Mechanical Turk is the wonderful internal service that Amazon created for helping to crowdsource their product reviews, recommendations, and generally housekeeping associated with hundreds of thousands of SKUs. The service allows you to leverage crowdsourcing to divide a job into 100s of smaller jobs, and pay people literally pennies to complete a project for you, which opens up an amazing opportunity for entrepreneurs.

For those of you with $6,000 burning a hole in your pocket, Colorware has the laptop for you. They’ve stripped down the glossy aluminum from a 15″ Macbook Pro and made it a sexy matte black. Continue reading for some more eye candy.

After the explosion of the Internet and the countless IPO success stories, everyone wants to invest in the next Google, and everyone wants to work for the next Google. Problem is, Google’s are extremely hard to come by, and there are very precise distinctions between startups that are destined for greatness or destined for the deadpool.

For those of you hoping to educate your children of the realities of living with Big Brother watching you at all moments, there is the new toy released by Playmobil, “Security Check Point,” that one reviewer found especially interesting, in a sarcastically, hilarious review.

Ever wanted to make custom tool tips for your website? How about finding out and eliminating exactly what’s lagging down a client’s site? These tools and 48 others are included in a massive list Smashing Magazine just put together for all of us web designers out there.

For those of you considering the switch to the iphone 3GS, I highly recommend it. I received my unit Friday and feel like the jump in speed is equivalent from going from EDGE to 3G and from a 486 to a Pentium processor. The full details even show it’s 11% faster than the Pre!

It looks like Palm has finally distributed the Pre out to various media outlets and after the earliest review by Boy Genius things were not looking good, especially for touch-typist. Well, apparently Engadget, Gizmodo, and the NYTimes have different opinions on the phone.

Mark Cuban, American billionaire and all around interesting guy has recently invested enough money in a restaurant chain to bring them from 1 store to 50-75 stores after the restaurant famously put their Twitter profile on their billboard.

Pretty much everywhere we look, we have VCs and entrepreneurs telling us now’s the time to start a business. Today, one of the cover stories on CNET was Tim Draper of DJV fame explaining exactly why he thinks you should start a business now. So if you have a great idea, and want to get started, this is the best podcast for you.

Just had a chance to watch Glee on Hulu, and I was blown away. The plot tells you instantly it’s going to be a hit: a teacher takes over the glee club and the star quarterback is pulling double-duty as a choir boy while the entire script is backed up by the likes of Jane Lynch (of Role Models, 40 Year Old Virgin, Best in Show fame) and superb writing. Read on for the trailer.

For those of you looking to capitalize on your growing mailing list or those of you who have yet to take full advantage of email marketing, email marketing is the easiest way to increase conversion rate for your eCommerce store or turn visitors into members, but too few people know what it takes to create a great email.

Web design is a unique art, it is quite different than print design, graphic design, and based on the limitations and also functionality of XHTML, web design has quite a bit of quirks you need to work around. What are the best tutorials to get you that perfect design?