It’s not new news that GM has been considering selling Hummer for a little while now. It seems that among the other brands that GM dragged with it through financial nightmares, GM has now decided to shelve the brutally yank car as it is financially unfeasible to maintain the brand.

GM did try to pawn it off to the Chinese recently, but the deal fell through when Beijing decided that it was too much of an environmental risk to allow the brand to be purchased by a Chinese company.

This follows the previously GM brands of Pontiac, Saturn and Oldsmobile and finds itself stacking up in the losers corner where car brands are sent to die!

So with cost-cutting still part of the strategies of many companies, especially the car manufacturing industry, Puma has taken it a step further and have commissioned that a Formula 1 car be built out of shoe boxes.

Here is the video:

This is a really good bus advert that is both memorable and eye-catching. Would you ride the bus?

Thanks @igsaan for the find!

The controversial Audi A5 suicide advert has been doing the rounds online. I think that it’s a brilliant advert that highlights the new Clean Diesel engines that are good for the environment. Audi has a reputation of really good adverts and I have featured some here before.

Sadly though, Audi has come out disowning the advert and denying the validity of he advert as an Audi initiative. In their defense, the advert does stand out like pink hair when you consider that legacy Audi adverts are always very clinical and portray clean and tidy concepts. #JustSaying!

Check out the Audi A5 Suicide advert:

Do you think that this really is an Audi advert?

Nokia Messaging for Social Networks is the latest release of Nokia Messaging which is available for the Nokia N97, N97 mini and the 5800, which in short means, all Symbian S60 Version 5 devices within the Nokia stable.

I have been a fan of the Nokia Messaging application and even went as far as rating it as a Nokia N97 application worth using!

What’s even cooler about this release, is that I have a short feature in the launch video. Watch it and look out for my Twitter account as the first tweet!

I feature from 41 seconds to about 54 seconds. If you don’t follow me on Twitter already, you probably missing out. I go as @DChetty, so check it out!

The latest application now supports full Twitter and Facebook integration and allows simple, yet useful features like the ability to export Facebook events to the Nokia’s native calendar. The latest app supports full home-screen access and pulls data directly from your Facebook and Twitter accounts.

It’s very nifty and I recommend it as a potential Beta Labs winner!

The Audi guys have released a video ahead of the European winter season for its Audi Winter Accessory range.

It’s a pretty funny take on ice-hockey and worth the watch!

Check out all other Audi articles or some of these:

Audi A7!

Audi reveal it’s new logo!

Audi TT RS – Car Porn!

Facebook privacy models have come under fire before and there was a major uproar a little while back when Facebook included a clause in its privacy policy that claimed ownership of all content put up on its platform by its users. The uproar achieved its objective and Facebook changed the policy realising that pissing off 100 million users is not exactly a good business strategy.

Mark Zuckerman, the big whip at Facebook, has released an open letter to the public today, highlighting expected changes to the Facebook privacy model and has asked it’s users to monitor these changes as it will affect the current privacy settings in place on users accounts and the new management system will be rolled out over the next few weeks.

Here is the letter:

It has been a great year for making the world more open and connected. Thanks to your help, more than 350 million people around the world are using Facebook to share their lives online.

To make this possible, we have focused on giving you the tools you need to share and control your information. Starting with the very first version of Facebook five years ago, we’ve built tools that help you control what you share with which individuals and groups of people. Our work to improve privacy continues today.

Facebook’s current privacy model revolves around “networks” — communities for your school, your company or your region. This worked well when Facebook was mostly used by students, since it made sense that a student might want to share content with their fellow students.

Over time people also asked us to add networks for companies and regions as well. Today we even have networks for some entire countries, like India and China.

However, as Facebook has grown, some of these regional networks now have millions of members and we’ve concluded that this is no longer the best way for you to control your privacy. Almost 50 percent of all Facebook users are members of regional networks, so this is an important issue for us. If we can build a better system, then more than 100 million people will have even more control of their information.

The plan we’ve come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone.

We’re adding something that many of you have asked for — the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content you create or upload. In addition, we’ll also be fulfilling a request made by many of you to make the privacy settings page simpler by combining some settings. If you want to read more about this, we began discussing this plan back in July.

Since this update will remove regional networks and create some new settings, in the next couple of weeks we’ll ask you to review and update your privacy settings. You’ll see a message that will explain the changes and take you to a page where you can update your settings. When you’re finished, we’ll show you a confirmation page so you can make sure you chose the right settings for you. As always, once you’re done you’ll still be able to change your settings whenever you want.

We’ve worked hard to build controls that we think will be better for you, but we also understand that everyone’s needs are different. We’ll suggest settings for you based on your current level of privacy, but the best way for you to find the right settings is to read through all your options and customize them for yourself. I encourage you to do this and consider who you’re sharing with online.

Thanks for being a part of making Facebook what it is today, and for helping to make the world more open and connected.

Mark Zuckerberg

Don’t forget to check out some other Facebook articles on my blog:

How to get your own Facebook domain!

Facebook stats – October 2009!

For all Facebook users!

Facebook adds Instant Messenger service!

Old Audi Logo:

New Audi Logo: Yup, its new, I promise…

It took me a while to notice the subtle differences, which lay mainly with the slight change in font and the newer bolder 3D rings. Otherwise, to the man on the street, its the same. One need to ask though, why bother?

Just last week I signed up for eBucks, the rewards program that gives you a little bit extra every time you shop in their partner stores. I was excited, as they have a decent list of partners that I tend to frequent and it makes sense for me to use eBucks.

This morning, I heard that eBucks has signed up Incredible Connection! Talk about timing!!!

Being the techie g33k that I am, I doubt that I could have been more excited about the new partnership as I tend to get most of my PSP games, consumables, iPod accessories and laptop accessories from them anyway! While the in-store staff do show signs of thumb-sucking when I ask them technical questions, I find it hard to find another national retailer with such a diverse product set and I tend to do a lot of research of what I want before I ask them anyway!

The CEO of Incredible Connection, David Miller said, “This exclusive partnership between the country’s leading IT specialist retailer and the country’s leading rewards programme gives customers the best bang for their eBuck – not least because technology is becoming a necessity rather than a discretionary purchase. Together, we enable customers who are eBucks members to actually get something back, in the form of eBucks, for buying a piece of technology that would otherwise simply have been a cost to them. In addition, our customers have the option to use their eBucks as an alternative currency to pay for their purchase. ”

My eBucks card should arrive in the post sometime this week, so you can expect me to get my hands on a new “something nice” for myself VERY soon!

Btw, Incredible Connection has revamped their previously horrid star struck website to something A LOT more appropriate and usable. I really hope that this is a sign of good things to come, as it certainly seems that they are undergoing a few good changes within their stable! Nice one David Miller!

Nokia’s N97 online campaign called Search for N came to an end a few weeks ago after running successfully globally. The competition was run in South Africa on blogs and Twitter and saw the Finnish company embrace Social Media in an effective and well-thought out manner.

I was super fortunate enough to have won one of these devices from @ChristopherM’s blog iMod and I have just collected my new Nokia N97 from a lunch event held at FTV in Fourways, Johannesburg by the team from Nokia and their marketing agency, Fleishman, where the South Africa’s lucky 10 winners were brought together for a great lunch, networking and of course to receive their prize, a brand spanking new Nokia N97. We are fortunate enough to be the very first owners of the N97 in SA and only 10 of these handsets are now in circulation as owned devices: the 10 winners of this competition.

Pic by @PaulJacobson - http://twitter.com/pauljacobson

I would like to express my thanks to @ChristopherM and his blog, iMod, for running the competition and for putting up with my pestering. He knows how badly I wanted to win the phone and is aware of the amount of lurking that I have done on his blog to get all 5 clues answered successfully. I have a lot of respect for iMod and many of you know that my blogging has been inspired by Chris’s work on iMod. A two-time winner of the Best Science & Technology Blog Award in the SA Blog Awards, I highly recommend that you visit his blog!

Nokia and Fleishman: To all those of you involved, THANK YOU and well done! I was truly impressed with the Social Media adoption that you have embraced and so successfully implemented. This was a unique campaign in SA and one that will be used as the benchmark for all other online socially integrated campaigns. Thank you for the Nokia N97 handset, the lunch and the trip to attend it. Your friendliness and welcoming attitude certainly did not go unnoticed and I think that I speak for all those who attended, when I say that you guys run an impressive operation!

To my readers, please brace yourselves for a flurry of Nokia N97 posts. I have always been a Nokia fan-boy and the short time that I have had to play with the device so far, has been truly impressive and I am super excited!