LUCKY

Twitter's latest buy: Big data startup Lucky Sort

Twitter's shopping spree shows no signs of letting up. Today, the social-networking giant said that it has acquired big data startup Lucky Sort.

Lucky Sort CEO Noah Pepper said in a blog post that his company's "goal was to make huge document sets easier to analyze, summarize, and visualize by building elegant and user-friendly tools for text analysis."

Neither Twitter nor Lucky Sort said precisely how the startup will be integrated into Twitter's larger plans, but Pepper said in his post that several members of his team would be moving to San Francisco to become … Read more

Spin for your lucky number and hope it comes up 7's with LuckyAround

One of the beautiful things about the App Store is that it has just about anything you can imagine. Whether as a programming experiment or to fulfill a real purpose, if you can think of a simple task, the odds are that you will find an app to fit the need in the App Store. And that's certainly the case with LuckyAround, an app that allows you to spin for a random number on your phone. The app has no menus and no options -- just the corner of a roulette wheel and a play button that activates the … Read more

Amazon about to start a new Fire

Friday's tech news roundup can ease symptoms of Gadget News Overload:

Looks like a new Kindle is on the way. Amazon's making an announcement on Sept. 6 in Santa Monica. We're expecting to hear about a new Kindle Fire with a camera and volume-control buttons, and it could have an improved display.

But be prepared for a rush of new gadget news over the next two weeks. When iPhone season nears, every device maker wants to get their news out before the iPhone steals all media glory. Here's a quick list of what's coming up: … Read more

Getting in on the secret of Pixar's 'hidden' speakeasy

If you've worked an office job for any length of time, you've probably found yourself envying "the creatives" -- the people in the design department, say, who always seem to be having more fun than anyone else, with their crazy cubicle setups and unusual work routines.

Matthew Panzarino over at The Next Web has posted a great little story about one of the most extreme -- and awesome -- examples of this that I can imagine.

Panzarino's piece concerns a secret room at Pixar. Judging from what the author says, I should've known about the hideaway before. But I didn't, and you may not have either, so here we go.

It seems that when Pixar moved into its then-new building in Emeryville, Calif., animator Andrew Gordon (who worked on "Monsters Inc.," "Little Nemo," "The Incredibles," and so on) felt a bit of pressure to outdo his co-workers' cubicle craziness. (You can imagine, at a place like Pixar -- which is packed with "creatives" -- just how inventive people get with their work setups.)

Luckily, he discovered a small access hatch in the wall of his office, and -- creative, curious, and mischievous person that he must be -- he wasted no time in doing what many of us probably wouldn't have. He opened it. Then he got on his hands and knees and crawled into it. Then, lo and behold, he discovered a secret "room."… Read more

Goodwill sells a 32GB iPad 2 for $65

In what many will surely take as a "no way!" story, a lucky guy strolls into a Goodwill and finds a brand-new, in the box, fully functioning iPad 2 with a price tag of merely $65.

Let us review. iPad 2. Brand new. $65. There are no typos in that price.

The find of a lifetime was discovered by Reddit user djrjr in Robinson Township, Pa. I guess his link karma really paid off:

I am a constant shopper at Goodwill, they get a fair amount of money from me for everyday things. The thing is if I … Read more

Lucky Supermarkets credit card scam getting worse

Lucky Supermarkets, a chain in California, has been hit hard with a credit card scam.

The company announced the scam in November, saying customers and employees who used the self-checkout kiosks in more than 20 of its 234 stores might have fallen victim to tampered credit card readers. The hackers reportedly used devices called "sniffers" that recorded credit card numbers.

Soon after the information was made public, Lucky Supermarkets, as well as its parent company, Save Mart Supermarkets, said it was unsure how many people might have been affected but urged customers to monitor their accounts.

"We … Read more

Google killing 'I'm Feeling Lucky' button?

Are there things you used to do in the 1990s but just don't do any more? I'm thinking admiring Britney Spears. I'm thinking investing in tech stocks. I'm thinking clicking on Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" button.

This is an important question today, as a stunning and, frankly, revolutionary development in search has been spotted in Finland.

The remarkable sleuths at Google Operating System espied a Google home page without the "I'm Feeling Lucky" exhortation.

Naturally, Google, being a company that loves to examine every shade of blue that exists … Read more

HTC phone battery stops bullet, saves life

Earlier this week, an Illinois man managed to leave his cell phone in his back pocket, a choice that ended up, thanks to his rolling bottom, with his wife calling the police, who sent a SWAT team to the man's place of work.

John Garber, a valet from an Atlanta nightclub might now be dead if he'd kept his cell phone in the same place.

According to the Associated Press, Garber was working at Club Halo when two men were thrown out of the club. Police say that the men allegedly ventured over to a car, grabbed some weapons and began to shoot indiscriminately in the direction of the club.

One of the bullets went through Garber's coat and was about to do him severe damage. Suddenly, it was intercepted by his HTC phone (yes, it was a Droid Incredible), which he had put into the chest pocket of his jacket.

Garber's coat is now adorned with a bullet hole. The top left corner of his red cell phone battery now enjoys a dent that signifies it wouldn't let the bullet through.… Read more

Lottery number helper

Lotto Buster 2010 provides an incredible range of tools to help you make lotto guesses. The program not only gives predictions, but also provides the statistics to help choose your own numbers.

The program's interface was an instant hit with us, since it laid out all the options clearly and was easily navigated. Some of the charts and graphs required a visit to the Help file's glossary but were intuitive more often than not. The first impressive aspect was its Lotto Buster's wide swath of lottery choices, which range from every American state's drawings to countries … Read more