justcurio.us is an anonymous question and answer system, open to anyone, with one simple rule: to ask a question, you must first answer someone else’s question. Question yields answer yields question. Strangers helping strangers.

The questions can be about anything — the best Beatles album, your saddest moment, your worst fear, your biggest regret, your fondest childhood memory, the meaning of life, whether you should break up with your girlfriend, the best crepe place in Paris, the best cure for loneliness. Anything at all. This is our chance to lean on each other, to look to a stranger for help, to discover what other people think.

justcurio.us is entirely confidential, allowing anyone to ask and answer questions with complete anonymity.

Check out the site.

Mirage Motion Media offers an exciting new advertising medium – a patented technology that uniquely creates “moving pictures” from static rear lit signs, using no electronics or moving parts. Users can walk down the street or through an airport or a mall and the picture moves. Stop, and the picture stops with you.

Check out the site.
Read the Business Week article.

Current is about what’s going on: a look at what’s new in culture, style, technology, music and more, with much of the content produced by viewers themselves. The viewer produced, bite-sized documentary format gives us the scoop on what’s cool. Watch clips of gang members getting their tattoos erased to modern pre-fab houses being built.

Check out the site.

This is the unofficial site from Microsoft(beta). It doesn’t work on Mac IE or Safari, but I can already see the potential. The interaction design is very interesting and somewhat resembling of a Flash interface. Specifically, the overlays, drag-able modules, expanding/collapsible menu structures and lightning fast & smooth page loads. I’m looking forward to seeing some sick AJAX stuff in the marketplace soon!

Check out the site.
More about AJAX.

Check these guys out. Electroland is a crew from LA that creates comprehensive and multi-disciplinary urban projects and scenarios. The picture above is of their EnterActive project in Los Angeles, CA.

The project consisted of a luminous field of LED lights embedded into the entry walkway that responded to the presence of visitors; a massive display of lights on the building face mirrored the patterns of the entry; and video displays in the lobby and entry areas.

Thanks to Jill Nussbaum for the link.

Check them out.

Here’s a great Flickr search interface created by Felix Turner over at airtightinteractive. It’s a simple search, then zoom in and zoom out interface. The experience is fairly smooth and clean. Give it a try. There are some really interesting search results that the tool spits back to the user. Hopefully in the future, Felix will add some type of ‘user searching’ similar to the Marumushi Flickrgraph service.

Check out Flickr Postcard Browser.

Check out Marumushi’s Flickrgaph.

[from c|net]
Amazon.com is merging photographs and maps in a new search service that offers virtual tours of two dozen U.S. cities.

The company’s A9 search subsidiary is expected on Tuesday to launch a beta of A9.com Maps, which lets people see street-level photos of addresses and get driving directions.

The service integrates interactive maps with A9’s Block View technology, which offers photos of both sides of streets taken from trucks equipped with digital cameras and Global Positioning System receivers. The 35 million shots taken so far are also used in Amazon’s Yellow Pages search, which features photos of businesses alongside addresses and phone numbers.

The new A9.com Maps service lets people get driving directions by clicking on starting and destination points on the map and shows photos of locations corresponding to points on the map clicked with the cursor. Instead of having to type in addresses, people can click on a point on the map and the corresponding address will pop up.

The service also allows for navigation through zooming in and out and shows which roads have had street-level photos taken. “We’re making the map a little less abstract; a little more like reality,” A9 Chief Executive Udi Manber said.

Read more.

Check out the A9 service.