The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. Name: Project Decor Quick Pitch: A home decorating platform where users can browse and buy items. Genius Idea: Interactive design boards let users upload photographs of their room. 

A couple whose car fell down an embankment in the Catskill Mountains tried to make rescue calls on their cellphone but shoddy reception prevented help from reaching them in time. Arthur and Madeleine Morris’ car was stuck when it fell down an embankment near their driveway of their vacation home. Five times they tried to call 911, their son and a neighbor, but the calls failed due. 

Gadgets such as smartphones and tablets are becoming more and more embedded in kids’ lives. From middle schoolers with smartphones to babies who are comfortable with an iPad but can’t work a magazine, many children today grow up as true digital natives. And parents are catching on that gadgets can help control and distract their little rugrats. According to one study, nearly a quarter. 

Technology often intersects useful, important, and mind-boggling when it helps someone in need. Today BrainGate announced one of these inventions — a robotic arm controlled by your brain. I constantly tried to move things with my mind when I was younger (see: five minutes ago). One day I was staring at the refrigerator door willing anything to move when suddenly a paper fell to the ground.. 

There’s a new product that just came out of Disney Interactive Labs — a video portal for clips, movie trailers, and even a collection of curated YouTube videos, all designed to be watched online or on any of your mobile devices. The new Disney Video site, located at video.disney.com, combines the best of Disney past and present, with a whole lot of content that might not be found anywhere. 

Former Ohio State linebacker Andrew Sweat has a real shot at the NFL, if he wants it. But Sweat won’t risk head trauma by living out the dream of millions of kids across America — and he used Twitter to confirm his decision not to chase an NFL contract. The Columbus Dispatch originally reported that Sweat told the paper his choice on Friday in a text message. On Sunday night,. 

If you’re a dog or cat lover, then you’ve probably wondered what they’re thinking about when they do the goofy things that they do. I People I know like to have one-sided conversations with their pets, but what if the conversation could go both ways? A fun app called Cross Tuner for iOS lets you turn your camera on your pet (or human friend) and drops funny thought bubbles into the. 

What a difference a rumor makes. Samsung, one of Apple’s suppliers of mobile parts lost $10 billion off its market cap yesterday after a report surfaced that Apple had taken some of its business elsewhere. Yesterday, DigiTimes reported that Apple turned to the financially troubled Elpida for a large number of dynamic random access memory, or DRAM. The Japanese company, which recently. 

How many articles have been written about Facebook in its eight-year history? Impossible to tell — by the time you came up with an estimate, no doubt, another dozen would have been added to the list. It is, at least, easy to pinpoint the very first story written about the social network. It appeared in the Harvard Crimson on February 9, 2004, five days after Zuckerberg launched. 

Search engine ranking startup Positionly has secured $300,000 seed funding from Berlin-based led by seed VC Point Nine Capital and joined by Angels Mariusz Gralewski and Michal Skrzynski. The idea behind Positionly’s service is that small business owners don’t need to know about SEO. Its clients already include TD Bank Opower, ESPN and TUI. Users can either enter search keywords manually. 

Researchers at Stanford University are designing a new device that could help people with degenerative eye diseases restore their vision — by implanting a photovoltaic silicon chip beneath their retinas. With degenerative eye diseases, the retina’s light-sensing cells die off, though the rest of the eye remains healthy. Photovoltaic devices (and the retina) work by generating an. 

There are quite a few options when it comes to the browser that you use to surf the Internet. You can pick from Firefox, Safari, IE, Opera, Chrome, and other smaller players that I’m probably missing. Much like mobile devices, the browser has become a powerful platform for developers to build apps on top of. Google has actually done a fantastic job of highlighting extensions built on. 

Viddy, the social video editing and sharing app du jour, isn’t just racking up millions of ordinary users, but a whole host of celebrity participants, too, including Justin Bieber. Swoon. From sports stars to TV presenters to rappers, these well-known personalities love sharing 15-second bursts of video with their fans. We have gathered our selection into one digestible list, complete. 

Looks like it pays to be in big data. Data analysis company Palantir has raised $56 million in its latest round of funding, through two unknown investors, according to an SEC filing today. Palantir has been seemingly very successful, offering tools to analyze all sorts of data. That includes structured, unstructured, geospacial and other types of data that various industries may use in. 

Whenever the question of which social network dominates the landscape is raised, it seems as if the same two or three major players are the only sites that ever earn a mention. If you’re judging social networks based solely on the number of users each can claim, this makes perfect sense. But, as impressive as the numbers may be, total users is not the only measure of success for a social. 

Top American universities attract some of the planet’s brightest minds to pursue graduate and doctorate degrees in the U.S. But thousands of those best and brightest head for the exits almost immediately after they complete their academic programs. Why? The American S-1 student visa only allows foreigners to stay in the U.S. for the duration of their education program and no longer.. 

When Google first launched Android, the open-source operating system came with the promise that it could power almost any device. That’s created a proverbial cornucopia of mobile devices that consumers have to choose from, but it’s also led to the issue of fragmentation — there are so many devices running different versions of Android with different capabilities that can alter. 

Carrying on in the esteemed tradition of Facebook hackathons, there will be an all-nighter on Thursday at the company’s Menlo Park headquarters that culminates with CEO Mark Zuckerberg ringing in the NASDAQ bell ahead of the company’s much, much, much anticipated IPO. There is an internal event page for the big day that has about a thousand Facebook employees RSVP-ing for the bell ringing. 

Against all odds, you likely know someone who still hasn’t succumbed to the lure of Facebook. Maybe you’re a beginner yourself. Or perhaps you just haven’t had the gosh darn time to explore every last corner of the world’s most expansive social network. Below, we offer a refresher course for those eager to learn more about the basics of Facebook. Let’s take a social. 

It’s been amazing how technology-enabled aggregation can make certain things in life so much easier — spaces such such as travel planning, real estate searching, and news reading come to mind. But when it comes to the financial space, that disruption hasn’t quite happened yet. Most of us have a retirement account here, a checking and savings account there, a credit card or two somewhere.