ReadWriteWeb

In previous months, we've covered here in ReadWriteWeb a new and emerging concept called crowdfunding - a way for entrepreneurs, especially apps developers, to obtain just enough funding to get off the ground, by way of a handful of collected funding sources contributing no more than $1,000 each. It's a superb alternative for businesses as small as one person to build an app and place it in the cloud.

The problem is, it's not officially legal. Not that there's any enforcement against the practice at the moment; in fact, last week the House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved by a vote of 407 - 17 language that amends the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, in order to exempt crowdsourced funds from having to clear legal hurdles from every state from which a member contributes funding.

Last Thursday afternoon, in response to a softball question from Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff on the subject of the relationship of Google's proposed takeover of Motorola Mobility to the ongoing patent wars, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt cleverly avoided linking the two. In fact, he suggested that Google was more impressed by the company's phones and their engineers than with its patent portfolio. "We're actually very excited about the product line and so forth," Schmidt told Benioff. "To use the Motorola brand and product architecture, and the engineers and creative people - these guys invented the RAZR!"

For those who may have already forgotten, the RAZR was perhaps the last trendy, fashionable phone prior to the iPhone. Launched in 2004, it was the U.S.' top seller for nearly three years, but that fact didn't help Motorola very much financially. And as far as design was concerned, the product line was not without its defects. No, it's hard to believe that RAZR engineering was the key selling point for Schmidt and Google.

Britain's Conservative Party plans to offer a £1 million taxpayer-funded prize for a website that can "harness the wisdom" of voters. The price will be given to the team that develops a platform that enables large groups of people to come together online to solve common problems and develop new policies. According to the Guardian, some of the ideas for this site include services that help to identify wasteful government spending or rate the quality of schools and hospitals. It is worth noting, though, that the Conservatives will only give this prize away if they win the 2010 elections.

Just as many of us are getting used to augmented reality applications for cellphones and digital cameras, Babak Amir Parviz and his University of Washington students are taking it one step further. The group is working on a human machine interface where LEDs are embedded into contact lenses in order to display information to the wearer. You heard right, in a few years your cyborg eye will talk to you. In an article with the IEEE Spectrum, Parviz relays the challenges of custom-building semi-transparent circuitry into a polymer lens roughly 1.2 millimeters in diameter.

The latest edition of mobile navigation app Waze has just launched in the iTunes App Store and on the Android Market Place with the Symbian and Windows Mobile versions available on the Waze website. In this updated version, the company has added even more features to their already popular "munching" game which sends a Pac-Man like character loose on the roads to help build the company's mapping database and validate the roads already in place.

Unlike other mobile navigation apps, Waze "crowdsources" its map-making process, reliant on its users to switch the app on when driving around town. Then, using the phone's built-in GPS capabilities, Waze uses the information sent back to create base maps and determine traffic patterns in order to warn other users of traffic jams ahead.

Just as many of us are getting used to augmented reality applications for cellphones and digital cameras, Babak Amir Parviz and his University of Washington students are taking it one step further. The group is working on a human machine interface where LEDs are embedded into contact lenses in order to display information to the wearer. You heard right, in a few years your cyborg eye will talk to you. In an article with the IEEE Spectrum, Parviz relays the challenges of custom-building semi-transparent circuitry into a polymer lens roughly 1.2 millimeters in diameter.

This past week's buzz phrase (so much so that it was a trending topic on Twitter) was "augmented reality" (or AR), which is what you get when you mix your perception of the world around you with computer-generated information. While still in its infancy, the technology holds the promise that you might one day be able to point your iPhone's camera at a Starbucks and see a little notice pop up that says, "There's a Starbucks here."

Between self-aggrandizing FriendFeeds, bottom-feeding link baiters, and perpetual Twitter spammers, finding cool online friends can be challenging. Michael G. Noll and Ching-man Au Yeung created the SPEAR (SPamming-resistant Expertise Analysis and Ranking) algorithm in the hopes of separating the social media wheat from the chaff. This morning the two postgraduate students offered their findings to Delicious in a blog post. The project was first evaluated using data sets collected from the popular bookmarking community.