According to Businessweek, Tata is about to release their $2,500 car in India. How do they make it so cheap? Well, among other things, they’ll save $900 per car by skipping equipment that the U.S, Europe and Japan require for emissions control, in addition to passing on anti-lock brakes, air bags, and support beams to protect passengers in crashes. That’s, um, great. Tata could get their vehicle up to Western standards at a sticker price of about $6,000, which is still very, very cheap for Western markets in particular.

It’s taken a mere 66 years, but the character of Wonder Woman is finally going to be written by a woman (Gail Simone), as reported by Jennie Yabroff of Newsweek. The article provides a very interesting take on women slowly gaining prominence in the comics world (both as writers and readers), but my favorite wikinomics-related part is the path Gail took to get the job, which is covered in the last paragraph. Basically, she started a somewhat controversial blog that spoke “somewhat” poorly (and accurately) about how female characters are portrayed in comics, which led to her landing a job at DC, which led to the Wonder Woman job. Let’s here it for the blogosphere and job creation!

What do insulin-producing lettuce, glow-in-the-dark cats, and schizophrenic mice have in common? Hopefully not much, but they are all on the Wired List of The Top 10 New Organisms of 2007. I think this list of innovations mostly scares me, super CO-2 absorbing trees sounds a bit promising.

While it’s not exactly news, check out the Economist Debate Series if you’re looking for an interesting example of customer co-creation / engagement.

On the globalization front, there’s quite a few articles floating around about how China is changing (covering up?) it’s behavior because of pressure associated with hosting the Olympics. For example, this LA Times article talks about how China is showing caution on executions, while this one from China Daily discusses how Shougang Group (Beijing’s biggest polluter) is shutting down blast furnace #4 as part of it’s pledge to cut normal output by half during the Olympics.

The New York Times profiled a cool new device called a Neuros OSD, where OSD stands for open source device. In addition to being a powerful little machine that appears to enable you to record, copy and transfer everything under the sun, Neuros Technology is providing full documentation of the hardware platform so “skilled users can customize or ‘hack’ the device — and then pass along the improvements to others.”

Finally, a variety of people (here’s one such article) are writing about the possibility that all the major labels dumping DRM will hurt Apple’s dominant iPod/iTunes combo. I personally believe such thinking is ludicrous for a wide variety of reasons (which I’ll go into into detail another time), which certainly include Steve Job’s open letter to the music labels asking them to dump DRM, which one would think he wouldn’t have done if it would hurt Apple, right?