For many Web startups, the elections offer an opportunity to showcase their technologies and reach people who might never otherwise hear about them. Vineet Choudhary launched his startup Perspctv around the elections. The site is a one-page dashboard that gives a snapshot of how Obama and McCain are doing in the polls, the news, the blogosphere, and Twitter, among other things. The site proves nothing about the election’s outcome, but it does provide a useful dashboard for monitoring it from different perspectives.

But the election site was just a dry run. The real point of Perspctv is to give marketers a way to monitor how their brands are being talked about across various media. As the election concludes, Choudhary is transitioning the site to become a new-media dashboard for marketers. You can already search for any terms and see how much online buzz they are generating. The screenshot above, for instance, shows a comparison of “Android,” “Blackberry,” and the “iPhone.”Source:TechCrunch

Finnish mobile giant Nokia has announced that it is trimming down and cutting over 600 positions, mainly in marketing and sales departments. The Nokia Research Center (NRC) will also focus on fewer research areas in the future.

Nokia is also closing an entire site (Turku) by the end of January 2009, but hopes to relocate all of its 220 employees to Nokia’s site at Salo or in the capital area in Finland. The changes in the Markets unit, Nokia Research Center and in other Nokia functions will come into effect on January 1, 2009.Source:TechCrunch

During a demonstration run of a Tesla Roadster in Southern France, the driver (who was demoing it for the passenger) attempted to take a wet corner a bit too fast and ended up going off the road, smashing the front left and rear right quarters of the car. The passenger was thrown clear, luckily not through the windshield, but miraculously neither party was seriously injured.

They were going to CHANGE EVERYTHING. Whoops. presenting five biggest technology disappointments of the past year. No, not Vista and the Kindle — you didn’t expect anything there.

5. Apple TV

Cable TV was going to be dead by Christmas. Instead, Forrester Research reversed its bullish forecast, placing Apple TV behind Jam Packs for GarageBand.

4. Googlephone

Valleywag editor Owen “Wrongway” Thomas repeatedly insisted all year that there was no Googlephone. He was almost right: Google’s only built a phone software platform, one which launched with no killer apps or interface innovations. Don’t drop your iPhone just yet.

3. Facebook ads

“Once every hundred years, media changes,” Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg declared moments before unveiling an overhyped ad system for broadcasting your purchases to your friends’ Facebook pages. Even if Zuckerberg proves bizarrely right about media, he picked the wrong day. A hundred years from now, the history books — or whatever replaces them –will talk about YouTube instead.

2. DRM-free music

Cory Doctorow is finally happy, but face it: DRM-restricted music and video files weren’t the repression of personal freedom that evangelists like Doctorow made them out to be. They’re merely irritating when they don’t play. Copyright crusaders are like medical marijuana advocates: You can’t argue with them in theory, but in practice you know what they really want is the right to party hearty — or in this case, to download music not just free of DRM, but free of charge.

1. Tesla Roadster

The all-electric sports car really would change the mass public’s attitude toward electrics. If only it would hit the road. The company missed its promised ship dates, and genius founder Martin Eberhard has been ousted. To be clear, Tesla’s electric motors work just fine. Gossip says that Tesla’s electric motor is so strong that it breaks its gearbox. The company has acknowledged that its custom-made two-speed transmissions have proved a problem.

Special Achievement Award: Pownce

Never confuse celebrity with software. Videogenic Digg founder Kevin Rose announced a new company that would do something radically different. Lead developer Leah Culver topped an online beauty contest, despite posting dubious integer-rounding code to her blog. But to date, I still don’t even know what Pownce is — NO DON’T TELL ME LA LA LA LA NOT LISTENING! Uncov writer Ted Dziuba explains it for me. As for Pownce’s cyberlebrity status, Ted adds, “their daily traffic is now less than 2girsl1cup.”

(Illustration by Uncov. Photo of Google Android by Mobile magazine. Photo of Leah Culver by Brian Solis)

Tumblr’s service, Tumblelogs, gives users pared-down tools to set up a […]Source:GigaOM
I am off to the Web 2.0 Summit and my video panel today and won’t get a chance to write anything till much later. Meanwhile, here are a handful of picks from our network that might be worth your time:

Earth2Tech: Crash testing Teslas is expensive.
WebWorkerDaily: Will Twine, a personal knowledge management tool, have you in […]