Our weekly update, where we share what’s inspiring us:

Facebook’s real time ad experiment

Facebook continues to evolve this week with real time ad targeting. The experiment, active now on 1% of all Facebook accounts, allows advertising to cater to users as they type. That’s right—your wall post two seconds ago about wanting pizza could trigger ads for pizza almost immediately. Is this scary or good news for potential consumers?

Robots Helping Japan Relief Efforts

Japanese robots have invaded America several times, albeit usually in animated form. Finally we can return the favor. The U.S. military contractor iRobot is sending four of their best and brightest– two “Packbots”  and two “Warriors”– to help with relief efforts in Japan. Both robots were used in the aftermath of 9/11 to investigate tight spaces and dangerous terrain—hopefully they can make a difference in Japan.

Payment is a Form of Communication and John Gruber’s post on pricing explains why simple pricing takes precedent over complicated programs in competitive business– and provides an interesting take on the NY Times’ $35/month three-tier plan.

Three Days In, The Color App Starts The Refinement Process

Color, the much hyped, highly funded ($41 Million) AR photo-sharing app is facing consumer backlash and should be delivering a second version sometime soon. Developers are already hard at work trying to fix the “loneliness problem” – the feeling of loneliness users complain of feeling when they aren’t close enough to the “elastic network” that makes Color’s social experience work. The iteration process is important to any successful project – we’re interested to see where this one takes Color.

Coal Kills

A thought-provoking graphic from the blog of marketing guru Seth Godin: coal kills. The fossil fuel, which received a controversial bump in lobbying powers and marketing recently, purports to produce more “death rate per watts” than nuclear and oil combined. The numbers, Godin suggests, don’t even take into account the cost of human lives effected in early stages of energy production. Godin asks us to think about how we react to graphics like this—and what on earth we can do to help it.