people

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I'm sitting here, reading my morning e-mail and what pops up but a press release for a new dating site that purports to be "exclusively for intelligent people."

Called, wonder of wonders, IntelligentPeople.com, the site says that to sign up you must first "pass the IQ test required for admission."

Now, my first instinct was to look at the calendar. It's not April Fools' Day, right? No, I think that happened already. Maybe the people behind this site weren't smart enough to notice that it's way past April 1.

Well, snark … Read more

AUSTIN, Texas--Why invent the wheel by yourself if you can turn instead to a group of peers and solve it together?

That was the premise of a gathering here of executives from most of the leading companies in what might be called the "people-powered" industry.

These are companies like CafePress, Moo, Etsy, and 8020 Publishing whose business is manufacturing physical products designed by customers. CafePress, for example, makes T-shirts, coffee mugs, hats, and many other products emblazoned with logos and designs uploaded by users. Moo makes business and greeting cards adorned with users' own photos and images, and 8020 publishes photo and travel magazines full of readers' work.

But each of these outfits has until now had to solve a set of problems unique to this nascent industry--legal issues, community management processes, and even questions of nomenclature.

So as many of the people behind these companies prepared to go to Austin for this year's South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi) festival, Moo CEO Richard Moross decided that maybe this would be a good time and place to get everyone together and discuss whether a cooperative investigation and search for solutions to common problems would be a good thing for everyone involved.

After all, there's strength in numbers, right?

… Read more

Tata Motors is billing its tiny, ultracheap Nano as the "people's car," but some people would just as soon not see it get built--at least under current conditions.

The Tata Nano made an outsized splash at its debut Thursday as the world's automotive press disseminated details and photos of the $2,500 car, which the giant company ($7.2 billion in revenue for its most recent fiscal year) said it designed to give Indian families an alternative to overcrowded scooters and to "set a new benchmark among small cars." The Nano is roughly half … Read more

Got $2,500? Then Tata Motors may have just the car for you.

If you live in India, that is. The tiny little bubble of a car, which made its debut Thursday at the New Delhi Auto Expo, is expected to go on sale to Indian consumers later this year, but it won't hit the export market in the next few years--and then it'll likely be to dealerships nearby in Southeast Asia and farther afield in Africa and Latin America. Too bad for a San Francisco-based colleague of mine, whose first reaction was "I want one of … Read more

It's the notebook for neurotics.

Asus, the Taiwanese computer maker, will come out with a notebook that sports two 500GB hard drives from Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. Combined, this will give a fully configured Asus M70 notebook a terabyte of storage.

Put another way, the notebook will be capable of storing 1,000 hours of video, or more than 350 feature length movies, or 250,000 four-minute songs. That will probably tide you over for even the worst airport layovers. A terabyte also holds about the same amount of data that could be stored on the paper from 50,… Read more

People search engine Wink, the less bubbly but more filling competitor to Spock, is adding an interesting antilibel feature. Now, if you search for yourself on Wink and find a result you don't like, you can ask Wink to ignore it, and when other people search for you they won't see that result either.

It's a very useful feature--providing people are searching for you on Wink. While you can get that embarrassing party photo removed from the Wink results, it will still show up on Google. Wink CEO Michael Tanne makes two points regarding this. First, he … Read more

PeopleJam is a place for people looking to give and receive advice on health, relationships, spirituality and finances to connect with each other.

The site launched Monday and is in open beta right now. The founders have culled more than 150 "experts"--meaning writers, motivational speakers, counselors, finance experts and more--to blog on these lifestyle topics. There are also "lifecoaches" who also contribute content, both videos and text-based.

The idea is that PeopleJam will be the destination for people who have specific questions to create a profile, find answers to questions and add their own posts … Read more

Attendi is a combination search engine and chat service.

Accepting the fact that Google and Yahoo have won the search engine battle, Attendi says it wants to be the search engine that "bypasses Internet content and head straight for your brain." The aim is to provide answers for questions individuals have that have yet to be indexed on the Web.

Example: Should you want to find a motorcycle that works well for someone who weighs 260 pounds, when you google that, you get a mishmash of irrelevant to mildly relevant answers. Searching on Attendi brings up a list … Read more