StraighterLine is a new kind of remote education company, offering online college courses in basic subjects such as math, accounting and writing at an extremely low flat rate of $99 a month.

The attack on Twitter last week wreaked so much havoc on the micro-blogging site that the outage is now referred to as a Twitpocalypse. Even the smiling whale page announcing “Twitter is over capacity” wasn’t visible because log-in was impossible for two hours. The DDOS (distributed denial of service) attacks knocked the micro-blogging service offline on Thursday and reduced service levels for a much longer period. The twitter meltdown raised questions concerning security in the digital age and how it’s a bad idea to rely on a closed, singular service provider – imagine only having one email service!
Proponents of [...]

Nascent online service Quirky is hoping to eliminate the opaque process of product research, industrial design, marketing, and manufacturing that stands between inventors and consumers, collapsing them into a streamlined, democratized online discussion they’re saying takes only days from start to finish.
Anyone with an idea and $99 can pay to pitch their proposal to Quirky’s users, who after deciding whether or not the idea is viable, will then provide feedback as the idea approaches manufacturing, voting on potential names, logos, and product design choices. Once the product begins selling, those in the Quirky community who contributed most to the feedback [...]

DIYcity, an open source platform that enables a community of users to develop technology solutions to common problems faced by cities ranging from transportation to healthcare, recently launched its latest application. SickCity provides realtime disease detection capabilities at the local level by mining popular social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter to find key words such as flu, fever or chicken pox that indicate that an individual is ill, under the guise that increasingly people are turning to these networks to tell their friends how they’re feeling. The results are then plotted on chart showing 30-day trends for a particular [...]

We’re excited to hear what Florian Peter, founder of CScout, will share with us at PSFK Conference NYC 2009. He will be speaking on our “Open To Change” panel, along with Scott Heiferman (Meetup), John Geraci (Outside.In), Avner Ronen (boxee) and Domenico Vitale (PI&C), where the group will discuss how creators and the community openly come together to develop new thinking and make ideas happen.
Who are you and what do you do?
I am the founder of the trend agency CScout. I’m an entrepreneurial trend consultant and speaker with a flair for spotting and interpreting emerging business trends. Launched in [...]

We’re looking forward to having John Geraci, the brains behind DIYcity and co-founder of Outside.in, join us this Thursday at PSFK Conference NYC 2009. John will be participating in our “Open to Change” panel along with Domenico Vitale (People Ideas & Culture), Scott Heiferman (Meetup), Florian Peter (CScout) and Avner Ronen (boxee), where he will discuss the potential of leveraging open communities to develop new products, services and experiences for the benefit of everybody concerned.
First, who are you and what do you do?
John Geraci, creator of DIYcity and co-founder of Outside.in.
I find ways to make cities and neighborhoods work better [...]

We’re looking forward to hearing what Scott Heiferman, co-founder and CEO of Meetup, will share with us at PSFK Conference NYC 2009. On our “Open to Change” panel along with Domenico Vitale (People Ideas & Culture), John Geraci (Outside.In), Florian Peter (CScout) and Avner Ronen (boxee), Scott will discuss how to leverage open communities to develop new products, services and experiences for the benefit of everybody concerned.
First, who are you and what do you do?
I help people organize local community groups (Meetup Groups) that make their lives better.
You’ll be sharing your ideas on our “Open To Change” panel. [...]

We’re excited to hear what Domenico Vitale, Chief Idea Architect at People Ideas & Culture, will share with us at PSFK Conference NYC 2009. He will be joining our “Open To Change” panel, and with Scott Heiferman (Meetup), John Geraci (Outside.In), Florian Peter (CScout) and Avner Ronen (boxee), he will explain how to leverage open communities to develop new products, services and experiences for the benefit of everybody concerned.
First, who are you and what do you do?
I am a Roman who is now a New Yorker with a lot a lot of love for what we do at PI&C. [...]

The ni9e blog had a nice walk through of Evan Roth’s “Available Online For Free” exhibit opening that took place in Vienna recently. Check out the video of the show below.

[via ni9e Blog]

Evan Roth of Graffiti Research Lab is having his first solo exhibition at the Advanced Minority Gallery in Vienna, opening tonight. It’s also celebrating the release of his self published book AVAILABLE ONLINE FOR FREE: Selected works by Evan Roth 2003-2008. The book was made entirely in Linux using open source software and open typefaces. The physical book can be bought for $26, and in the spirit of open source can be downloaded for free.
[via Wooster Collective]

While visiting Erwin Olaf’s photography portfolio, we noticed how readily the artist allows visitors to save any photo from his portfolio. Whether intentional or not, Olaf is basically giving away his creativity for free.
Then we came across this open design Italic Shelf. Released under a Creative Commons license, Ronen Kadushin’s shelf can be built, modified, and expanded on, with the design framework available as a download for anyone to work with. Together, it got us thinking that maybe – giving away your goods is not enough in our current marketing environment. Things given out for free are one way [...]

Architecture For Humanity promotes open source architecture and provides professional design services to communities and non-profits to help build a sustainable future. They’ve announced their 2009 Open Architecture Challenge, and this year’s assignment is to design a better classroom. Anyone is eligible to participate in this competition to help imagine better learning spaces – you don’t even have to be an architect to get involved.
They explain:
We are inviting you, the designer, to work with students and teachers to design the classroom of the future for a school of your choosing. Your design should address the unique challenges your school faces [...]

Mark Gorton, creator of the Lime Wire file sharing software is now using his talents to improve urban transportation design. Using an open source software program he’s created along with data gathered from the collective population, Gorton aims to make urban transportation safer, more efficient and sustainable.
Wired reports:
The top-down culture of public planning stands to benefit by employing methods he’s lifting from the world of open-source software: crowdsourced development, freely-accessible data libraries, and web forums, as well as actual open-source software with which city planners can map transportation designs to people’s needs. Such modeling software and data existed in the [...]

Bug Labs, a group of innovative engineers, unveiled their new additions to their Bug product at CES that enables users to create a custom device based on fully programmable “bugmodules” that attach to the “bugbase.”  The unusual product gives knowledgeable consumers a chance to build a device that fits their needs, rather than relying on the marketplace to provide something for them or become burdened by a string of different products. 
The first bugmodules were released in 2007 and included a touch-sensitive LCD screen, a motion and accelerometer sensor, a GPS unit and a digital camera with video capabilities.  At [...]