Fast Company just announced the beta of their new online community that focuses on innovation and business ideas. Check it out — you don’t need an invite to sign up. Inc. magazine is said to be starting one, too. (Not surprising; both Inc. and Fast Company are owned by Morningstar Founder/CEO, Joe Mansueto).

A viewer tip for ipod owners: iPod Juice dot com has a great free video, showing you how easy it is to replace the battery of your iPod.

And here’s a free video about how to use your iphone to record a podcast of a meeting. You need to be a little geeky for this; it involves hacking the iphone software. But it’s pretty cool.

Is StumbleUpon edging out Digg in popularity among bloggers bloggers? A recent online survey listed StumbleUpon as the most popular social bookmarking site, with the rest trailing far behind. See the

A few free SEO tools to mention if you don’t already have them — SEO Quake and Search Status are browser plug-ins that let you see SEO related information about pages you visit. SEO Quake works on both Firefox and IE.

And this is very cool: If you want to track how you’re doing in the search results over time, for a bunch of different keywords, and save the results automatically – and you should that’s what SERPArchive does.

Tasting domains? According to domaintools.com, Google’s cracking down on temporary domains that stay up only long enough to bring in revenue from AdSense and then close down before they have pay for the domain. (Applies to sites less than 5 days old.) It’s called domain tasting, and it took advantage of the fact that you can cancel a domain within five days and not pay anything. Court documents revealed that Google makes a tidy profit from these “entrepreneurs” but no more. I wonder if Yahoo will follow suit.

Time Driver is a new web application that lets you easily manage your appointments across different time zones and with different people, all completely free. The backbone to Time Driver is Time Trade System’s Time Trade Enterprise Scheduling Application, a robust powerhouse application for scheduling different tasks on a larger scale.

TimeDriver’s interface is where this application sings. It’s simple, easy to use, and yet it has a lot of power — including the ability to sync with Google Calender or Outlook. The web interface works in all major browsers with an offline application that is free to download and use. The offline app is scheduled to be released soon for Windows, with a Mac version shortly behind it.

Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic
unveiled Spaceship 2. It seems the day is getting closer when a trip to the moon will be as easy as flying to Las Vegas, and perhaps less expensive. Make no mistake – Virgin Galactic is a commercial venture meant to provide recreational trips at a profit.
Speaking of Vegas, if you’re going there anytime soon, like for Ross Goldberg’s internet marketing conference this weekend, try the Mario Andretti Racing School – last week I drove the Indy cars 24 laps and got up to 160 mph.

With the writer’s strike still dragging television down, will the web become a viable medium for the entertainment industry? Probably not for awhile, but one group of writers are raising more than 30 million to do their own thing — online. It’s called Visual Artists.

Marketing Sherpa has a free case study this week on building your own social networking site. Next, Web 2.0 and social networking are more than just buzzwords. Used properly, they can help you get your message out, build an audience, and connect with your customers.

Mint Money Management automatically tracks all your bank accounts and credit cards and categorizes all your expenses, organizes everything, and could save you a lot of money. It’s the automatic part that makes it worth looking at – and of course it’s free.

While I was in Vegas last week, we had the chance to drive Indy cars around Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Out of our group of 20 or so, including Yanik Silver and Jeff Mulligan, I only had the second best lap time, but I had the highest top speed. 159.85 mph.

Interesting. You may think that people willing to pay more than $20,000 for a conference pass on eBay is a little crazy. Of course, it’s no ordinary conference; this is the only public ticket available to the TED conference in Monterey this year.

The reason I mention it, is that it’s a great example of Moving the Free Line.

What? $20,000 isn’t free!

No, but this is the year that the powers that be at TED decided to start releasing free videos of many of the incredible speakers from their past conferences. As a result, demand to attend their invitation-only conferences is higher than ever.

So much so that the bidding for a ticket is already up to $20,400.

If you haven’t caught on to the great content, like this, available for free at Ted.com yet — you’re welcome!

VC investments rose to a new six year high this year, gaining an 11% increase over last year and making a total of $29.4 billions dollars invested in start-up companies.

In a show of confidence, they have even raised 34.7$ billion for future investments in 2007, a sharp 9% increase over 2006. It seems that they believe the hottest new ideas are recession resistant and will appeal to people in an economic downturn. These areas include healthcare and bio technology, alternative energy, the internet and pollution reduction.

Even though VC’s are investing at levels not seen since last century, they are doing it more carefully now.  The new trend is much smaller investments to more companies.  After all, Google and Facebook both started in a dorm room or campus.

It doesn’t take a lot these days to get a web site off the dime. So why not invest in a bunch of them and let the founders bootstrap for awhile?

I’m currently building a recommended reading list. In the meantime, here’s a book you definitely want to include on yours. CEO Tools by Kraig Kramers. Kraig is an MIT, Stanford Business School grad and former CEO of eight companies, including a successful turnaround at Snapper Lawnmowers here in Atlanta.

Heard about the new virus that targets the iPhone? Even though this is only a proof of concept, the kind of concept it proves is a dangerous one. Since the iPhone is a big deal with the hip and trendy, a trojan or a worm that goes through a person’s address book could quickly spread itself across the globe.

Are cellphones the next big target?

Google’s releasing a new product called Knol, which will be a direct competitor with Wikipedia as a free, online encyclopedia. The only difference is that Knol will be user-centric, rather than community centric, and will have a spotlight on authors that contribute.

Currently, Wikipedia has a leg up with a lot of articles and a solid user base. But Google is Google, so it shouldn’t take them long to make Knol the talk of the town.

It seems that Google had some great news at MacWorld this year- they are streamlining gmail, search, calender and much more to work seamlessly for the iPhone and its touch based interface.

You can check out the enhancements right now. If you have an iPhone, just hop on down to Google.com and check it out. You can customize the applications that appear on the Google sidebar, the new interface is vastly improved for touch based navigations — AND — it all runs faster and smoother.