact: the “geeky” economy in San Francisco Bay Area startups is booming, much higher than state or national averages. IE, geeks have more money to spend on cars than people elsewhere in USA (which is borne out by looking at the cars on the road — California’s roads have more “expensive” cars, like the Chevy Volt is).
Fact: General Motors has a research division located in “geeky” Palo Alto (right next to the original “geeky” Frys).
Fact: every other car company CEO knows that what differentiates cars today is GEEKY FEATURES +not+ engine, transmission, etc. (see the video of Nissan’s CEO below).
Fact: the Toyota Prius has life-saving features like radar-based crash preparation and better headlights than Chevy Volt (which doesn’t yet have those features, despite being more expensive than the Toyota Prius).

So, why should GM’s CEO, Daniel Akerson, be fired? Because he just denigrated his competition’s car by calling it “geeky.”

Now I know why the Chevy Volt has no driver assist features available. The CEO doesn’t care about technology and doesn’t care about the very customers who could help his company attain profitability. He should be fired.

By the way, my Toyota Prius is the best car I’ve owned. It gets more than 40mpg, even with my lead foot. Something most other American cars have yet to attain. All while having a better stereo, great blue-tooth audio integration so my iPhone plays music well without cords (stereo even), great display screens, and while having features like self-parking, a camera that both keeps me inside the lane and warns me if I’m getting out of one (say, if I’m falling asleep, which could save my life), and radar that makes my cruise control a LOT better than that in the Chevy Volt. Not to mention my Prius has LED headlights that are nicer on the dark road I drive home on every evening.

But the Chevy Volt has slightly more acceleration.

Now I know why the Chevy Volt has more acceleration but fewer features that could save my life. That alone tells me why GM’s CEO should be fired. But trying to call his potential Silicon Valley customers lame is the real reason he should be fired. Any CEO that tries to call customers lame should immediately be shown the door.

Compare this to Carlos Ghosn, Chairman & CEO, Renault S.A. & Nissan Motor Co., Ltd. who celebrated geeks last week in his speech at LeWeb. I interviewed him after his speech (in which he showed off a prototype “geeky” car that even had an iPad holder). Listen to how he talks, he’s a great CEO for the “geeky” age. Why? He knows who has the money to buy his high-end electric cars: geeks. Compare the Nissan and GM CEOs and you can tell instantly that one should be shown the door.

Carlos’ LeWeb speech is here:

It isn’t every day I get an entrepreneur to put a feature into a product, much less the product that was just named Apple’s iPad app of the year, but here’s the story.

Flipboard Founder Mike McCue just tweeted that I was responsible for Flipboard putting Twitter list support into the product, among other things.

Why do I do it for free? Because I love this stuff and want the best possible apps to use myself. Flipboard without Twitter list support would have been totally worthless for me. It isn’t obvious that Twitter list support is important. After all, how many people use Twitter lists. But for Flipboard it was a must have. I showed Kathleen Kennedy Flipboard and showed her how she could go to Listorious, copy a Twitter list, and make a Flipboard out of it. She was thrilled.

It’s not just me, either, who helps startups build killer products. There’s a whole team at Rackspace (the world’s largest hosting company, where I work) that’s doing this kind of work. Why? Because we know that if the Internet gets bigger and more important we’ll win our share of the new business. Yes, we lost Flipboard to Amazon, but I still helped Flipboard even after I realized they’d never become a Rackspace customer. Why?

Well, because word gets around that we’re helpful and that we support our customers better than other hosting companies. Today I interviewed Ning’s CEO, one of our 150,000 customers. I’m now thinking about a product they will probably ship in February and I’m wondering how to make it better. I hope to show it to you soon, too, it’s pretty interesting.

I’m passionate about seeing things early and work hard at adding value back to entrepreneurs for that honor.

Anyway, congrats to Flipboard for being named Apple’s iPad App of the Year and if you missed my interview with Mike McCue, you can watch that here.

What’s the next great startup? Let me know: scobleizer@gmail.com

When Ethan Gahng told me this week he had a new Twitter client I almost hung up on him.

After all, does the world really need yet another Twitter client? We already have hundreds of different ones and companies like Seesmic and TweetDeck, not to mention Twitter, have already done an awesome job. I didn’t see what else they might do to really get on my screen.

Let’s just say I was skeptical, but Ethan’s a nice guy and has been trying for a long time to find something that will get me excited.

During the video where he shows me Lazyscope (an Adobe Air-based client for viewing and creating the real-time web) for the first time you’ll hear me switch from being skeptical to seeing the possibilities. That was earlier this week.

Tonight he shipped an update with some of the feedback I gave him (he hadn’t seen an account that followed 27,000 Twitter users run on the service before he came to my house — I let him borrow my account to fix some bugs we both found).

It’s this iteration that has made me a fan, but I think he found something interesting: by mixing Twitter and RSS together you can make a better reading experience. Now each Tweet has a lot more content, if it includes a link to other content he even lets you subscribe to the RSS feed in a user-friendly way.

I’m now using Lazyscope. Is it perfect? No and it won’t be for everyone, but the prefetching of content it does is really cool and useful and saves me time and for that I’m grateful I didn’t blow him off. Why isn’t it perfect? Well, because he chose Adobe Air as the technology it won’t run on my iPhone or iPad, so I can’t use it everywhere. Also, I require a Twitter client to use the new Twitter retweet feature, along with Twitter favorite feature and Lazyscope does its own behavior (he explains that in the video, and tells me he’ll put options in a future version). Also, some people will find the UI too simplistic and want to go back to TweetDeck’s columnar approach or Twitter.com’s bigger fonts.

The update that shipped tonight makes the prefetching work much better, especially on fast-moving streams like mine. You should make sure you have the latest one.

Are you using it? What do you think? First reactions from my friends are very positive. Here’s some other press that LazyScope got this week:

Louis Gray: Lazyscope: An Immersive Twitter Desktop News Experience.

The Next Web: Try This: Lazyscope. Twitter meets RSS reader; subscribe to anything.

One reason I watch Twitter so closely is to see which companies are loved. TeamSnap is one that kept showing up here and there. They have 30,000 sports teams already using it to manage their teams (after only being out a year-and-a-half).

Here Dave DuPont, CEO, came to my house to talk about why his company is so loved.

Some things? Attitude.

Funky sports. Focus on customers. Non-corporate speak.

Hey, startups, or, really, anyone, want to see how to do it? Watch this video.

I’m very proud that they are hosted on Rackspace, too. Matches our focus on customers.

Why should we let it all hang out?

It’s something we’ve been arguing about lately as Facebook becomes more and more powerful. After all, if I say I like music by Neil Young on my Facebook status message (assuming I’ve set my privacy so that only my friends and family can see my messages) then you can’t study my behavior or beliefs and you certainly can’t look through all of Facebook and find all users who’ve said they like Neil Young.

But if I said the same thing over on Twitter you can build systems to show who has liked Neil Young. Today Research.ly turned on a system that gives people very powerful access.

The Next Web said “Research.ly: Twitter analytics, sentiment and trend tracking done right.”

I totally agree.

When you watch the exclusive video I did with Research.ly’s founders, you’ll see just how powerful this service is. You can look for items in real time, and filter out the non-important ones, looking at just the people you’re following, if you want, or all Twitter users, or just the people following your account. I’m following about 27,000 geeks, for instance, so using Research.ly is very awesome because I can see just what they are talking about in the news.

For brands this is going to be invaluable.

Read the Next Web report and watch the video I did. Make sure your social media guru sees this. It’s very significant.

Unfortunately it’s not free, will cost about $99 a month to get started, but for brands (and for journalists) who want to be able to instantly see what people are talking about — filtered and graphed — this is crack. I’m going to pay the fee because it’ll let me do journalism with Twitter that other people won’t be able to do, especially when added to tools like Storify or Curated.by.

What do you think?

I’ve really been getting into Quora, a new Q&A service that was started by a former CTO of Facebook. I’m not sure why this one took for me, where there have been many others, but I think it’s just the smart community that’s sprung up on this service. I almost didn’t blog about it, because so far there’s been some of the best discussions of technology and startup help I’ve seen anywhere and I didn’t want to see that watered down, but when something is good I just have to share it, so here we are.

It’s interesting, but there’s something that makes it easier to write there than here. Weird, huh? But here I have an idea that there’s an audience that’s known me for a while. Over there everything seems fresh and new. Plus, here, I have to come up with my own questions and ideas. Over there I can just respond to other people’s questions and ideas.

Which leads me to last night. I have been playing a lot with photo sharing services and have been spending a lot of time thinking about why I don’t like photo-sharing on the iPhone app Path as much as I like Instagram and what I would do about Path to make it better than Instagram. So far 18 people have voted it up, which tells me there’s something there that resonates with the audience hanging out on Quora, so thought I’d point it out here.

But there’s something else going on with Quora. It builds a page of everything you do on the site which is a new form of blogging. For many people who aren’t used to regularly posting and trying to build an audience this is an awesome way to share ideas and get used to trying to find things that’ll get other people to respond. I imagine we’ll see a new group of journalists spring from Quora. For instance, you can follow me and see everything I’ve written so far on Quora. Funny enough I’ve been doing a lot more words there than here. It’s like a place where I can try something out on a smaller audience, then move it to the blog when it’s baked. I wonder what Dave Winer or Mike Arrington would think of this, probably think I’m nuts.

Speaking of Path and Instragr.am, the other day I met Kevin Systrom, CEO of Instagr.am. They announced over on Quora that they just passed 300,000 users after only being out a month, which is quite good for an iPhone-only application. We had a nice chat, in audio, on my iPhone, of course, about Instagr.am. and where he sees the service evolving.