A new invitation-only site called Rent the Runway lets members rock Badgley Mischka on a Banana Republic budget through an online borrowing system.

Bodega is launching its first endeavor, the “Mapping Project.” The meet-up, which takes place tomorrow at 303Grand in Williamsburg, Brooklyn aims to connect creatives, start-ups, social entrepreneurs, and small business owners with the purpose of spurring collaboration.

The Urballoon is a large helium balloon with a video projector and a wireless laptop that projects user-generated content onto public spaces.

Yesterday, Rugby debuted its new “Make Your Own” iPhone application at their store Greenwich Village store.

The problem with online shopping is that its, well, online. Until we have photorealistic 3D avatars of ourselves, it will always be better to try things on IRL. But the truth is, we dress for other people, and we often need outside opinions when deciding what to buy. So we shop with friends or, more often, end up returning half of our purchases. Though perhaps you have snapped a photo of an item with your cellphone and sent it to a friend. This is what Brooke Moreland and Joe Weisenthal noticed people doing, which gave them an idea: “Wouldn’t it be cool if you got a personalized review about how something looked on you “in real life”, before you made the purchase?”

Microfunding is emerging as a compelling alternative to big banking. Popularized by Kiva and other philanthropic institutions, we’ve also seen the model applied to creative pursuits with sites like Society6 and Kickstarter.
A new site called Microfundo aims to bring this model to music. Calling themselves “Kiva.org for musicians,” their mission is
“to support the entrepreneurial activities of independent musicians from developing countries around the world — championing undiscovered musicians who would otherwise not have the means to develop their music careers.”
Microfundo takes it concept directly from the traditional banking model–artists receive the full amount of their microfunding campaign’s goal, and Microfundo [...]

On August 21, the third invocation of the Rental Car Rally will be rolling from NYC to Detroit. The brainchild of  StreetWars‘ “Supreme Commander” and Steve Bryant of Wiimbledon, the rally is more Mermaid Parade than NASCAR–check out our post and some photos from their San Francisco to Yuma expedition.
There is no set route, but each team must hit pre-defined checkpoints, which include an abandoned ghost town in Pennsylvania with a mine fire burning beneath the streets and a drive thru strip club. The motley crew will then spend the night partying in a downtown Detroit hotel casino before [...]

Culture site Flavorpill has always hung its hat on curation—culling cool urban to-dos and telling people about them. Last week, they relaunched their site with a new invite-only listings hub—the Flavorpill 50—that reinforces this tack and adds a new twist.

At the NY Tech Meetup in February, we got a peek at a new mobile service called omgicu. After its launch a few weeks back, there has been a lot of buzz–and debate–about it. omgicu can be described as a real-time version of Gawker Stawker, enabling anyone to “spot” celebs and blast it out Gossip Girl-style to anyone who has opted in for area alerts. We recently sat down with Hugh Dornbush, the company’s founder, to talk about the evolution of celebrity media, our genetic drive to gossip, and birdwatching.

What inspired you to create the service?
I was in mobile for [...]

Looking to democratize the grant process, Society6 has launched a new patronage system based on micropayments.
“When one of our artist friends was invited to show her work at a prestigious art show, but wasn’t able to secure the funds to go, we knew there was a very real problem to solve”, said co-founder, Justin Wills. To do this, “we started to look at the existing support infrastructure for artists and other creative people,” said co-founder Lucas Tirigall-Caste, and “realized that it was particularly bureaucratic, exclusive and wasn’t designed for scale.” So they re-imagined the process as a meritocracy—one where [...]

Last year, 200 some-odd people set off on a 36-hour road trip competition from New York City to Montreal. Now entering its second year, the so-called “Rental Car Rally” is back, this time from San Francisco to Yuma, AZ. Embarking on June 14th will be about 100 “crazily-festooned” teams competing for a few thousand dollars and a “gold gas pump” (a gas pump handle that’s been spray-painted gold).
If you’re envisioning a road race with cars tearing down the highway, go see The Fast and the Furious 4. This will be more slapstick comedy; winners are judged not by [...]

“Twenty4 Hours of Perfect Content” (www.twenty4.tv) is a new digital art project that aims to turns your browser into a TV set using crowd-sourced content.

The brainchild of Michael Romanowicz (right), Twenty4.tv creates a channel-surfing experience by streaming a slideshow of preexisting websites. Next he’s asking you, “the crowd,” to help him populate a database of sites like these. When he has more than enough to work with, Romanowicz will attempt to curate 24 Hours of Perfect Content contextual to time of day and a number of other themes.
We caught up with Romanowicz to talk about his inspiration and why [...]

For most Americans, the question yesterday wasn’t whether you should watch the inauguration, it was where.
Aside from every TV channel, you could watch live streams online from CBS (on Joost), ABC, CNN, Fox News (on Hulu). Katie Couric covered the post-inaugural events in a web-only cast (sponsored by Audi). There was an official feed from the Presidential Inauguration Committee, an amateur one from Obama Girl on Stickam.com, and everything in between. You could even join a virtual celebration as an avatar of WeeWorld.
One of the most popular places to watch was CNN.com, who did a virtual viewing party [...]

We’ve been thinking about ways handsets could be more sustainable, and it turns out that Nokia has too. Their latest idea: Make less stuff.
As part of its new “we:” strategy to save energy and reduce waste, Nokia’s N79 Eco will ship sans charger (the idea is to use your old one) and come in a smaller box. According to AllAboutSymbian:
The smaller box may not sound terribly significant, but when you operate on the scale of Nokia the little things really do add up. For example between February 2006 and the end of 2007, Nokia shipped 250 million phones in smaller [...]

Gadget designers rarely get to think outside the box. Sure, they may get to give things rounded edges or the like, just to spice things up. But it’s the square that fundamentally shapes our technology–from TVs to Kindles.
That is all about to change. In the near future, technology will take on the same twists and curves as our own bodies. Fast Company saw several products from CES as harbingers of the trend, including:

Samsung’s flexible screen/display points the way towards scroll-shaped cellphones–just unroll the screen.
Apple’s new 17-inch MacBook Pro has a lithium battery specially shaped to fit the machine’s innards,  significantly [...]