Saas For Cows! Farmeron Raises $1.4 Million *Seed* to Ease Farmers’ Lives

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A lot of people in Silicon Valley are pretty obsessed with organic this and that. One or two startups have looked at the whole connecting-fams-with-consumers-directly model, even.

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Let there be intelligent light: The case for LEDs

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Light is the fastest known phenomenon in the universe, capable of traveling at 186,282 miles per second. The lighting business, by contrast, is one of the slowest industries in the world

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Move Over Harvard and MIT, Stanford Has the Real “Revolution in Education”

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Lectures are often the least educational aspect of college; I know, I’ve taught college seniors and witnessed how little students learn during their four years in higher education. So, while it’s noble that MIT and Harvard are opening their otherwise exclusive lecture content to the public with EdX , hanging a webcam inside of a classroom is a not a “revolution in education”. A revolution in education would be replacing lectures with the Khan Academy and dedicating class time to hands-on learning, which is exactly what Stanford’s medical school proposed last week.

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PayPal forms alliance with Softbank to launch PayPal Here in Japan

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PayPal is forming a joint venture with Softbank Corp . to help launch its small business mobile payment product PayPal Here in Japan. The joint venture, called PayPal Japan, will include investments of $12.5 million each from both PayPal and Softbank, a leading telecom and Internet company

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Hey Google, take control of Android already, will ya?

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Google’s “open” approach to Android has certainly helped build the platform’s user base: Android powers more than half of the world’s smartphones .

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Cloud startup Tier 3 gets serious about enterprise PaaS

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Up-and-coming cloud provider Tier 3 is getting into the platform-as-a-service space with a new offering based upon VMware’s open source Cloud Foundry project , as well as a plethora of cloud database options. The new PaaS, called Web Fabric, is built on Tier3′s previously announced Iron Foundry  implementation of Cloud Foundry that adds support for the Microsoft .NET framework.

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Simple Design Update Makes the Classic Wooden Deck Chair Infinitely More Useful [Furniture]

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Sometimes change is a good thing, as is demonstrated by the simple updates Numen made to the classic folding deck chair found on swanky cruise ships around the world. A new 'X' design not only adds an optional sun shade, but also handy pockets for storing drinks and sunscreen.

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The spectacle of technology

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I was recently in New York, and while there I ended up at an art opening, where I fell into a conversation with an art historian. Obviously, the conversation turned to the state of the “art world.” She was pretty candid when she said that these days it is less about art and more about “the spectacle of art.” The sale of The Scream by Edvard Munch for $120 million is yet another sign that in the art world there is a lot more focus on the business, the ever rising prices, the booming demand. This person said that the world is indeed focused on big sales and big art gatherings such as Biennale or Art Basel.

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Inhabitat’s Week in Green: the Water Discus Hotel, magnetic LED bulbs and pig poo electricity

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Each week our friends at Inhabitat recap the week's most interesting green developments and clean tech news for us -- it's the Week in Green. Man-made islands ; indoor ski slopes ; temporary ice hotels . We thought we had seen it all in Dubai, and then the Middle Eastern city went and outdid itself with the Water Discus Hotel , a hotel that will feature a series of sci-fi styled discs, one of which will be located 21 stories underwater

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Watch These Real-Time Skaters Ride a Stop-Motion World [Video]

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It's an amazing effect. Filmmaker Russell Houghten combines stop-motion and real-time video in Open Horizons , and not just in alternating sequences. He actually mashes them into the same scene, the same shot, at the same time.

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