No, that's not a scene from The Fifth Element II. What you see here is the Avcen Limited Jetpod T-100 City Flying Taxi, a VQSTOL (Very Quiet Short Take-off and Landing) vehicle that the company says could be in the air by 2010. The idea is that these flying cars would volley people between city centers and outlying areas (like airports) in order to reduce highway traffic. Avcen says that 75 of these in London could relieve road traffic of 37,000 return car trips per day all the while keeping things quiet and requiring only short landing strips made of pavement or grass. For air geeks, specs include dual jet engines with a thrust of 2 x 13.3 kN, a cruising speed of 350 mph, a range of 920 miles, an operating payload of 1,543 lbs, and seating for 7 pax. Bruce Willis pilot not included.

[Via The Contaminated]

It's always interesting when electronic billboards, kiosks, and other installations go haywire and show you the dark heart of Windows lurking underneath, but it's even more fun when you can actually start poking around -- and it looks like there's a fair bit of poking to do in all those NYC taxis with backseat screens. According to Billy Chasen, dismissing the error message will allow you to get to the Start menu, from which it's trivial to run the Windows Connection Wizard, set up the Sprint broadband card, and start surfing away. Billy could also browse the filesystem -- which may or may not contain credit card data -- and it looks like he even had enough access to install any software he could find online. Hmmm, looks like there's 1000 experience points waiting here for the first person to send in a photo of Engadget on one of these screens -- with a 5000 point bonus if it's in Firefox.

Despite cries of privacy invasion from the city's many drivers, interactive entertainment / advertising / navigation platforms are still being rolled out in New York's 13,000+ cabs, with major player TaxiTech's eTaxi solution the latest to receive approval from the NYC Taxi and Limousine Commission. One of four companies certified by the TLC to fill a mandate requiring these rigs in all cabs by October, TaxiTech has teamed up with hardware partners Apriva, Ingenico, and Grey Island Systems to offer a very polished looking setup centered around a 15-inch touchscreen capable of delivering a whole slew of valuable infoswag. (Click here to check out a video of the eTaxi interface). Like Digital Dispatch's SmartCab system before it, eTaxi gives passengers the ability to track their route in real time (no more pricey "shortcuts" for unsuspecting tourists), kick back to some ad-supported video or music content, bone up on historical info about the city, and even pay their fare with a credit card, tacking on a pre-calculated tip with the push of a finger. Sounds pretty convenient to us; let's just hope we don't have to start eating part of the multi-thousand dollar per car annual fee it's costing cab companies to install these luxuries.

Cabs are to New York as freeways are to Los Angeles; that is to say, they're an integral part of the landscape and no matter how hard you try, you're going to have to engage with them at some point. As such, most New Yorkers have a love-hate relationship with taxis. But New York's Taxi & Limousine Commission is trying to ease that relationship a little bit -- on Thursday, it gave a preview of the next generation of the city's yellow fleet, where new cabs will have a touch-screen that lets you watch TV (or turn it off), pay by credit card, follow your progress on a map, and best of all, make it easier to retrieve that umbrella that you forgot in the backseat when you got dropped of that one drunken night in the East Village. The commission said that the new system will let you call a hotline and tell them where you were dropped off and what was lost to use as clues to retrieve your forgotten property. We're assuming that then they'll retrace various cabs' driving histories (via GPS) over the period of the last several hours. But just keep in mind that you probably weren't the only person getting out at Port Authority around noon last Wednesday. The TLC says the new cabs should start hitting Manhattan by the end of the year.