ReadWriteWeb

Micah Baldwin has heard his share of pitches, and at Gnomedex in Seattle, he spouted off to us about startup failure, including bad ideas, saturated verticals, the "rule of three," YASE (yet another search engine) syndrome, and changing jets mid-runway.

All in all, Micah is overwhelmingly positive. For someone who preaches the virtues of failure, he has a lot of faith in ideas others would consider doomed. Watch the video below, and hear his words of wisdom.

On the third and final day of the ninth annual Gnomedex conference in Seattle, Washington, the tired but ever-ready members of the ReadWriteWeb gang convened to dish some dirt about the apps, hardware, speakers, and fellow attendees they'd seen over the weekend.

From a 3D printer churning out plastic copies of Darth Vader's head to the show's most geektastic game (hint: not Rock Band this time), Gnomedex left very little to be desired from our intrepid staff. Gather around and hear the tale of another great conference from Marshall Kirkpatrick, Steven Walling, Frederic Lardinois, and Jolie O'Dell.

A co-sponsored initiative from Microsoft Bing and Gnomedex will give incentive to developers working on economy- or ecology-themed apps this summer.

The Will Code for Green contest calls for submissions that help "deal with the worsening global economy or... improve the ecology of the planet Earth." Two $10,000 grand prize winners and three $3,000 runner-up prizes will be announced at the 2009 Gnomedex technology conference, which takes place August 20-22, 2009, in Seattle, Washington. There is a catch: Entries must use Bing APIs. But is that catch really so bad or unexpected? Gnomedex (and blog network Lockergnome) founder, Chris Pirillo, doesn't think so.

Twubs - it's not the mean-spirited nickname the kids called us in high school, nor is it the Miami Vice detective opposite Don Johnson. Similar to Hashtags.org, Twubs is a Twitter aggregator that allows users to contribute on breaking news, popular trends, shared conferences and memes such as #followfriday and #musicmonday. In addition to indexing basic tweets, the service also displays photos and videos that share a common hashtag. Earlier today Twubs launched a free conference suite in the hopes that conference planners will take a cue from Gnomedex founder Chris Pirillo and incorporate back channels and live feeds into their events.