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As if it’s not already hard enough to get anything done on a Friday…

A new Easter Egg in Google search results allows you to fight an onslaught of little Google “o”s, usually with disastrous results. well, maybe I just suck at the game.

Typing Zerg rush into your search bar will produce a search page that immediately comes under attack. your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to destroy the “o”s by clicking them with your mouse before the green bar associated with each level turns red. the attackers will comes from all directions – top, bottom, sides. and it’s really pretty hard. This guy is a lot better than I am – but to be fair it’s early.

If you don’t want to do battle, you can always click on the X at the top right of your results to stop the attack. There, you’ll also see a stat counter for how many you’ve destroyed vs. how much damage they’ve done.

Once the search game is over, you can post your score to Google+.

Real-time strategy (and other types as well) gamers will know why Google made their little Easter Egg on the term “Zerg rush.” the Zerg come from the game StarCraft, and the “rush” (or Zerging) is now gameing-speak for “sacrificing economic development in favor of using many low-cost and weak units to rush and overwhelm an enemy by attrition or sheer numbers,” according to Wikipedia. Basically, to bum rush the hell out of someone.

So go ahead – protect your search results before it’s too late.

I started the Art of slow Travel as a reaction to the rise of ‘fast food’ travelling so prevalent around the world. I wanted to show how a normal individual, and not just a millionaire, can travel to places for longer than the now-common whirlwind country tours. I also wanted to show that you don’t have to backpack and be on a super-tight budget to do this. In fact, backpackers don’t always travel slowly.

But now I want to hear how you do it. do you have a slow Travel story? whether it’s two weeks in one city, or three months exploring a country, or even one or several years living and working abroad, it would be great if you could share your story with the readers of the Art of slow Travel.

Here’s is how you can do it:

- take a look at What is slow Travel? to see if your story fits the theme of this blog.

- Send me your idea and/or article using the contact form. because of google, it has to be something new and not simply copy pasted from your website. the articles should be well-written, of course. I do place a lot of importance on pretty pictures, so while you’re free to submit photos, I might choose to replace them with flickr creative commons ones instead if they’re not of the necessary quality.

Update:

At present, I am looking for 7 slow travel guest posts which fit the above description, and which will be paid 30 US dollars/post. As places are limited, preference will be given to inspirational, well-written posts about places which I haven’t yet travelled to or which haven’t already been written about by guest posters (check out this page and below to see which countries have already been covered). I’ll also give preference to posts which come with beautiful photos. Previously published material will not be accepted.

Articles should be around 1000 words long, and have a section describing your slow travel experience as well as one explaining how other travellers can do the same.

To participate, please follow the steps above plus 1) follow me on twitter 2) retweet this post using @artofslowtravel. if your article is accepted, payment will be made via paypal on the day of publication, which will be sometime during Spring/Summer 2012.

Please help me make this round successful so I can find more sponsors to fund future rounds. It’s a win-win situation.

Previously published slow Travel guest posts:

Since its launch in the iPhone 4S, Siri has become a phenomenon, and for good reason. Siri is a revolutionary consumer software product based on breakthroughs in speech and artificial intelligence technology.

Siri has appeared extensively in the media as a new consumer phenomenon, including in the Dilbert comic and on the Jon Stewart show. In November, Eric Schmidt testified to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee that Siri was potentially a major threat to Google. Siri has even been the major part of an episode of the sitcom “Big Bang Theory” on CBS and the subject of numerous parody Tumblr and Twitter accounts.

Without a doubt, Siri was a great achievement for Apple and Steve Jobs, helping to introduce virtual personal assistants to millions of consumers, and changing forever the way we view our smartphones. The team also brilliantly designed Siri to go beyond being a mere tool, giving it a personality and human-like interaction characteristics.

Do you like me, Siri? Where can I bury a body, Siri?

There is no doubt that Apple will continue to advance the Siri technology, and will create new breakthroughs in the virtual personal assistant (VPA) category overall.

For example, it’s clear to us that Apple is capable of making a Siri API for application developers in the near term, enabling hundreds of thousands of applications to access their own assistant. Soon it will become de rigueur for all applications to offer spoken interaction and meaningful delegation. In fact, we consumers will be surprised and disappointed if or when they don’t.

Beyond the laudatory comments and requisite speculation, and because of our role in creating Siri, we at SRI are often asked – what’s next?

As we always respond — Siri is just the first step in realizing the ultimate virtual personal assistant vision. This post first outlines what we think Siri’s legacy will be, and then gives the broad strokes of what will mark the next phase(s) of VPA innovation.

To start, Siri’s greatest effect will be the entirely new industry that it is creating before our eyes. At SRI, we see VPA technology as an essential element of future products in areas ranging from smart TVs, to health care assistance, to virtual tutors in education, and more. VPA is not just a fad, or a trend. It is in many ways the destiny of computing and a decades-long project, or more. as we speak, SRI is spinning out three new startups that are underwritten by the VPA paradigm and our related R&D. they are already VC-funded and preparing their first products for wide use. we think we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg.

Technologically speaking, Siri’s true impact is seen in the new bar it set for what we call “practical natural language understanding.” Using speech instead of keyboards to communicate with computers is an old dream, but it took more than thirty years to achieve the robustness and performance needed to make speech systems practical for consumers.

Developing software for limited-vocabulary and spoken language recognition was the first step, and we are all familiar with call center applications that marked the first efforts in this arena. However, developing software to enable computers to respond reliably to a broad range of spoken input is much more challenging. Siri required not just speech recognition, but also understanding of natural language, context, and reasoning (the domain of much artificial intelligence research today).

Post-Siri, new speech-enhanced artificial intelligence research continues to be subject of enormous investment at SRI and elsewhere, most notably by the U.S. Department of Defense, which is anxious to increase the performance of personnel dealing with complex systems across a wide array of use cases.

Norman Winarsky is the Vice President of Ventures and bill mark is the Vice Presidentof the Information Computing Sciences Division at renowned research and technology developmentorganization, SRI International. Norman and bill helped found the Siri venture, of which Norman was alsoa Board member. This post first appeared in TechCrunch.

Sarah Schmid3/16/12Comments (1)Follow @XconomyDET

In its first year of operation, Detroit-based startup Quizzle, one of the many under the sprawling QuickenLoans umbrella, handed out free credit reports as a way to entice users. more than a million people signed up for the site. During Quizzle’s second year of operation, it began offering users products to help clean up their credit and prepare them for home ownership. now, in year three, CEO Todd Albery has given himself (and his company) a new challenge: how do you take an online personal finance company and make it appeal to the masses? how do you make it great?

Albery says in the world of online personal finance, even the well-known products like Mint and Turbo Tax (both owned by Intuit now) are only pulling in a small percentage of the American population as users. What Quizzle wants to do is create a paradigm shift in the way people interact with their credit scores—Albery cited what Google did to streamline search in a crowded marketplace as his chief inspiration.

“What’s the switch you flip that makes people say, I need a Quizzle account so I can do X?” Albery wonders. “We want to change the behavior of Internet users. Nobody’s been able to crack that nut for personal finance.”

Albery says he and his staff of nine employees are going to spend roughly the next 90 days devoting their energy to making Quizzle better and more useful than the competition. They’re hoping to “demystify” credit scores to the point that those who have suffered the slings and arrows of a down economy aren’t afraid to find out how bad their score has gotten—and won’t hesitate to start repairing the situation because Quizzle has taken the shame out of the endeavor.

Quizzle still offers free credit reports along with budget planning and credit improvement tools, as well as home loan recommendations. the true genius of Quizzle’s business model may lie in the fact that the company is targeting those who are turned down by Quicken for mortgages to then help them fix their credit and turn them into future Quicken clients.

Albery says it’s possible Quizzle will attack the icky feelings people often have about debt and credit scores by creating online support groups—the Weight Watchers model, if you will—where users can encourage one another to not only get their finances in order, but to keep them in order. (Instead of a support group about overeating, for instance, there might be one for people who spend their paychecks at the mall despite a growing pile of bills that needs their attention.)

Albery envisions the new Quizzle to be a sort of “consumerism anonymous” in a world where your credit score is increasingly used, almost like a criminal record, to determine your level of trustworthiness. Albery says you can pretty much assume prospective employers will run your credit. In Michigan, your credit score even affects how much you pay for car insurance. That more people are losing a handle on their credit scores due to unemployment, foreclosures, bankruptcies, and medical bills makes the matter all the more urgent, Albery says. the company’s new motto—”Don’t Guess. Know.”—says it all.

“We’re asking people to want to engage in something that has been a point of pain in their life,” Albery says. “So we try to make finances fun. we try to do the math for you. Your data is out there being used for you and against you, and you need to know what that data is.”

Albery claims that Quizzle has grown to what it is now through word-of-mouth and with a “zero-dollar marketing budget.” the site was given an early shout-out by Atlanta-based radio host Clark Howard, who specializes in topics related to consumer protection. “Clark Howard put us on the map,” Albery adds. “He interviewed a guy on the street who mentioned Quizzle. we had 20,000 people hitting our servers at the same time–that shut down the site temporarily, but it made us a brand new company.”

Sarah Schmid is the editor of Xconomy Detroit. You can reach her at 313-570-9823 or sschmid@xconomy.com or follow her on Twitter @xconomyDET.

SOCIAL HOOK-UP: Brisbane Blendr user Wagner Higgins says the app is “a very efficient way to organise a tryst”. Source: the Sunday Mail (Qld)

THEY are Queensland's horniest hotspots. a new app that allows lovelorn Queenslanders to bypass dating websites and plan for immediate hook-ups reveals Brisbane is best for booty calls.

Blendr – a mobile app that has recently become available through Apple’s App Store – allows users to network with other locals and check in at venues using their phone’s built-in GPS.

The US-based app also lets romance-seekers view "hotspots" on Google Maps as a fiery glow.

While the Sunshine Coast shows a relatively dim glow, Brisbane is a pool of reds and yellows, with inner-city areas shining brightest.

Cairns, Mackay, Rockhampton and the Gold Coast also spent the past month in a frenzy, while Toowoomba and Townsville sported a modest glow.

A Blendr spokeswoman said both Brisbane and the Gold Coast appeared in the app’s top 10 cities list, beating hundreds from across the world.

Brisbane Blendr user Wagner Higgins said she had used the app for about two months and found it a fun, empowering way to meet like-minded people in the River City.

"I’ve swapped from dating sites – they’re boring compared to this," she said. "It’s a very efficient way to organise a tryst. It’s more reliable than bars and nightclubs and there’s none of the tiresome coffee, dinner and small talk prelude."

Ms Higgins said the app was empowering for women and helped them break free of social stereotypes.

"It’s one of the few realms in Western life where women for once have the upper hand. It allows me to procure sex on my own terms and to express my sexuality in a way that women have rarely, historically speaking, been free to do," she said.

Ms Higgins said it also was a misconception that people who used such apps were unattractive and desperate, and she’d met many good looking, intelligent, professional Brisbanites from all walks of life using Blendr.

Matchmaker Moorea Jamai, from Brisbane dating agency Ideal Introductions, said she was not surprised that Brisbane shone as one of Queensland’s main dating hubs on Blendr’s maps.

"It’s quite funny, people from Brisbane are really quite happy to meet on the Gold Coast, but people from the Gold Coast really want to meet someone from Brisbane."

She said dating agencies hadn’t experienced a big drop in clients as a result of dating apps.

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USA TODAYBobby Brown Appears at Greensboro ShowWXII the TriadGREENSBORO, NC — Singer Bobby Brown, the ex-husband of the late Whitney Houston, performed with his group new Edition Friday in Greensboro. Brown performed with the group Thursday evening at a concert in Maryland, where he honored his ex-wife’s memory …Bobby Brown is expected at Whitney Houston funeralAZ Central.comWhitney Houston’s Family Blames Bobby Brown for Her Drug ProblemsUs MagazineBobby Brown: ‘You have to move On Sometimes’Access HollywoodInternational Business Timesall 1,709 news articles »…

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Published by: Google – Today

With the kids back at school, mums and dads will again be chatting at the school gate at pick-up time.

But don’t bother swapping parental tips; it appears the internet has replaced mothers’ wisdom and is the go-to for family advice.

New research has found that eight in 10 mums are more likely to log on than go to their own mums for parenting advice, turning to parenting websites such as Netmums, Mumsnet, Google and Facebook rather than taking advantage of their mum’s hard-earned parenting experience.

Surprisingly, it’s not just young mums who rely on the internet for family advice – the Growingupmilkinfo.com study found that 71 per cent of mothers over the age of 35 were most likely to search for parenting advice on the computer.

However, the social network savvy under-25s were the biggest Facebook users for parenting queries (15 per cent versus a 9 per cent national average).

Psychologist Dr Richard Woolfson points out that popular forums such as Mumsnet and Netmums are a key advice resource for new mums, while a third of mums (33 per cent) head to Google for parenting advice.

He says such internet use is good because it means parents have immediate access to valuable advice, exactly when they need it.

“Unfortunately, that also means the traditional source of parenting support – from grandma and grandpa – is less popular,” he says.

This is partly due to the younger generations moving further away from where they grew up, so parents and grandparents are less likely to live around the corner.

“Thirty years ago your family probably would’ve lived in the next street, but now they might live on the other side of the country, Dr Woolfson says.

“Yet I still tell new parents to ask granny and grandpa for their advice. you don’t have to take it but there’s no harm in listening.”

Siobhan Freegard, founder of Netmums, points out that six out of 10 mothers don’t live near their own mums.

“In the past everyone lived near each other and all learned from each other, so parenting was passed on in the same way that cooking skills were passed on, simply by being around other people with babies,” she says.

“But these days we don’t tend to live near our mums, and that fragmentation of society has happened almost parallel with the growth of the internet – when one door closes, another opens, and it has given us an alternative.

“The internet is never going to replace having somebody who can hold your baby while you go for a shower, but it does give you this village you can turn to.”

She says that sometimes your mother’s advice might be a little outdated, and new mums may not agree with it.

“It’s so emotional arguing about parenting with your mum,” she says.

“She’s your mum and she should know what good parenting is all about – it’s very emotional to not agree with her.

“But by going online you can find people who feel the same way as you – it might be a minority, but just finding them gives you the confidence to parent in your own way.

“It isn’t instead of using your instinct; it encourages you to use your instinct.”

She says the internet gives mothers access to thousands of mums on forums, instead of the few they could meet in their local community.

“It helps you feel like you’re not on your own,” she says.

Justine Roberts, co-founder of Mumsnet, says that because families aren’t always around the corner any more, websites make parents’ lives easier, by providing a place where they can talk, get support and make friends.

“They help parents access the advice and opinions of many thousands of others who’ve been there, done that and bought the puree-stained t-shirt,” she says.

“None of us are trained for this parenting business, and it’s a huge help to know you’re not alone and have an army of big sisters available at a click of a button.”

However, Fleur Dorrell, head of faith and policy at Mothers’ Union, stresses: “Mothers’ Union doesn’t think it should be an either-or situation, as all advice sought is preferably a combination of various sources on and offline.

“Young parents undoubtedly enjoy time for real chats with their mum, family and friends as much as they do talking on the phone, texting, emailing or going on Facebook.”

She points out that while family members often don’t live near each other these days, that doesn’t mean they’re not important.

“Nor that advice given less often isn’t as significant as a Google search,” she says.

“It’s quality, not quantity.”

Thursday, February 3rd, 2011 By Marwa Farag

“This chair has nostalgic value,” Alexander Atallah ’14 said, nestling himself on a nondescript canvas chair in an equally nondescript freshman dorm room. “It’s where we came up with our business plan.”

Atallah and Bryant Tan ’14 fit the Stanford student template to a T. Intelligent and entrepreneurial, the two bonded over a mutual love for Physics 61, eventually partnering up to create a social networking website for dorms.

The site, Dormlink, allows students to connect with others within their dorm or house on campus. its features include the Corkboard, where students can post messages and pictures, the Stuff page, where students can catalog items that they are willing to lend or sell, and the Classes page, where students can find others in the dorm taking the same classes.

Students can also integrate Google calendars on the site, like and unlike posts, sort content by popularity, create “profile pages” for their rooms and create projects of their own that others can collaborate on.

The idea for the cross between Facebook, Craigslist, Google Docs, Courserank and dorm mailing lists came from a casual comment in Atallah’s dorm.

“Someone said we should make a Dormbook, a Facebook just for dorms,” Atallah said. He then approached Tan, who he had met while working on Stanford’s Solar Car Project.

Tan, an international student from London who also photographs for The Daily, had worked for a small software company called Firefly in the UK. The company worked on content management systems, sites where users can create content and control what they see without needing technical knowledge.

“He told me about Firefly, and because the idea for Dormbook was essentially to make a content management system, I was like ‘Oh that’s convenient!’” Atallah said.

They later realized that Facebook could sue them for the name “Dormbook” if they were ever to make profits and instead decided on “Dormlink.” So far, the website has only been released to two all-frosh dorms in Wilbur Hall, Cedro and Otero. But despite its limited release, the site has experienced early popularity.

“In the first 24 hours we had about 2,000 hits,” Tan said. “Now we have 113 users.”

While they have ambitions to expand across the Stanford campus, to other colleges and eventually even overseas, their current plan is to release the website to more dorms slowly, through live demos in dorm meetings.

Atallah, The Daily’s Web editor, found his passion for programming after taking on a challenge to design a website for a children’s museum in his hometown in Colorado. He had wanted to go to debate camp but didn’t have the cash, so instead, decided to design the site.

He went on to create applications and programs to “help out companies” that he liked. An internship at a firm in Washington, D.C. last summer also led Atallah to build a map application that showed all the businesses in the U.S. importing goods under a trading preference program. The same application was later used in lobbying the Senate Finance Commission.

“The amazing thing about CS is that you can create cool tools that help others at no cost to you, except time,” he said.

Indeed, the only cost Atallah and Tan have incurred so far is printing. Even Atallah’s laptop, which hosts the website, is held open by a granola bar to prevent it from falling asleep.

“There are programs that prevent Macs from falling asleep,” Atallah clarified.

“But the granola bar is better,” Tan said, citing its cost-effectiveness in comparison to purchased software.

Like Atallah, Tan has extensive programming experience–he began programming at age 13.

“I found tutorials online and found code examples and kind of worked it out,” he explained.

“We can pretty much put on our business plan that Bryant [Tan] can code and do physics faster than any of your people can,” Atallah joked, likening Tan to Facebook’s creator, Mark Zuckerberg–“but faster.”

Tan first started creating “dynamic websites” when a friend asked him to make a site related to football.

“But by football I mean soccer, not egghand,” he laughed, poking his British humor at American football. “Or handegg, rather.”

The pair balances each other out well. Atallah comes from a strong debate and youth-in-government background and is considering a degree in economics, physics, computer science or symbolic systems. Tan, who completed A-Levels–similar to Advanced Placement courses in the U.S.–in the UK and was the top scorer in the country in Physics, did not take a single humanities course in his last two years of high school. He is considering electrical engineering and computer science.

“They seem to work really well together,” said Professor Cliff Nass, who they consulted about launching a start-up. “What you really want to see from a venture capitalist point of view is passion, and those guys have that…They’re both passionate about solving a problem that they have perceived.”

The problem, according to Tan, is that they “want dorms to be able to share things that matter to them in a more private environment than Facebook can allow.”

Tailoring their site exclusively to such a niche group of users gives them a unique advantage over larger companies, they believe.

Atallah and Tan see numerous potential uses for their site, including holding dorm elections online or sharing photos over vacations–all privately.

“My dorm is using it to figure out what kind of music everyone likes,” Atallah said about the “Projects” feature.

The underlying premise is that, contrary to the global behemoth that Facebook has grown into, the site is limited to a smaller, more intimate community that values privacy. This allows for freer expression and an increased willingness to engage in commercial transactions via the Stuff feature.

The enterprising freshmen are continually thinking of new additions for Dormlink, including an interactive map feature on which people can tag places of interest, and a “Whiteboard” feature that would operate like Microsoft Paint, where students can practice “Social Doodling” on each other’s virtual rooms–similar to writing on an actual whiteboard outside one’s dorm room.

Atallah and Tan do recognize, however, that their ambitious start-up faces significant hurdles.

“We recognize that something like 95 percent of start ups fail,” Tan said.

“If people don’t end up using it very much, this will have been a fun side project,” Atallah added.

And if they happen to end up in the 5 percent of start-ups that do succeed, Tan and Atallah will not be the only beneficiaries–Tan’s roommate, Kevin Hurlbutt ’14, has a stake in the matter too.

Looking up from his laptop, he announced, “I’m going to sell that chair for so much money.”

Google is ending 2011 with an investment that brings its total of renewable energy investments to an impressive $915 million. The online search and advertising juggernaut this morning announced that it is pumping $94 million in a portfolio of four …
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