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.