BUSINESS TECH: 2012 Most Popular Websites

Is there a website that you can't go a day without checking? Chances are, a few million other people have the same favorite, if web data company Alexa's list of the world's 500 most popular sites is any indication.

Alexa's web stats are updated daily, but its ranking system relies on three months worth of information. The rankings consist of several different criteria including a website's global reach and number of pageviews. "Alexa computes traffic rankings by analyzing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users and data obtained from other, diverse traffic data sources," the company's site reads. READ MORE

Start Up Life: Risking It All To Change Direction In Life

SOMETIMES IN THE EARLY STAGES OF STARTING A BUSINESS YOU HAVE TO REALLY SCRIFICE A LOT.  MASHABLE SHOWS US TWO WOMEN WHO ARE GOING THRU THE STRUGGLE

Start Ups: How To Make Money On Youtube

In a nutshell you make money on YouTube by becoming a YouTube partner, which allows you to display ads on your videos, and then you earn a percentage of the revenues generated by clicks on those ads, much like with AdSense. As for how much money you can actually make, I heard numbers anywhere from $3 up to $10 per 1,000 video views.

However, the process of becoming a YouTube partner is not as trivial as becoming an AdSense publisher.

Facebook IPO: A bet on 'King' Zuck

Mark Zuckerberg will wield near total control over Facebook's future. Some fear that once the hype dies down, the situation could lead to problems no one will be able to do anything about.

iPavement Embeds WiFi Hotspots In The Street

iPavement paving stones are installed in existing sidewalks, to provide WiFi access to passers-by

It seems that a lot of people have been talking about putting things in the road lately. Just within the past few years, we’ve heard about asphalt-embedded parking spot locators, power strips and coils, piezoelectric generators, and heat-harvesting water pipes. Now, a Spanish tech company has developed yet another piece of “street technology,” known as iPavement – sidewalk paving stones that double as WiFi hotspots.

How Small Investors are Making Huge Returns Trading Penny Stocks

You may have noticed a lot of buzz lately about Penny Stocks. 

Penny stocks are the common stocks of smaller public companies that trade for less than a dollar per share.  Like other stocks, they are regulated by the SEC, but instead of trading on the major markets like the NYSE, they trade on “over-the-counter” markets, which are very accessible to the public.

Super Secret Hypersonic Aircraft Flew Out of Its Skin

ABC News: It turns out that tearing through the atmosphere at 20 times the speed of sound is bad for the skin, even if you're a super high-tech aircraft developed by the government's best engineers at its far-out research agency.

DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, has made public its  best guess about what might have caused its unmanned arrowhead-shaped Hypersonic Technology Vehicle (HTV-2) to suddenly lose contact and crash in the Pacific just a few minutes after slicing through the sky at Mach 20 last August: it was going so fast its skin peeled off.

Start Ups: How to Make Money Doing Side Hustles

If you need extra money to take care of an unexpected bill or to get out of debt, you may have considered getting a side job. Whatever your reason for needing extra money, there are plenty of side jobs you can take on to increase your income. The great thing about a lot of side jobs is you can do them in your free time. Many of the jobs are simply things people are too busy to do or have no desire to complete

Craigslist Ugly Design Due For Makeover

techcrunch

Recognizable, fast-loading, but outdated as hell website seeks Senior UI / Usability / Front End Engineer. Love it or hate it, Craigslist‘s design could provide a better experience, and apparently Craig thinks so too, as this weekend the site posted a job opening for someone to make it “faster, friendlier, and easier”. It’s hoping for a brave designer who can “develop new products and features that will have CL users swooning”, “optimize internal team tools”, and who has mobile app design and platform support skills.

There’s plenty of tweaks we’d appreciate like more consistent navigation controls and better use of whitespace. But don’t expect Craigslist to ditch its famously minimal facade that’s helped it climb to 50 million classified postings and 30 billion page views a month.

This Speaker Dock Is Made Entirely Of Bamboo,No Electricity Required

I try my best to stay away from writing about speaker docks and phone cases. In my experience, they’re all the same, save for a few minor tweaks here and there. But today I stumbled upon a pretty novel little iPhone speaker dock that just so happens to be 100 percent green and uses no electricity whatsoever.

You’re intrigued. I can feel it.

Meet the iBamboo iPhone speaker dock. It’s made from a single piece of bamboo, and holds the iPhone in place as it plays music to amplify the sound. Granted, you won’t get any extra power in the lows or feel that bass keep bumpin’ bumpin’ (this beat goes boom, boom), but you will get some added volume and that’s all the casual listener needs anyways.

Plus, the iBamboo is pretty damn beautiful, in both bamboo and black color flavors. It exists in perfect harmony with the minimalist design of Apple products, and is eco-friendly to boot.

StartUps: Let Launchgram Bring New Product Info To You

Last week at the 10x Xelerator, Andy Sparks impelled LaunchGram.com into motion and lazy people all over the world rejoiced (or they will…eventually). This new service, in the words of Sparks, “aggregates pre-release demand signals for products coming soon.”

The way it works is that consumers can create an account at LaunchGram’s website and subscribe to news about imminently launching products of interest 
(the iPhone 5 for example).

Once users subscribe, they can receive “LaunchGrams” via email with curated updates about product release date, pre-order availability, photos and video. (LaunchGram does the dirty work here by scouring the web for the most up to date information about listed products). The same information that shows up in emails can also be viewed on product-specific pages at the main website.

SICK!! Hands on with Microsoft Research's Beamatron

Microsoft Research is continuing its trend of showing off some pretty cool demos, this time with the "Beamaton" augmented reality system. Unlike some other AR experiences, Beamatron strips away the layer of abstraction that comes from looking at the augmented world through a portal, such as the screen of a smartphone or PS Vita. Instead, the system uses a projector and a Kinect sensor on a motorized pan-tilt head to project virtual objects into the real world. Beamatron is able to create a depth map of the physical space around it using the Kinect Fusion software, allowing it to alter the projections to preserve their form on various physical shapes. What's more, the projections can react to the physical dimension of the space, such as colliding with obstacles or falling off elevated surfaces.

In the demo below, a virtual remote controlled car reacts to driving over ramps or people's feet as you'd expect a real car to, and is even stopped by physical walls. In terms of practical use, Microsoft mentioned that they could see the system used to project notifications onto surfaces of a room, making sure that they are always in an individual's line of sight. While we're not too keen on being unable to escape notifications, we'd gladly take that car for a spin.

How to Make Your Company More Like Apple

Author: Daniel Burrus 
Published: April 18, 2012 at 12:08 pm

The most recent CNBC All-America Economic Survey revealed that at least half of all U.S. households own at least one Apple product. In other words, there are more than 55 million American homes with at least one iPhone, iPad, iPod, or Mac computer.

The actual breakdown is interesting: Just as many Americans between ages 18 and 34 count themselves among Apple users as those ages 35 to 49 (63 percent). The number drops to 50 percent when you get into the 50 to 64 age group, and down to just 26 percent among those 65 and older.

Friend Request: Parenting On Facebook

When their children are babies, parents use Facebook to share pictures of birthday parties, school projects and family events. On the other hand, what if your children are teenagers, old enough to post their own pictures and events? If you're like the majority of parents in the US, you would probably admit to secretly accessing your teen's profile to see what he or she is up to online.

According to a survey "Digital Coming of Age" by AVG, an online security firm, 6 out of 10 of the parents of 14-17 year olds admit that they secretly check their teen's accounts to see what they are doing online. Worldwide, that number is around fifty percent. The survey consulted over 4000 parents in 11 countries. In the US, a larger percentage, 72 percent, of parents maintain a presence in their teen's online life by friending them on Facebook. Both actions can be deliberate steps parents take to protect their children from online bullying, try to set continuous boundaries and acknowledge the role that social networks and online activity play in children's lives. Openly friending your child on Facebook is also a good way to keep a pulse on his/her life.

BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY: Facebook Timeline For Brands: It's About Storytelling

FORBES:

As anticipated, Facebook Timeline for Pages was announced Wednesday. The buzz is deafening. Us social media types don’t lack opinions or channels to share them. Among my network, the chatter is mostly positive, obsessed with aesthetics of the interface, new navigation patterns and the placement of things like Apps, Photos and the like. But this, my “friends,” is not the real story here.