The full slideshow is on Vanity Fair.

Irish Times writes

Soft drinks company Pepsi, TV network CBS and publishers, Time Warner have partnered to insert a paper thin interactive video screen into the September 18th copy of Entertainment Weekly .

The screen will be powered by rechargeable batteries, the videos will be held on a tiny microchip.

When readers open the magazine on the correct page videos will automatically load, similar how musical Christmas cards work. Readers will be able to touch the screen to view one of five videos. In total they will be able to watch 40 minutes of video.

It is an interesting move from two mediums that are subject to a lot of pressure from the Internet. I have to think that it is more of a one-time deal as the cost has to be pretty high for the technology and would have to drop a long way before being cost effective.

The  package will include ads from Pepsi to help underwrite the cost, I am sure this will get a lot of buzz so may be money well-spent.

Recently I have been wondering if cloud computing is really ready for prime time. The news flow suggests that the jury may still be out on that. Twitter’s data in the cloud at Google Apps was hacked and downloaded and emailed to TechCrunch. Then there was high profile hosting company Rackspace who have spent nearly $290 million on equipment to allow hosting on the cloud since last year. The problem is there has been a couple of outages taking sites down such as Justin Timberlake and a couple of people I know who were not best pleased. TMCnet contributor writes

Origin Storage, the storage systems integration provider, reportedly said the company does not find the repeated security breaches in Twitter surprising. The company said that such attacks will be expected as many IT staff and managers are being pushed into adopting cloud computing services on a fast track basis.

There are two forces at work at many companies, they are getting pressure to go to the cloud to cut costs and streamline development but technology heads are not usually keen to leave security in the hands of others and recent cases such as those above are not going to encourage them.

I think in summary that cloud computing will change the way people use computers and companies do business, however it does have some way to go and it could get bumpy.

Custom Letters is an evolving category that includes calligraphy, sign painting, graffiti, stone carving, digital lettering, hand lettering, paper sculpture, and type design (we’d prefer to feature new/original type over, say, revivals).

Custom, in this instance, means built from scratch; we aren’t looking for customization—a type treatment or 3d treatment—of an existing typeface.

View the full article

2. Etsy, this is a bit of a cheat as this is a site that had $100 million in sales in 2008 so is really beyond a startup. It is a simple site for sales of handmade and vintage goods. An amazing 97% of the userbase is women.

3. Loopt is a favorite of mine although the ‘Big Brother’ factor does give me pause. Loopt works with over 100 phones such as the iPhone using the built-in GPS capabilities to show your friends where you are on a map. Out for the night you can see if friends are nearby, of course you can turn it off if you do not want to be found.

Not all of the startups were promising to me, having worked with some technology companies that were not the next Google (CueCat anyone?) I think I can see when a technology is too difficult for a user. I fear that LiveScribe may fall into that category, you use a special pen and a special paper to convert notes into digital files.

It’s a risky strategy. With these shows, MTV is betting on a particularly elusive sliver of the youth demographic: 18- to 24-year-olds. Yet Graden argues that the programs tap into today’s youth culture in a way prepackaged sitcoms no longer can. “Once you hit 15, 16, you are onto Facebook, onto Twitter, so this is the first generation that has already published the story of their life in real time,” he says. “These shows are what they wish their story was—with pictures they choose, with songs they choose, with their friends.”

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The photo above is from a great slideshow on Flickr which is better than anything I have seen on the major news outlets. View the full slideshow, warning as many of the images are graphic.