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This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. Name: Plurchase Quick Pitch: Plurchase lets you shop with friends on sites like Amazon and Zappos. See what friends are shopping for, and chat with them. Genius Idea: Plurchase brings the social act of window shopping to e-commerce.
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Last year, there was a lot of coverage of Google striking a deal with satellite imagery company GeoEye to be able to use the high resolution images from its new GeoEye-1 satellite for their Google Earth and Maps products. The exclusive deal saw Google shift away from its partnership with rival DigitalGlobe, which provides many of Google’s rivals with imagery. Now, it looks like Google is back on board with a new DigitalGlobe satellite.
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Great viral videos are hard to come by, but Volkswagen (or rather ad agency DDB Stockholm) appears to have hit the bullseye. Their new campaign “The Fun Theory” is a series of experiments, captured on video, to find out if making the world more fun can improve people’s behavior. The top video, Piano Stairs, has achieved over 1 million views on YouTube – I can’t count how many times friends have shared it this week. Among the experiments: does turning a set of subway stairs into a real-life piano encourage people to use them (answer: yes, 66% more).
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News came today that a server failure has resulted in total data loss for T-Mobile Sidekick users. The data loss, seemingly the fault of Microsoft/Danger, is resulting in shock and anger.
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Last night, at a retreat in Arizona, two people died and another 19 had to be hospitalized after something went horribly wrong at a sweat lodge. Normally, such a story, while interesting, wouldn’t be right for TechCrunch. But there’s a tech angle here. Apparently, the man who rented the place and threw the retreat, author James Arthur Ray, is also an avid Twitter user. And yes, during the night of the incident he was tweeting about it. Ray later deleted those tweets and all the tweets about the retreat.
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When Apple announced iPhone OS 3.0, one of the somewhat unexpected but awesome features Apple added to it was Internet tethering. Ever since its June release, the iPhone has had the ability to provide 3G internet to your laptop via USB or Bluetooth. So why aren’t you able to tether right now? AT&T, of course. Even though tethering will likely carry a monthly fee, AT&T’s already stressed network isn’t ready for thousands, if not millions, of tethered iPhones. It’s the same reason that it delayed the rollout of MMS.
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Google made a very minor but significant change to their search homepage earlier this week. While everybody else was distracted by the barcode logo, a few Chrome and Safari users may have noticed that the search buttons now have a certain zing to them, a new and pretty look, with slightly rounded corners, a border around them and a cool looking gradient.
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Google’s new logo is a barcode which, as far as we can tell, says “Google.” Today is the 57th anniversary of the first patent on the bar code. Inventors Norman Woodland and Bernard Silver filed the patent on October 1949, and it was granted, No. 2,612,994 (pdf), on October 7, 1952. Google regularly changes its logo for holidays and other special events. Here’s their 10th birthday logo from last year, for example. More recently they celebrated Ghandi’s birthday. Google hosts some of their holiday logos here, and fan created logos here.
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This technology is just mind-boggling. PhotoSketch may be the coolest program we’ve seen or written about since the invisible speakers. PhotoSketch is an “Internet Image Montage” project from five Chinese Computer Science and Technology students at Tsinghua University and the National University of Singapore. The basic premise, which they present in the form of a research paper [pdf], works like this: Step 1.
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Was Sesame Street this current when we were growing up? Along with the Mad Men spoof that’s being widely shared online, the children’s TV show released a clip this week in which Big Bird, Elmo and Snuffy celebrate the letter “D” with an iPod ad-inspired video. (Perhaps “current” is the wrong word, since these Apple ads are far from new.
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