Brad’s Sketchpad

In this weeks Plain Text, I look at the excellent forthcoming documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car?” and preview the electric sports car from secretive Silicon Valley auto-startup Tesla Motors.

Many analysts and journalists furrowed their brows when eBay bought Skype last year for that large sum of money - plus incentives. In this week’s Newsweek, I chronicle the next steps in eBay’s effort to integrate Skype and prove the naysayers wrong. We talked to Meg Whitman, Pierre Omidyar and Niklas Zennstrom for the piece.

In this week’s Plain Text, I ask whether America’s mayors are unwisely and unrealistically promising cheap, broadband wireless networks in their cities.

Jennifer and I, with my brothers Brian and Eric, just returned from a glorious week rafting the Colorado river. We started at Lee’s Ferry and traveled through the Marble Canyon, all the way to Phantom Ranch at the fat midsection of the Grand Canyon. On Thursday, we hiked up to the South Rim: a five hour, dauntingly vertical trek along the side canyon carved by Bright Angel Creek. In all, it was a lovely, adventurous, occasionally heart-pounding trip. Here are my Flickr photos. Here are Jen’s Flickr photos.

One note: we were extraordinarily fortunate to have as our guide Michael Ghiglieri, the co-author of the best selling Over the Edge: Death in the Grand Canyon. As you can imagine, his observations and experiences made for an interesting trip.