Tim Pawlenty, the governor of Minnesota will be using Facebook to hold town hall meetings.  On Wednesday, March 31 at 7:15PM EST – Pawlenty will use his Facebook Fan Page to gather feedback and make a major announcement.  Pawlenty currently has about 33,000+ Facebook fans. [Mashable]

Nissan announced today that the Leaf electric car will cost about $32,780.  After a federal tax credit of $7,500, the car will cost about $25,280.  The Nissan Leaf competitor Chevy Volt will cost about $32,500 after the federal tax credit.

The Leaf will be going on sale this December, which is about a month after the Volt is released.  Infiniti will also be making a luxury version of the Leaf.

“We’ve been working in lithium ion batteries for 17 years,” stated Nissan director of product planning Mark Perry. “So all that advanced research and engineering work we’ve [already] paid for.” The Nissan LEAF will have an iPhone application available for checking temperature and battery levels. [CNN]

Whenever a plane is getting ready to take off, you are asked to turn off your mobile device. The FCC is concerned that cellphones in flight could disrupt towers and the FAA believes that the signals could interfere with navigation. Regardless of the reason, if I see someone trying to use their device in mid-air, I will probably tell them to stop messing around and turn it off. Cellphones.org put together a solid infographic to show how cell phones and airplanes work with each other.

Via: Cell Phones

TomTom will soon start selling devices that have a lifetime map and traffic updates subscription. In the XL and the XXL series, they will come bundled with Lifetime Traffic service and Lifetime Map Update services, or both of them.

This means that the units will be eligible to download quarterly updates using the TeleAtlas map data and POI databases with no additional charge. Devices with TomTom’s Lifetime Traffic devices will receive traffic information every three minutes. [CNET]

Buddy Media is a social media company that runs campaigns for major brands. They can handle brand management, advertising, and relationships with PR agencies with social marketing tools. Some of their clients include Microsoft, Anheuser Busch, FedEx, and Time Inc.

Buddy Media has just raised $2 million in funding from SoftBank Capital, Greycroft Partners, Ron Conway, and Bay Partners. Some of Buddy Media’s newest tools include the abilities to create and track Facebook Fan pages to drive a campaign. There is also a Twitter Management System. [TechCrunch]

According to Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty, Asian suppliers have revised shipping forecasts for the Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) iPad. Now the suppliers expect to ship about 8-10 million iPads by the end of 2010.

When breaking the numbers down further, the suppliers expect to ship about 2.5 million units between the first three months of sales (March to May). Even though 8-10 million iPads will be shipped, Hubert believes that Apple will sell about 6 million of them.

Piper Jaffray & Co. analyst Gene Munster expects that Apple will actually sell about 2.8 million units in 2010, including 200,000 units in the opening weekend. We won’t know the real numbers until Apple makes an announcement about them later this year. [Mashable and BusinessWeek]

Tesla Motors has extended an agreement with Lotus to help them fix a production gap with the Roadster motor vehicle. Tesla registered for a $100 million IPO in January, but could have faced a one year shutdown of production due to tooling changes with a supplier.

Lotus provides Tesla with “gliders,” partially assembled vehicles without the electric powertrain. The current deal with Lotus was set to expire in March 2011 with a supply of 1,700 gliders. The new deal will give Tesla at least 2,400 gliders. And the agreement has been extended until December 2011. [Reuters]

Google added an update to the Development channel of Chrome. In the update, Flash has been integrated by default. Below are the reasons why Google added Flash by default to the browser:

We believe this initiative will help our users in the following ways:

- When users download Chrome, they will also receive the latest version of Adobe Flash Player. There will be no need to install Flash Player separately.

- Users will automatically receive updates related to Flash Player using Google Chrome’s auto-update mechanism. This eliminates the need to manually download separate updates and reduces the security risk of using outdated versions.

- With Adobe’s help, we plan to further protect users by extending Chrome’s “sandbox” to web pages with Flash content.