It is impossible to keep up with every aspect of car culture. You have to pick your areas of focus; choose the events to follow that interest you most. For me, there are two fascinating occurrences happening simultaneously, but in diametrically opposite directions. One is the birth of an American brand: USF1. The second is the impending death of an iconic automobile brand: Saab.

Let’s take the bad news first. Something happened in 1990 when GM acquired 50% of Saab, and something REALLY happened in 2000 when they bought the other 50%. Some will say that GM sucked the lifeblood out of the brand by trading on decades of consumer loyalty bred from uniquely Saab innovations, like an ignition key on the floor, instead of developing innovations on their own. Saab did, in fact, keep pace and even developed some promising models under the aegis of GM, but moved from the endearing quirkiness of rational Swedish engineering to the more economical rationale of cross-model parts compatibility and shared-source manufacturing.

The problem with GM Saab started in 1993, or rather the 1994 model year when things got ugly. Saabs were, up to this point, an acquired taste aesthetically, but were never confused with any other car on the road. The profile was distinctly “Saab”. 900 fans were let down by the 1994 version, and the brand never really recovered as the car changed over the course of a decade to resemble many cars, all seemingly merging towards the center of the herd where it’s safe. GM took a brand that offered a spectrum of ingenuity and innovation and boiled it down to model lines based on other cars that GM had on hand, and therefore their surplus of cheap parts. Most 900, 9-3 and 9-5 models to follow were based on lesser platforms (Opel’s Vectra, for example) and utilized parts common to the GM family tree. In effect, GM diluted the Saab heritage by marrying cousin to cousin and made it impossible to build upon all that strong Swedish DNA.

Now GM has Saab up on the auction block. A few contenders have raised their bidding paddles, including fellow Swedes Koenigsegg and more recently the Dutch fabricator Spyker, both manufacturers of exotic and ridiculously expensive supercars. For unknown reasons, these negotiations seem to end consistently without a deal and a handshake. At this point, it looks as if Saab will either be retired altogether or bought by an obscure emerging market manufacturer and cannibalized of all of its assets. Glimmers of hope reside only in the silver lining behind cloud number 3: Subaru. If there is any sense in this world, Subaru will buy Saab.

With a few exceptions, GM Saab continued to offer basically the same car for 15 years. In 2005, this was taken to the opposite extreme when GM, in its brief but most inspired moment, created the Saab 92-X by badge engineering a Subaru Impreza WRX (also partially owned by GM at the time) with Saab styling, comfort and handling. This car still ranks near the top of my candidate list as a replacement for my 1990 Saab 900T that I sold 3 years ago. I haven’t had a car since, but that’s another story. The 92-X represented a brief moment of hope for me that great things could come out of the unholy union of an elegant Swede descended from jets and a nimble Japanese rally car pumped full of horsepower. *sigh*

Speaking of horsepower, how about some good news? It’s January. Among gear heads, this is a quiet time of year, with the only outlet being Top Gear episodes on BBC America. If you’re really Jonesing, you crawl over to internet videos of obscure automotive competitions like Race of Champions in China or Ice Rally in Finland. Not this year. So far, 2010 is WAY different. Not only will we get the Winter Olympics and World Cup Soccer, this year will mark the first year in my lifetime that the US will field a Formula 1 team. In a sort of perfect storm scenario, team USF1 has managed to time their launch to take advantage of three unique circumstances: open grid spots; investor faith in emerging teams; and a surplus of talent and technology.

Formula 1 teams are monstrous efforts that draw heavily on a multitude of resources, not the least of which is financial. When you figure that, in the past, heavily-funded team like Honda, Toyota, Minardi, BMW and Jaguar invested millions of dollars season after season only to finish consistently in the lower half against equally-funded teams like Ferrari, Mercedes McLaren & Red Bull, it becomes a difficult sell to convince outside investors to invest in a fledgling team. All five of those teams decided the back half of the grid was not worth the cost and will not be on the grid this year.

Last year, a rookie team, Brawn GP, did not exist (in theory) 30 days before the start of the first race, however, they took top honors in both of the categories for which Formula 1 teams compete: The Constructor’s Championship and the Driver’s Championship. This opened the door for any new team to solicit funding during a time (2009) when funding was extremely hard to come by without forming a partnership with a major auto manufacturer, which is the prevalent route among F1 contenders. Richard Branson came on last year as Brawn GP’s only sponsor. This year, Sir Richard felt confident enough to simply field his own team.

Navigating the political structure of the sport is like trying to explain tax law to a third grader. The governing body of F1, Federation Internationale de l’Automobile (FIA) is the official legislative body and creates the rules that govern teams, cars, drivers, testing, management, budgets, etc. During the summer of 2009, they tried, as they often do, to regulate the sport to reflect major overtures in public sentiment and to safeguard the sport. In years past, these regulation changes focused on increasing the sustainability of the sport and controlling the excessive spending on technology and testing. The sport has no lack of detractors that bemoan it as a hideously obscene display of inefficiency, excess and indulgence. Short-lived solutions like “No tire changes during a race” last for about a season until the winds of public opinion change, and then they go away.

This year, under the dark cloud of the global recession, the FIA attempted to place a regulatory cap on team budgets in order to level the playing field between mega-manufacturer-sponsored teams like Mercedes and those that are funded privately like Force India. In the end, the teams argued the point into submission, but not before taking a very careful look at their own operations and how they could slim and trim down to a sleek $35 or $40 million operating budget. With that came realizations that there was indeed fat to be trimmed and so the trimming began, leaving a lot of uniquely-skilled individuals looking for work. Couple that with the withdrawal of 3 or 4 teams (depending on how you count) and the soup lines start to stretch around the block. The same can be said for the racing world in general, stretching through the other open wheel classes, NASCAR, LeMans, etc. This affected not only teams, but also nearly every aspect of the complex network of suppliers, fabricators, manufacturers, and testing facilities. Suddenly bargain deals were everywhere, and USF1 is not the only team taking advantage of this. The grid this year will also see new teams Lotus, Virgin, Campos and Sauber (minus BMW support).

USF1 announced themselves officially as a team in March 2009, although the organization started 6 or 7 years ago. Since March, they have been a SkunkWorks-type operation, with precious few information leaks, most of which centered around tertiary-level organization (they have yet to announce who will be driving their cars). This is an odd way to begin a relationship with a future, and currently non-existent US fan base. But looking closely at the team structure reveals some promise in the names that show up on the non-technical side. USF1 managed to strike a partnership deal with Chad Hurley (YouTube) that may affect the way we watch F1….sure why not? Hurley knows how to handle popular, mainstream media. Other rumored sponsors include Rich Silverstein of Goodby, Silverstein & Partners in San Francisco, so USF1 should have some flashy marketing and catch phrases like “Got Speed?”. Others rumored to be part of the mix are Bay Area-based IDEO (unconfirmed..but I’m crushed anyway) and Octagon Worldwide in Charlotte, NC. Within that mix is some incredible potential for the USF1 brand to be engineered from scratch into an American legacy.

So my days over the next three months will be spent watching the rapid emergence of USF1 and monitoring its growth. USF1 is uniquely positioned to offer US race fans a home team on the world stage of auto racing. Skeptics will immediately draw parallels from this lofty endeavor to the uphill battle that US Soccer has had over the last two decades since Americans just don’t gravitate towards sports that we do not absolutely dominate. We could care less about rugby or cricket, we give marginal deference to hockey and soccer, and you can just forget about cars that turn right while racing. Conversely, we’re addicted to YouTube and Twitter since they bring us to an intimately close vantage point. Maybe the dream team that USF1 has assembled can pull it off. I’ll be watching.

As the prolific pedagogue and founder of The Riverside School in Ahmedabad, India, Kiran Sethi has infused the city’s youth culture with spirit and empowerment. Launching aProCh (A Protagonist in Every Child) early last year, Kiran has set after making Ahmedabad a child-friendly city. “They (children) understand intuitively that the real curriculum is not what’s taught in schools, but what’s written on the face of the land.” At the heart of the organization’s ideology is the fulfillment of the child’s need need for joy, safety, play, and the opportunity to explore the wider world. Bridging the gap between children’s teachers, parents, and their larger community creates the foundation of The Riverside School, and poises children to effect needed change.

Kiran’s latest thinking on how to enact change is The Design for Giving Contest. Through this, an entire emerging generation is called to action. She’s continued to drive home the point “Do not let the teachers drive the project; let them just guide it.”

With over 1300 entries pouring in from children full of earnest thinking and concern the teams from Continuum, IDEO, and the Institute of Design at Stanford were sure to be overwhelmed. As any contest of this size our team was rigorously making sure every entry had fulfilled each category with a level of clarity and conviction. Though, we also admitted how each entry would be its own mystery whose impacts we couldn’t possibly fully grasp: the elderly they visited, the thirsty villagers they spoke with, or the water sanitation issues they researched. Qualifying the entries would be soft, but also hard and fast. Sixth senses were hard to trust on this one.

I will not forget one particular entry. As we were going through many dozens of entries we began to learn their rhythm, their formats, language and tactics. Shivesh Pandey’s entry was different. This 11 year-old dove into a problem we hadn’t seen in other entries. He started to envision a technology device for his local train station. He explained that his motivation was several deaths from people trying to cross the train tracks as unannounced trains wizzed through the terminal. Following his explanation he submitted his genius: a fully equipped, stacked device outlining each feature – in crayon and colored pencil. Without a flinch, he had the answer. He was simply calling for its production and installation.

Though the entry by standard was not as robust, it showed a kid ready to make it happen. This was his idea addressing a problem in his world – straight from the gut. I presume that no teacher held his hand while working through his sketch. I appreciated Shivesh’s entry not because it was a great design, or necessarily even the right solution – but his potential to realize and act on the problem. He thought to outline the opportunity it seemed nobody saw. After all, that attitude struck me as core to the contest. If we can be a part of activating this generation’s custom of giving and support their design thinking, that is a powerful thing.

We’ll look forward to staying involved in Kiran’s work as it surely evolves. Kiran recently shook things up at TEDIndia and her contagious thinking. It seems the contest already has a life of its own – in the best way.

I saw that as of today there are just over 100,000 approved iPhone apps. The obvious question is: how many apps do we really need? While the quantity vs. quality vs. usefulness questions get discussed, there’s a bigger question: wasn’t the World Wide Web going to be the device-independent user experience platform?

Apps are great – having downloaded two billion of them, users clearly love them, but I wonder what this means for the future of users’ experiences on mobile and other devices. While apps are great at maximizing the experience on a particular device, the proliferation of different smartphone platforms means that there are at least five different OSs developers need to think about (iPhone OS, Blackberry OS, Symbian, WebOS (Palm) and Android). Isn’t this just another version of the Windows, Mac OS and Linux battles? (Interestingly, Windows Mobile, while early to the party, seems to be lagging.) What you can do in the mobile world depends, more than ever, on what device you have.

 Certainly the last 15 years have seen multiple revolutions in the web experience (anyone remember html 1.0 and blinking text?). Instead of ‘there’s an app for that,’ just a couple of years ago, we might have said, ‘there’s a site for that.’ But the limitations of the web environment (or the great capabilities of the iPhone) made the opportunity for apps too good to ignore. Each opportunity brings new challenges with it; in this case, it’s finding, choosing and managing lots of apps. In a world of 100,000 apps, the killer app might just be an app navigator. The iPhone App Store today has a lot more in common with Yahoo! in 1994 than Google in 2009.

So we’re only at the beginning, and we know a lot is going to change in the app space. But the right question here is: What’s the total experience that users really want to have? And who’s going to make it happen? It’s time to take a step back and think about people.

Bench advertising is very commonly seen in bus stops and public parks. On my daily commute, they’re mostly dominated by dentists, realtors, pharmaceutical companies, and sometimes public health campaigns like HIV testing. Ever since the smart advertisers from “District 9″ flooded the city of Los Angeles with “Non-Humans seen in La Cienega exit off 10 freeway,” “Bus bench for humans only” warning signs (I actually followed the sign and called to report non-human sightings), Cougar Town is now following suit and put Courtney Cox on the typical realtor bus bench spots.  Compared to conventional posters, these attempts to make audiences feel as if they are actually living the storyline seem more effective. To those who watch Cougar Town, it adds realism and emotional connections, to those who don’t, it peaks curiosity to find out more from those www’s…