Interact Computers Official Blog

The Industry Standard has been merged with InfoWorld, the site of record for emerging business technology

This guest post was written by Meebo CEO Seth Sternberg . It is the first in a series of posts he’s writing about the decisions a young entrepreneur needs to make when she/he is first starting a business.

There’s no question about it: Google is great at search, and its huge lead over competitors is well deserved. But the site’s spartan design can sometimes leave something to be desired — sure, the company gradually makes tweaks to it, but we haven’t seen many radical changes in a very long time. Now WebMynd , a Y Combinator startup that launched back in early 2008, is looking to help spur the search giant to make itself a little better, or at least give it a few ideas to help.

This is a guest post by Vivek Wadhwa, an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Executive in Residence at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @ vwadhwa .

The S&P 500 is up 58 percent from its lowest point last March, the worst of the economic recession seems to be behind us, and even perennial stock market bear Jim Grant is calling for a barn-burner of a recovery , yet predictions of the next stock-market crash are already here.

One European company that picked the TechCrunch50 conference to launch a service was DemoPit participant deciZium , which launched its travel planning website YourTour in public beta and gave the audience a demo of its capabilities during the event’s breaks. Granted, there are a lot of travel-related websites and applications out there which makes it quite difficult to come up with something unique in this space, but YourTour does have a number of interesting features that deserve a second look.

As Intel readies its most potent chip yet for small devices, Apple is already a competitor.

Writing a book in 2009 is a tricky thing to pull off. Never mind the research, the interviews, or the writing , but then you have to face facts: who reads in 2009? Unless you’re Dan Brown or Stephen King or Glenn Beck, odds are your book, no matter how thorough or well-written, isn’t exactly going to fly off the shelves

Last year, Facebook rolled out a new “pirate” language on Talk Like A Pirate Day , it was quite funny. Naturally, it’s back again this year, and it’s maybe even more awesome. Most impressive is Facebook’s attention to detail (even the email and new desktop notifications are translated)

At this point there shouldn’t be any doubt in anyone’s mind that Apple’s response to the FCC over its ban of Google Voice was rife with half-truths and some complete falsehoods. One claim that’s entered the limelight again is Apple’s statement that it hadn’t actually rejected Google Voice, but that it was still “pondering” it.