Monday, October 01, 2007

NetBank Joins The Deadpool

netbank.jpg NetBank, one of the first online banking startups and a survivor of the first web bubble, was closed Friday after intervention from the US Office of Thrift Supervision and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).

NetBank had been in trouble for some time with failed mortgages and serious operating deficiencies. The service, which floated at $12 a share in 1997 hit a high of $249/ share in April 1999 until settling to a price of $15 a share in mid 2004. The company was delisted from the NASDAQ on August 3 this year and last traded at $0.068 on the OTC board on Friday.

An interesting comparison can be drawn between NetBank's model and a number of verticals being targeted by startups today. In 96 internet banking was new and the big players were only just starting to roll out internet banking services, and even then they weren't very exciting. Services such as NetBank offered a product suite that was innovative at the time; however the major players saw a demand for online services and eventually caught up. It's not too dissimilar today to the various Google Maps mashup services that have launched, only to find Google 6 months later offering the same features themselves. We've seen it a little bit with MySpace add-ons and I suspect we'll see it with Facebook in the months to come as well.

Existing NetBank accounts have been acquired by ING Direct. NetBank joins the veiled halls of the TechCrunch Deadpool.

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Water bridge created with high voltage


Physicist Elmar Fuchs and his colleagues from Graz University of Technology are investigating why water, when exposed to high voltages, forms this strange liquid bridge as the liquid moves from one beaker to another. They published their research in the Jouranl of Physics D: Applied Physics. The water bridge was cylindrical with a diameter of 1 to 3 mm and spanned as much as 25 mm. From PhysOrg.com:
 Images  Newman Gfx News FloatingwaterbridgeThe group's analyses have shown that the explanation may lie within the nature of the water's structure. Initially, the bridge forms due to electrostatic charges on the surface of the water. The electric field then concentrates inside the water, arranging the water molecules to form a highly ordered microstructure. This microstructure remains stable, keeping the bridge intact.
Link to Physorg article, Link to the scientific paper (Thanks, Sean Ness!)

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Firefox: Run Faster Without Rebooting Reinstalling

firefox_logo.png If Firefox has a flaw to get bummed about, it's that it slows down your machine after a few hours of steady computing. Digital Inspiration has a workaround for this that (yay!) does not include any sort of restart reinstalling:

  • Start Firefox and export your bookmarks as a file on your hard-drive (we'll need them later).
  • Type firefox.exe - P in the Run box of Windows.
  • Click the Create Profile button without making any modifications to your existing profile (which is normally called "default")
That should do it; now, when you start Firefox in your new profile, you should be up to speed (get it?). Sure, it won't have all the tweaks of your old profile, but if you're just looking for a CPU break, this might be the way to go. Note: Be sure to check out Gina's post on managing multiple Firefox profiles for further info.

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Image Editing: Resize Images without Sacrificing Content with GIMP or Rsizr

Popout Ever have to crop or resize a picture to fit it better on a web site but end up disappointed with the content you have to lose from the photo? Using a method called liquid rescaling, your pics can be rescaled while retaining almost all of the pertinent content, so you can get the best of both worlds—a smaller image that retains everything you want. If it still sounds a little unclear, check out the video to see this brilliant idea in action.

If you're a fan of the open source image editor GIMP, you can download and install the Liquid Rescale GIMP plug-in to get liquid rescaling results (after you install it by moving the downloaded files into your GIMP directory, you'll see the Liquid Rescale option under the Layer menu). If you don't feel like installing anything, you should try out the Rsizr webapp, which does the rescaling from the comfort of your browser. Both tools are a good deal slower than what you see in the very cool video above, and neither are implemented to the full extent of what you're seeing in the video, but the results are still promising.

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Clocks: CB2's World Panel Clock is Sci-Fi Sexy

cb2_lcd_clockgi.jpgOur desks are so cluttered we have given up the fight for organization, and that is exactly why we are tempted by CB2's World Panel Clock. The transparent LCD display looks Star Trek awesome and has all sorts of useless information we would otherwise have on our desktops, including time and calendar functions.

As you well know, we are suckers for cool, as you can tell from our fantastic fashion sense...well, CB2's World Panel Clock certainly does have ample flair, with a brushed aluminum base and a slanted transparent display. The timepiece is battery powered, which will saves you adding to your wired disorganization and is available for a reasonable $24.95. The fight against unneeded, largely pointless gizmos is futile—we'll have one over here, please. [Product Page via Technabob]

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