No matter if you work at the IT department or not, you probably have unlocked or help unlock some of this achievements, whether it’s the “Have you tried to restart?” or “The Network is down.” We all have been there. More »

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From a 2004 Playboy interview with Larry Page, in which the Google co-founder describes a very different company from the one we use now: More »

Gizmodo

Editor’s Note: David Binetti is the CEO and co-founder of Votizen, a consumer technology company based in Mountain View, CA focussed on giving voters a greater voice. You can follow Binetti on Twitter @dbinetti.

Photo Credit: Creative Commons Flickr / George Parilla

TechCrunch

Good news for Facebook fans: now you can get a free set of cool color personal cards based on your timeline. They’re giving 200,000 sets of 50 cards for free, so you’ve to hurry up. Here’s how to get yours: More »

Gizmodo

This is going to feel good: now you can call all supporters of SOPA and PIPA, the dreadful US internet censorship laws, using a simple web site. Just record your very own message, pay some dollars and fire away. More »

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Twistory, which lets people save their tweet backlog to their favorite calendaring application, has finally come through with full support for popular Web-based calendaring service Google Calendar.

You can now subscribe to Twistory using your existing Twitter account and automatically view in Google Calendar when you’ve tweeted what. Up until now, compatibility with Google Calendar was a little flaky, but the team behind Twistory tells me it is now finally stable.

Twistory is available for free, allowing you to visualize your last month worth of tweets in your calendaring application of choice.

There’s also a paid version, Twistory Pro (/month), which gives you access to your entire Twitter backlog (currently limited by Twitter to 3,200 tweets) and allows you to export your entire Twitter history as a CSV file.

TechCrunch

Using a condom that is not suited for your penis increases the possibilities of breakage and slippage, which in turn increases the possibility of sexually transmitted infections, or unwanted pregnancies. Thankfully, someone invented custom size condoms. Now they are available… in Europe. More »

Gizmodo

Barnes & Noble this morning reported sales and earnings for its second quarter ended October 29, 2011, and they’re a mixed bag. Total sales decreased slightly, from .9 billion to .89 billion, compared to the prior year.

The company posted a net loss of .6 million for the quarter, or .17 per share, as compared to a net loss of .6 million last year. This is below Wall Street expectations.

Physical book sales declined, Barnes & Noble says, offset by increases in NOOK products and positively affected by the liquidation of the remaining Borders stores.

BN.com sales, meanwhile, increased a decent 17 percent over the prior year, from 7 million to 6 million.

Zooming in on its NOOK business, Barnes & Noble boasted about the successful kick-off for its NOOK Tablet.

The 9 device was introduced on November 7, 2011. In the first few weeks of launch, the company says the NOOK Tablet has become the fastest selling NOOK product in its history.

Says William Lynch, CEO of Barnes & Noble:

“We expect to sell millions of devices during our third quarter, adding to the millions of current NOOK customers.”

B&N further said that the consolidated NOOK business across all of the company’s segments, including sales of digital content, device hardware and related accessories, increased 85 percent in the second quarter to 0 million, on a comparable sales basis.

The company also says it plans to invest more heavily in customer acquisition activities to fuel NOOK digital growth. However, as a result, B&N expects full year EBITDA to be at the lower end of the previously issued range of 0 million to 0 million.

TechCrunch

We’ve all built up a ton of connections through networks like Facebook and Twitter. Now there’s a way to greedily exchange that social capital for real-world dollars. Shopcade is a new affiliate ecommerce platform where users create a personal store and feature products from a catalog of 40 million item. They can then blast store links to their social networks and earn affiliate kick-backs when their products sell. When used for good, Shopcade helps people structure the shopping recommendations they give friends to aid product discovery, and give to charity. But when used for evil, Shopcade incentivizes social network users to spam their friends.

Facebook has been trying to keep social spammers out. It banned Ad.ly, which connected brands wishing to advertise with celebrities willing to post ads to their fans as status updates. This is because social spam pollutes the user experience at Facebook’s expense. Most people know and loathes someone who uses the news feed to market their small business or promotes events, but most people don’t have anything shill. Paid tweeting services let users earn money for publishing ads, but require tens of thousands of followers to be lucrative.

Shopcade has the potential to give everyone an incentive to spam. Maybe it will help cash-strapped teens avoid crappy summer jobs. But more likely it will degrade the social network experience if it gets popular.

The way the model works is Shopcade aggregates all the affiliate product feeds it can. Users create and customize a personal store and feature products they’d recommend — i.e. that they think their friends will want to buy. When someone buys a product, Shopcade gets an affiliate fee, but then rewards both the store owner and the purchaser by adding a small cash reward to their accounts. Users can cash out through PayPal or by donating their reward to charity. In addition to keeping a portion of the affiliate fees, Shopcade will monetize by selling custom themes and virtual goods that users can display on their stores.

The redeeming property of Shopcade is the product recommendation feed on its home page. When shoppers visit, they’re shown what products their friends are adding to their stores or buying, as well as products based on their own activity and Facebook Likes. These could become a good way to discover relevant products if enough friends are on-board.

From a business standpoint, Shopcade has potential. The 20-person London team was founded by Nathalie Gaveau, who started PriceMinister.com, a French ecommerce site which sold to Rakuten, the French eBay. It also includes an ex-PayPal employee that spearheaded that company’s global expansion.  Investors include Ian Livingstone, founder of Eidos Games, and Lord John Birt, Director-General of the BBC.

Unfortunately, from a social good perspective, Shopcade may lower the barrier to affiliate marketing and assist the greedy to exploit the news feed and Twitter stream for low-effort financial gain.

TechCrunch

Startups and entrepreneurs are far from lacking when it comes to resources that help guide them through the pain-staking yet always rewarding process of building a business. For example, they can check out the Startup Genome Project to see what specific components are integral to building a successful business, check out cool tools like this one to compare their term sheets to industry standards, or even these efforts by the Founder Institute to help founders standardize their relationships with advisors. Obviously, these are only a few of many — when it comes to connecting with funding, there are incubators, Angel List, Kickstarter — the list goes on.

And then there’s entrepreneurial education by way of video series: Back in August, TechStars, the multi-city startup incubator, launched a “reality-documentary” TV series (in collaboration with Bloomberg) designed to give the world a peak at what it’s like to start a business in the fast-paced atmosphere of a tech incubator.

Riffing off video series like this one, Sprinkle Lab, a startup that makes commercial videos for tech companies, launched a series last week that aims to speak to anyone and everyone interested in the world of entrepreneurship. The series, called “Now I Know”, will be releasing a new episode every Monday and Wednesday for the next six weeks that contains a lesson learned, a memorable experience, or personal philosophy from different notable figures in the tech space. It’s slightly reminiscent of The Startup Kids, but instead of focusing on young entrepreneurs, it shares musings on the big issues the tech industry faces today, dished out by experts — of every age.

The series premiered with six episodes featuring author of “The Lean Startup” Eric Ries, Craigslist Founder Craig Newmark, serial entrepreneur, lecturer, and author Steve Blank, Rock Health Founder Halle Tecco, Causes.com Co-founder and VP of Product Chris Chan and TechCrunch columnist and newly-minted CrunchFund VC MG Siegler.

Now I Know’s most recent video, for example, features former TechCruncher and current Accel investment guru Dan Levine talking about the concept of failure and how it might actually not be the best way to learn.

Sprinkle Lab Co-founder Cameron Woodward told us that he and his team founded Sprinkle Lab in March of this year, because they believed that there simply wasn’t enough good video coming out of the tech space. While there is Revision3 and other great video specialists like it, Woodward said that he wanted his startup to focus on making shows that are formatted for television, not just vlog-caliber.

“We’re millennials, so we don’t have that kind of patience”, he said. “We wanted to see something short and sweet and dripping with nerdy goodness”, so having founded a video firm built with MediaCore (a startup focused on letting SMBs build their own video platforms, which we profiled in August) — Sprinkle Lab launched Now I Know based on their desire to see this kind of educational content find a home.

There will be more videos launching next week, and while these videos are great, they leave you wanting more. Hopefully Sprinkle Lab will release the full interviews in the future; I have a feeling they would find an audience. Below is an example of Now I Know’s content, featuring Steve Blank talking about the fundamental differences between small businesses and startups. Check it out:

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