As far as the launch of the VW Polo Highline Plus is concerned, the car could go on sale next month i.e. August 2017. Dealers are currently accepting bookings for the new trim for an amount of INR 25,000. A source informs us that it will cost around INR 30,000 more than the Highline trim.

A Polo running red test plates was spotted in Pune with a dual tone red-black paint scheme, and bigger 9-spoke alloy wheels was spotted. It could very well be the upcoming Highline Plus variants. It also featured black plastic cladding across the side sill and rear bumpers.

Mechanically, the VW Polo Highline Plus remains the same with a 1.2 L MPi Petrol and a 1.5 L TDI Diesel engine under the hood. Both engines come mated to a 5-speed manual transmission. The petrol engine puts out 75 PS and 110 Nm while the diesel makes 90 PS and 230 Nm.

In June 2017, VW unveiled the sixth generation Polo based on the MQB platform. While the new Polo is reportedly going on sale in markets such as Spain in October this year, there is no plan to launch the new model locally for the next few years. Unless Volkswagen invests in localizing the MQB platform, the new Polo may prove to be too expensive to be competitive in our price sensitive market.

For years and years, Google has been trying to get away from having webmasters and SEOs focus on their PageRank score. They finally killed off toolbar PageRank a year agobut now, time and time again, people are selling "domain authority."

Domain authority is a Moz metric, not a Google metric. People keep on asking Google about it, and Google keeps saying there is no such thing at least in their algorithms around a Moz metric.

Now, we have Neil Patel, a well known marketer, post a video on YouTube named Why Domain Authority is More Important Than PageRank. In short, his rational is that because we don't have a PageRank score that is updated, we need to measure our web pages based off of some metric that is updated. So why not use domain authority from Moz?

Again, this goes against everything the industry and Google has been trying to move away from. Google has been killing off PageRank in the toolbar for years and years. In 2007, Google asked webmasters for feedback on removing PageRank and then in 2009, Google removed showing PageRank like data in Webmaster Tools (Search Console). But in 2013, Matt Cutts told us Google probably will never kill off PageRank in the toolbar. Well, Matt is no longer there and it was done. Then in 2012, Google stopped updating external PageRank by accident updated PR in December 2013. Since then Google told us time and time again that Google will never update PageRank in the toolbar again.

Look at how Google's Gary Illyes responded to this video on why domain authority is more important than PageRank:

It's not quite as useful as the traffic feature on Google Maps on desktop, which allows you to choose a specific "depart at" or "arrive by" time to account for traffic conditions. But it should make planing a trip a bit easier. 

It appears to be Android only for now, but Google often rolls out new features to Android first, so don't be surprised if it pops up in the iOS app in the future. We've reached out to Google for more info and will update if we hear back.

Google is doing all of us a solid and giving everyone the chance to use its free cloud storage to backup an entire computer's system files.

The new Backup and Sync feature will let you use Drive to automatically store files that you've already saved on your computer's internal hard drive or other devices like memory cards in the same format.

So, instead of havin

ackup and Sync comes in the form of an app, which replaces the Google Photos desktop uploader and Drive for both Mac and Windows computers. 

As we noted when the feature was first announced, using Backup and Sync is slightly limited by the 15 GB cap offered with free Drive accounts, so there is a low ceiling for your storage if you have a ton of files. That's pretty easy to fix though — all you have to do to avoid going over is pay for more storage or carefully manage exactly what you backup to Drive. 

The app is a great deal to automatically safeguard your files — it's free, after all. You can snag it for Photos or Drive right now.

This isn't Apple coming up with an iPod or iPhone and flanking the market -- this is a firm that simply pushed on the gas pedal at a time when everyone said it was going in the wrong direction (PCs were dead, remember?) -- and kicked everyone's ass.

As impressive as that is, there's more. This is also basically a brand new firm with a new focus, but people still see it with all the baggage the "HP" name brings, including the bad reflection from the massive mismanagement over at its sister company, HPE -- which, in contrast to HP, had all the advantages but couldn't seem to find the gas pedal.

This is a perfect example of why a firm should consider changing its name -- and Compaq, a powerful brand it owns, could be the perfect answer.

I'll expound on that and close with my product of the week: the Smartflower, which must be the coolest solar solution for your home in the world now.

I'm simply amazed by HP's performance. It was clear when Meg Whitman spun out HP that she didn't believe it had a chance in hell of succeeding. Firmly convinced that both PCs and printers were dead, she saddled the firm with virtually all the combined company's debt -- pretty much stacking the deck to ensure that HP died while HPE succeeded.

Many of Dion Weisler's peers privately thought that he wanted to be CEO so badly he simply didn't see that he couldn't succeed and foolishly took the job. Maybe it's good no one told him that because now, when you look at the two companies, HP is a stunning success -- HPE not so much.

In fact, HPE is a bit of an industry joke now. I mean, how do you stack the deck like that and still find it impossible to execute? What is scary is that if Meg Whitman had won the California election, Southern California likely would be part of Mexico today.

You can just imagine, at the split, the HPE employees looking down on their HP compatriots, thinking just how screwed those poor suckers were going to be -- and now realizing they're the ones screwed. At the next joint company reunion, HP employees should wear T-Shirts with two letters: The first should be "H" but the second should be "A," as in "HA!" It does show that strong leadership, focus, and simplicity can do amazing things in any firm.

There is a rule of thumb in marketing that says that one of the telltale signs that a CMO (chief marketing officer) has no clue what to do is a decision to change the firm's name or logo. As with all rules, however, there is one big exception -- and that exception is when the brand is working against you.

Now the brand "HP" doesn't have negative equity. The fact they sales are as good as they are showcases this. The problem is the image of the company and how it is trading.

The big indication of this is that both HPE and HP made a recently published list of the most-hated CEOs, placing at No. 8 and No. 10 respectively. It is clear from the criteria that it was attitudes toward the legacy HP and HPE that drove the decisions.

Dion Weisler is almost unknown outside of HP -- but in HP, as you might expect, he is a bit of hero, and HP's performance has been well beyond expectations. The employees there seem to love him, the channel seems to love him, and the investors should love him because they love anyone who can execute -- and man can he execute! These are the groups that picked the supposedly most-hated CEOs.

My takeaway is that it is the drag from HPE and the history of HP before the breakup that is causing Dion to be so badly reviewed. In short, it isn't his performance that is hurting him -- it is Meg Whitman's performance that is driving the perceptions surrounding both HP brands. If HPE continues to underperform and be defined by market mistakes, executive instability and layoffs, HP and Dion won't be able to own their own image.

Even though the HP brand doesn't have negative equity (by the way, that is when a consumer would pay more for a non-branded product than one with the negative brand), HPE is creating an ongoing drag on the image of HP, which must be hurting sales and company valuation.

Granted, given how tightly printers and PCs are tied to the HP brand, such a move wouldn't come easily or cheaply -- but unless HPE can be convinced to rebrand (in contrast, it seems very close to dropping into negative equity in the enterprise space), HP's only fix is to bite the bullet and take full control over its destiny.

Now, you wouldn't just cut the brand -- you'd transition it, and the likely first step would be to strengthen the sub-brands, similar to what IBM did with ThinkPad before selling the line and firm to Lenovo. But which brand?

While HP always has been bigger in printers, Compaq was by far the bigger player in the PC space. It too had its operational and leadership problems, but even though it has been well over a decade since it operated under its own brand, I expect that folks mostly remember it fondly (or don't remember it at all).

In any case, it is a storied brand, HP owns it, and were HP to migrate to Compaq it would free it from all the negative equity it is getting from HPE's problems, and allow it to take a clean step away from the HP history that it is ever more slightly connected to.

Think about this another way. Right now, HP sells PCs and printers and looks far more like Apple prior to the iPhone than like the old HP, which historically was far more of a big iron back-office company.

Admittedly, printers would be a big problem given the firm's dominance, and perhaps maintaining HP as a sub-brand for the printers alone might be the safest path going forward -- much like Lenovo maintains the sub-brand ThinkPad and likely always will, even though the "Think" part of the brand still has heavy IBM connections.

There are a lot of amazing and somewhat ironic things this decade. We have a government run by the Republicans, who currently are doing more to advance a variety of social agendas they don't agree with (albeit unintentionally) than the Democrats who support those agendas are able to do.

The auto industry is rushing to autonomous cars, which likely will destroy the auto industry as we know it (not that it has a choice).

Massive firms are working on artificial intelligence to make everyone but their CEOs smarter, which is where AI would have the greatest impact.

Global warming advocates are overstating the horrendous outcomes so aggressively that they are discrediting the entire effort.

Also, a little company with a big brand showed the world that even with the deck stacked against you, you still can prevail, through leadership, focus, strategy and execution.

So, I think HP should rebrand, step away from the past, and fully embrace the future it can define rather than be defined by the past or by a sister firm where execution, even with the deck stacked in its favor, is an almost impossibly elusive thing. What do you think -- should HP bring back Compaq?

Solar power is incredibly attractive to me because it seems so much like magic. You put some glass panels on your roof or in your yard, and magically you have electrical power. I took our last house to solar power in the early part of last decade, and it cut my power bill substantially -- even though the panel yields were a fraction of what current panels put out.

However, I live in Oregon now, and our house isn't ideal for a roof-mounted solution. Plus, with roof-mounted solutions, the panels don't move, so much of the time they are facing in the wrong direction.

Putting panels on tracking frames so they follow the sun isn't just more expensive -- the result looks like crap. The typical solution looks little better than if your kid built a poorly-thought-through science project in your yard, which you couldn't take down without causing hurt feelings.

What I needed was a yard implementation of a tracking solution that didn't look like crap. You'd think that would be easy, but apparently it isn't.

However, what I found was the Smartflower.