'Super sardine can': Expanded A380 could hold up to 1,000 passengers

By Ben Mutzabaugh, USA TODAY

This item was written by USATODAY.com contributor David Grossman, who is serving as Guest Editor of Today in the Sky while Ben Mutzabaugh is away.

Are you ready for an airplane that can hold 1,000 passengers? Australian Business Traveler (ABT) reports that this could very well happen when Airbus releases an expanded version of the world's largest commercial jet, the A380.

ABT reports most airlines are flying their version of the A380 with somewhere between just slightly over 400 and less than 540 total seats, depending on the different classes of service offered and the seating configuration implemented by each airline.

But the capacity of the current A380s could and apparently will be much higher. At least one airline, Air Austral, is planning an all-economy-class configuration with 840 seats, according to ABT, which refers to this configuration as a "super sardine can."

"If you think today's A380 is massive, wait until the next generation of the superjumbo," says ABT. The A380-900 will carry 650 passengers in a standard multi-class configuration and as many as 900 passengers in an economy-only configuration, according to ABT.

If that isn't big enough, ABT claims Lufthansa and Air France are already considering an even larger version, dubbed the A380-1000, which could hold as many as 1,000 passengers

capture 360-degree videos from iPhone

A New York start-up wants you to be able to capture and share 360-degree videos from your iPhone.

Kogeto's is now taking pre-orders (at kickstarter.com) for Dot, a $99 optical snap-on lens attachment that turns the iPhone 4 camera into panoramic video capture device. Kogeto demonstrated prototypes of Dot at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in New York City.

Dot snaps on top of the iPhone 4 lens; the entire thing looks a little bit like a crippled version of the letter "F." It comes in different colors and is a smaller, lower-quality consumer version of Kogeto's $1,399 Lucy S professional imaging solution.

Since Dot can capture the world around you, the user need not aim the iPhone camera when the device is snapped on. In fact you need not hold the phone at all. In its marketing spiel, Kogeto says to "Put down the camera" (on a table) and "Enjoy the party."

Dot is targeted at consumers who might want to capture panoramic videos during birthday celebrations, weddings, concerts and other family/friend gatherings. "You're not framing pictures," says Kogeto founder and CEO Jeff Glasse. "This isn't like shooting regular videos. We think it will create a whole new kind of blogging and vlogging (video blogging)."

Via the company's free software (which is coming in July), you can upload your panoramas to Facebook and Twitter. And you'll need the software to "unwrap" and play back the images.

On the iPhone you can drag your finger to see the video from a different perspective. Viewers on the Web can click with the mouse to change the view of uploaded panoramas. At the company's TechCrunch booth, video on the iPhone looked better than video demonstrated to me on the Web, but Glasse says Kogeto is still noodling with video compression settings. Another potential nuisance for some: Dot won't snap on above any case you may be using to protect the iPhone.

Glasse says Apple's approval for the app is pending (though he doesn't anticipate snags). He later plans on bringing out an Android version.

By Edward C. Baig, USA TODAY