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An employee at Best Buy Mobile spotted these suspicious cases in a new delivery, and whaddya know—they're emblazoned with the product name of Motorola's much-hyped Droid 2. More »

This sofa is likely to never see the dawn of a waking day, nor the imprints of your buttocks as you settle in for a marathon 15-hour Space Invaders sesh. Shame, Igor Chak, shame. [Igor Chak via Kotaku] More »

All this talk about the new Kindle reminded me that I still have some questions about Amazon’s e-reader specifically, and ebooks generally. Why do people persist in comparing the Kindle to the iPad (something I first asked months ago); what is the relationship between hardback book sales and ebook sales (ditto); if e-readers keep getting more accessible, is the end of the paper book nigh? Questions like that.
In the hope of finally getting some answers, I hopped on to Skype with CrunchGear‘s Devin Coldewey and interviewed him until he begged for mercy. Video below.

Russian photographer Sergey Larenkov took some old photographs from World War II and combined them with new perspective-matching photos. The result are a series of time portals that help us contextualize the war into our current reality. More »

The Ewee-PT—or the Segway's "Little Sister"—is essentially a cheap way to own an awkward personal transportation system. On the plus side, you're only paying a fraction of the price to look ridiculous, er, get around faster. More »

Even if not everyone will admit it, everyone likes taking pictures of themselves. I suspect it’s the not-so-secret reason why users are addicted to DailyBooth — the service which asks you to takes pictures of yourself (or something you care about) to document your life. With that in mind, it’s almost as if the iPhone 4, with its front-facing camera, was built for such a service. And now the two can consummate that match made in heaven.
DailyBooth’s first iPhone app has just been approved by Apple and is now in the App Store. It’s pretty basic — but that’s all it needs to be. You load it up and take a picture of yourself. And the app is smart enough to load the front-facing camera by default (assuming you have the iPhone 4 — but it can work with any iPhone running iOS 4). Yeah, this is going to be huge for DailyBooth.
As you might expect, the app also offers you a stream of the pictures from all the people you follow on the service. From here you can picture comment or text comment with one click. You can also see all your replies.
The one caveat about the app is that you have to already have a DailyBooth account to use it. That’s not a huge deal, but it’s something they hope to fix soon with a future release. For now, simply head to DailyBooth’s website to sign up for an account, then sign-in with the app.
And do it soon, because everyone you know with an iPhone is probably going to be using this app shortly, I imagine. As we noted when we first covered the company a year ago, the DailyBooth community is very impressive. The picture I just published just a few minutes ago already has about 20 comments — and most of these users don’t actually follow me. It’s fun — and I think it’s exactly the type of app Apple had in mind for the iPhone 4′s front-facing camera.
You can find the DailyBooth app, called appropriately, DailyBoothApp, here in the App Store. It’s a free download.

Remember Tamagatchis, those little electronic pets on a keyring you strived vainly to keep alive and grow to adulthood? The Tardigotchi is its successor, but get this—it houses both a virtual pet AND a living organism, a tardigrade. More »

As a recent iPhone convert, things are going well. But one feature that keeps me glancing over in Android's direction is those damn live wallpapers. ASpiritBomb, from the maker of aCircuitBoard, is yet another pang in my heart. [Thanks Smith!] More »

Just because vinyl records are analog, it doesn't mean you can't pirate them. All you need is a wood box, glass, window cement, silicone mixture, liquid plastic and a drill press. Hey, I didn't say it was going to be easy. More »

Sure, there's a FarmVille iPhone app, but iPad users haven't gotten a really good way of satisfying their virtual agriculture needs. Thankfully, there's now the free We Farm app from Ngmoco—a decent FarmVille alternative for your iPad. More »

This impossibly tiny, 100 square foot house contains tiny chairs, a tiny fireplace, and a tiny loft with a tiny window which serves as a tiny bedroom. But of course its owner couldn't help springing for the 15" MacBook. More »

With the debut of Groupon personalization, I have little doubt that the daily deal site will double the number of deals (and double its revenue run rate) in just a few months.
According to CEO Andrew Mason, the service is churning out 75,000 transactions per day. Through personalization, Groupon will be able to offer 20, 30 or more deals per city per day. Assuming the current growth rate in subscribers — in the last four months the site has more than doubled to 12 million registered users— 2x is likely a prudish estimate.
It’s hard to fault a company that is making money hand over fist; however, as a user, I do have one piece of advice: loosen that death grip on the daily deal mantra.
According to Mason, the personalization system will give a user one deal a day based on their preferences, their purchase history and their profile. Although there will be several, simultaneous deals in any given area, a user will only be able to access one main deal from his/her account. However, if the user finds a link to a different deal from a friend, a blog, or a daily deal aggregator, that link can be used by anyone. (In the early stage of the personalization program, Mason says, Groupon users may see multiple deals but eventually Groupon will turn that off.)
Thus, all the local deals are theoretically open to every subscriber but Groupon is playing air traffic controller in order to maximize the number of deals they can offer (aka cha-ching) and to ensure a nice distribution of users for their advertisers.  It’s easy understand Mason’s rationale here, at just one deal a day their hands were somewhat tied, unable to fully absorb the number of interested advertisers. In turn, Groupon’s limited inventory has directly benefited the “army of clones,” who have swooped in and picked up impatient retailers.
“We believe in the deal a day model, but we were running into a problem where the demand for merchants to be featured has been absolutely overwhelming,” Mason says. “We have something like 35,000 businesses lined up that want to be featured, 97% of the businesses that we feature want to be featured again, so the problem is only getting worse. And what it means is for every business we’re featuring, we have to turn away 7.” (See video above.)
Understandably, Groupon is trying to optimize the bottom line and enhance the consumer experience with personalized deals, but this structure also potentially creates a frustrating user experience. Under this system, a user knows that there could be 20, 30 deals floating around but s/he can only automatically access one. Thus, if a user doesn’t want their preselected deal of the day, she will have to scour the web and ping friends in a cyber goose chase. Of course, this search will be eased by the plethora of daily deal aggregators— but that doesn’t seem like an ideal solution for Groupon either. Why encourage users to jump off your website and spend more time on independent aggregators, where their wallets will be exposed to competitors’ deals.
From the launch of Groupon, Mason has adamantly defended the model of one deal a day, a structure that has obviously served his company well (and its army of clones) and catapulted Groupon to a billion-dollar-plus valuation. However, I believe the massive demand in the market indicates that there’s some flexibility in the business model. The data suggests that consumers can stomach several deals a day— maybe not hundreds— but certainly more than one.  From the vantage point of a user, I would like to see Groupon send just one personalized deal a day to my inbox because I think there is real value in that spotlight. However, on Groupon’s website, I also want the option to log-in and access all (or at least several) of my local deals in one simple repository, perhaps ranked according to my tastes and profile.
Groupon, consider this my 700-word comment card. However, regardless of how you tackle the challenge of personalization, I get the feeling you’ll probably do just fine.
Mason dropped by TechCrunch TV on Wednesday and we got a chance to discuss the new personalization campaign (above) and Groupon’s early days. In the second video (below), he discusses the key moment when Groupon kicked into second gear.

CrunchBase InformationAndrew MasonInformation provided by CrunchBase