Weekly Web Watch: Big Ideas, Good And Bad

By Carol Kopp Suddenly, there are some big ideas out there that are good as gold, and may mine it, too: A social network for gourmands. A computer as flexible as a piece of paper. Classic comedy in daily doses. Then there are the innovations we can live without. Like a Pepsi (PEP) vending machine with social networking attributes, for pete's sake.

(To read Keith Jurow's piece entitled, "All-Cash Buyers Preventing Collapse of Housing Markets", click here.)

These are busy times for innovators, and some will not labor in vain. GrubWithUs For Dining Out New site GrubWithUs sells tickets for fixed-price restaurant meals, filling up tables with people who'd like to share a meal with some sociable strangers. Users can browse available restaurants by date, and see who else has signed up for the table. Each offer is tagged “sold out” when the table is booked up.

(To see Keith Fitz-Gerald's article "The Next Commodities Bubble is Coming Sooner Than You Think", click here.)

TechCrunch notes that the site already has a competitor in LetsLunch. Participating restaurants apparently love GrubWithUs much more than discount coupon site Groupon. The customers they get through GroupWithUs aren't bargain-hunters who show up for a one-shot deal. They're there for a good dining experience, and if they get it, they'll be back, with or without their new friends. E Ink's PaperPhone This isn't a business yet, but it will be. The PaperPhone is a flexible device, literally. It's no thicker than a piece of paper, and you can squeeze it to make a phone call, flick a corner of it to flip an electronic page, or write a note on it with a pen. “This computer looks, feels and operates like a small sheet of interactive paper,” Roel Vertegaal, director of the human media lab at Queen's University in Canada, said in a statement. A prototype, developed by the E Ink Corp. with researchers from Arizona State University and Queen's University, will be presented at a scientific conference in Vancouver this week. E Ink technology is used in Amazon's (AMZN) Kindle e-reader.

(To read James Kostohryz's story entitled, "The Coming China Scare", click here.)

Funny Bits From Seinfeld It seems that comedian Jerry Seinfeld has saved every scrap of video of himself since he first got on stage in the 1970s, and now he's releasing them on a web site, three bits at a time. There will be three jokes a day, every day from now to whenever. Seinfeld's statement says he's doing it for a new generation of 10-year-olds who dream of being comedians some day. If 10-year-olds don't need three laughs a day, the rest of us do. The Business Class Online Newspaper Oliver Reichenstein, of Information Architects Inc., argues brilliantly that the online news industry needs to create an equivalent to an airline's business class in order to justify charging a premium, or charging at all. That is, people will gladly pay to avoid the torture of economy class. In the case of online news, the added value is less intrusive advertising, better design, and personalized service. Reichenstein seems to be working on this for somebody, but he won't say who.

To read the rest, head over to Minyanville.