Airbnb Heading For the Big "B" [3]

Crowdsourced room-rental website Airbnb [4] has become a rising star in the sharing economy [5], after Ashton Kutcher [6] gave it his patented Twitter [7] love and a "significant" financial investment. The service has seen growth of 800% in the last year. Hotels are going to have to offer a lot more than overpriced room service and pillow mints to stay competitive.

Can Citywide Wi-Fi Solve Cell Phone Problems? [8]

Towerstream plans to blanket seven square miles of Manhattan with 1,000 routers, which carriers can use to plug holes in areas with spotty reception. Towersteam has already tested a 200-strong Wi-Fi solution in the city without web promotion, which gives it confidence that it can handle the incoming traffic. Now that Bittorrent has come to the iPhone [9], we can pirate Lady Gaga [10] songs on the go!

DARPA's New Watchtower [11]

The mad-scientist arm of the Department of Defense has shelled out $14 million for a sophisticated visual tracking system that can aggregate information about a target from a massive number of sources, from infrared video to text messages. The system should also be able to perform "behavioral (pattern-of-life) modeling including cultural, social, and insurgency dynamics," for automated detection of threats.

Google Tracks Dengue Fever [12]

A new Google search product, Dengue Trends [13], helps authorities and health workers identify early warning signs of Dengue fever through the search results of individuals in a threatened area. Google [14] has been used before to track disease trends [15], and this new mapping system is part of Google's nonprofit, Google.org.

Sources: VentureBeat, Businessweek, Wired, BBC

[Image: Flickr user quinn.anya [16]]