Food.com, Propel and rental cars, Kindle demographics, and more

Seattle is a hotbed for online recipe sites with companies such as AllRecipes.com, Big Oven and Foodista. All of them got some added competition today when Scripps Networks unveiled a beta version of Food.com, a place to store and manage recipes. You may recall that Scripps, owner of the Food Network, gobbled up Seattle's Recipezaar for about $25 million in 2007.

Seattle's Propel Fuels is teaming with Enterprise Rent-A-Car on a pilot project in Sacramento to encourage drivers to use alternative fuels. A dozen Enterprise locations in the Sacramento region will give customers the option of fueling rental cars with E85, a motor fuel made up of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline. 

Real-time traffic data provider Inrix says it's tripled its coverage area to over 160,000 miles across North America during peak commute hours. The Kirkland-based company has added new cities in Canada including Montreal, Vancouver, Toronto, and Ottawa. Inrix spun out of Microsoft Research in 2004 and is backed by Venrock, August Capital and others.

Does Amazon.com's Kindle electronic book reader appeal to young people? Not so much, according to an unscientific survey cited by Cnet. Of 700 people responding to an Amazon discussion forum on Kindle, half were over 50 and 70 percent were over the age of 40. As Cnet points out, the ability to increase the font size on Kindle readers could appeal to the older crowd.

Amazon will start charging Kindle users by the megabyte to send personal documents wirelessly to their device. The new pricing, explained in this official Kindle blog post, starts May 4.

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