This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.
Name: Conduit Labs
Quick Pitch: Loudcrowd combines streaming music with real-time, online game playing with [...]

Bandai first brought the pleasure of regular bubble wrap to your keychain with its Mugen Pop Pop Toy. And now, in case you don’t bring your keys everywhere, they’ve put it on the iPhone too!
The iPhone app, which is free, gives you three different Mugen Pop Pop play modes: normal, repeat and scramble.
Normal - [...]

We opened the floor to stories about passwords you should never, ever use earlier this month, and our readers didn’t disappoint. IT types and the security-passive can learn a lot from what Donny Don’t does.
Photo by Freddy The Boy.
It started with a list of passwords you shouldn’t ever use at Listable, which was informative, but [...]

AOL, one of the largest national internet service providers and a global web services company, announced today that market research firm Forrester has rated it highest in “overall customer experience” in an independent study. Forrester conducted interviews with almost 4,600 people nationwide and found that AOL rated very high if not highest in categories such [...]

If you’re a publisher using images in your site or blog, and you’re willing to sacrifice a little real estate inside your images, you could be poised to make a nice little chunk of change from Pixazza.
The site, which launches today and hopes to be the AdSense for images, uses crowdsourcing to match products in [...]

A carpenter in a Chinese village, perhaps unwilling to spend what would amount to a month’s pay on a bicycle, has created a 100% wooden one to ride around town instead.
55-year-old Peijia Wu, from Shandong province, allegedly took three months to build his DIY wooden bike. It features no metal parts whatsoever – joints [...]

Open-source media center Boxee debuted a new Alpha release tonight, adding support for Pandora music streaming, PBS video feeds, and changes to the API and browser that indicate there’s a lot more multimedia goodness to come.
Here’s a look at what’s new in the latest build, as well as the newest plug-in from some Boxee-loving code [...]

According to the UK site Blogstorm, Google has started ranking Twitter search pages for topics (think hashtag-style words) higher, often making the front page for certain queries. This is despite the fact that Twitter blocks Google’s spider from indexing search result pages. Which begs the question, how is Google determining that these Twitter topics merit [...]

Another day, another new feature in Gmail Labs. This one could be more useful than most, as it’s something you probably have a reason to use with some frequency. It’s called “Undo Send,” and as the name suggests, it lets you take back a sent email, as long as you act quickly enough. [...]

Those crazy looking robotic carp now have a job-a whole school of them are going to be released into the sea off northern Spain to help detect hazardous pollutants in the water.
Created by engineers at the University of Essex, they measure about 8 feet long, can swim at roughly 2.24mph and feature real fish-like [...]