VW car driven by Apple iPhone control (with video)

Stanford University takes the wrap off its automotive-innovation lab, funded by $6 million from Volkswagen and featuring a Passat wagon that drives and parks itself with the push of an iPhone button.

MarketWatch’s Shawn Langlois reports:

Direct link to video via MarketWatch here.

Note to advertisers: (including those who advertise via third-party ad networks and become, in effect, our advertisers): Your Flash-based ads are no longer reaching the most well-heeled customers online: 50+ million iPhone owners. They’re also not hitting brand new iPad users or 35+ million iPod touch users. If you care about reaching people with discretionary income, you might want to consider dumping your flash-based ads and moving to a more open format that people with money and the will to spend it can actually see.

Help kill Adobe’s Flash:
• Ask MarketWatch to offer HTML5 video via the customer support web form here.
• Ask CNBC to offer HTML5 video via the customer support web form here.
• Contact Hulu and ask them to offer HTML5 video via email:
• Ask ESPN360 to offer HTML5 video instead Flash via their feedback page here.
• Join YouTube’s HTML5 beta here.
• On Vimeo, click the “Switch to HTML5 player” link below any video.

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “James W.” for the heads up.]

16 Comments

  1. @ Flash whiner

    YouTube doesn’t provide for embedding [what MDN does here] in HTML5.

    Suck it up. The waaahhhmbulance is on its way here to pick you up.

    (with acknowledgments to the original “waaahhhmbulance” guy)

  2. Ooops!

    That’s a MarketWatch video – they might not yet do HTML5.

    My comments still stand.

    BTW, Stanford was a top finisher in the DARPA Grand Challenge – sort of an X Prize for autonomous vehicle navigation. So probable some technology (and personnel) reuse going on here.

  3. You don’t get it do you? MDN is trying it’s best to kill Flash because God..err..SJ demands it.

    If I would think that Flash is “a proprietary, resource-hogging, browser-crashing abomination” like MDN puts it, then there is no way in hell I’d ever put anything “flashy” in my website just for the sake of not being a total hypocrite.

  4. To whomever the person is hiding behind the @MDN signature (so easy to say anything if you don’t have to stand behind it with your name):

    MDN does NOT put a single Flash object of their own. As a news aggregator, they put whatever original source is out there. The quoted, embedded Flash video above falls squarely on MarketWatch’s head. You may notice, a few lines further, MDN is also calling on MarketWatch to dump Flash.

    There are over half a million iPads out there right now. So far, we haven’t heard ANY ‘backlash’ (or so much as a peep) about the inability to see Flash from ordinary consumers who bought it. Chances are, we won’t get much in the future, even when this thing passes 10 million devices. And by then, it will be very, very obvious to all meaningful content creators that it would be wise to abandon Flash altogether.

  5. What Predrag said.

    MDN has been consistant in their anti Flash stance, when they embed a video they only have the choice of Flash or Flash. When YouTube or other sites offer the option to embed HTML5 video instead of Flash, that is when you can bitch at MDN if they continue to use the Flash version.

    The problems of Flash have been widely documented, and are not simply a “Steve Jobs” command from
    on high.

  6. I still stand by my words…if something would be a “proprietary, resource-hogging, browser-crashing abomination” then I would never ever EVER embed/link/whatever such content to my website, in this case I would not show any Flash animations at all.

    Seems to me that MDN is more than happy to use an “abomination” as long as no better (= HTML5?) is around – I wouldn’t, maybe flash isn’t that crap after all per MDN?

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