Google goes green with Blackle

When your screen is white - an empty word page, or the Google page, your computer consumes 74 watts. Yet when it's black it consumes only 59 watts.

Mark Ontkussh wrote an article about the energy saving that would be achieved if Google had a black screen, taking in account the huge number of page views, according to his calculations, 750 mega watts/hour per year would be saved.

In a response to this article Google created a black version of its search engine, called Blackle, with the exact same functions as the white version, but with lower energy consumption.

Check out the full article :: EcoIron

Unbusiness cards

For those of you who don't work for a big cheese corporate with fancy pants business cards, Moo is definitely worth a look. They've taken what is essentially a fairly boring & standard product, the old business card, and breathed into it, a new lease of life.

Enter the unbusiness card. These pint sized little beauties are about half the size of your normal business card so they already look different. Plus they link in with Flickr so you can use your Flickr photos on the back of each card (you can use as many images as you want to make a variety of cards) to personalise them.

They're tiny, they look hot & they're cheap. What more could a girl want? except maybe a proper job...

Check it out :: Moo

Invite yourself

Call me a neophiliac but I love to be the first to try something new and this site is mecca for people that love a good beta. Instead of surfing aimlessly round the web looking for new startups launching betas or waiting patiently to be invited to join the first band of trial users, InviteShare let's you invite yourself to the party.

The site has covers a bunch of startups in beta mode and lists the invitations available. It lets those sites post the number of invitations available and minions like me request an invite to participate.

Won't you tell us how to get to Amie Street?

One of my favorite new music distribution services turns one year old today - Amie Street.

Amie Street’s business model is dead simple - Artists upload their music for download on the site. Users download songs, with the starting price at free. When downloads pick up for popular songs, the price starts to rise, all the way up to $0.99. If a song gets to $0.30 or so, you know its popular. The artist keeps 70% of revenues after the first $5 in sales. Songs are sold DRM-free in MP3 format. Users can also generate credit in Amie Street by recommending songs. Only a few recommendations are allowed, but if the song you promote does well, you get credit in your account that you can use to buy other songs.

Well known artists are starting to use the service. Barenaked Ladies, Master P, Romeo and the Meat Puppets are all distributing music on the site, which has now sold over half a million tracks to users.

Their pricing model encourages music lovers to discover and buy new music. If a song is free, it hasn’t been discovered by a wider audience. If a song is 98 cents, it’s already a must-hear hit.

Taken from :: Techcrunch