SnappyFingers is a new startup out of Bangalore and calls itself a search engine for Question and Answers. Their crawler crawls and indexes Question and Answers and FAQ’s from across the Internet and provides a convenient, single point of search from their website.

The site is currently in beta and as per Chirayu, the founder, they have a database of 3 million questions in their search index.

The concept is really nice and has some pretty good potential but in its current form, there are a few shortcomings. For example, a search for “Miami weather” shows some a few good results and also few bad results. Check this out..

-Ramesh

Google, as part of their 10 year anniversary, is launching Project 10¹⁰⁰, offering millions of dollars to the best ideas they can find for helping people.

 

From their FAQ:

What is Project 10¹⁰⁰? Project 10¹⁰⁰ (pronounced “Project 10 to the 100th”) is a call for ideas to change the world, in the hope of helping as many people as possible.

Why is Google doing this? The short answer is that we think helping people is a good thing, and empowering people to help others is an even better thing. Here’s the long answer.

How many ideas are you funding? We have committed $10 million to fund up to five ideas selected by our advisory board.

As best I can tell you don’t need to execute the idea or even have a plan. They are paying for the idea itself. A creative thinkers dream! Except of course you likely lose control over the idea after you win your cash.

Read the full FAQ here. Deadline is October 20th.

-Ranjan

A guy lost his girlfriend in a train accident.... 

But the gal's name nowhere appeared in the dead list. 

This guy grew up and became IT technical architect in his late 20's, achievement in itself!!  He hired developers from the whole globe and plan to make a software where he could search for his gf through the web.. 

Things went as planned... 

And he found her, after losing millions of dollars and 3 long years!! 

It was time to shut down the search operation, when the CEO of Google had a word with this guy n took over this application, This Software made a whopping 1 billion dollars profit in its first year, which we today know as ORKUT. 

Some facts about orkut: More...

I cannot help but think there will be a specific type of individual that will purchase this, without offering up any stereotype’s I am sure you can think of at least one.

While this looks like nothing more than a severed cable, its actually a 2GB flash drive, and its certainly one that will not get stolen that quickly. My biggest concern would be leaving this laying around on the table and having my wife coming in the room and tossing it in the trash can thinking it was junk.

One thing I can say without hesitation is that using this memory cable in public with some of the high-end notebooks that are currently on the market is going to make you look simply crazy.

-Rahul

Did you hear about Radiohead? The band was making a new video, but they weren't using any cameras, just lasers and data. As you might imagine, we were intrigued.

The song is called “House of Cards,” from Radiohead’s recent “In Rainbows” album. In this new video, there were no cameras on set. Instead, two scanning technologies were used to capture 3D images. Geometric Informatics scanning systems produced structured light to capture 3D images at close proximity, while a Velodyne LIDAR system that uses multiple lasers was used to capture large environments such as landscapes. In the video, 64 lasers rotating and shooting in a 360 degree radius 900 times per minute produced all the exterior scenes.

Whether you're a music fan or a developer (or both), we agreed with the band that it would be great to give you a deeper look into how all of this was done, and even a chance to play with the data yourself, under a license that allows remixing.

You can view the video, watch a short documentary about how it was made, interact with the video in 3D, download some of the data, and download an iGoogle theme and gadget - all at http://code.google.com/radiohead. 

- Sarayu