Manolith.com announced their 12 hottest geeks. Their criteria of a proper geek girl entails being geeky, a techie, and being hot. I agree that all of their picks are hot, but some are definitely NOT geeks. Marina Orlova is clearly hot and I love Hot For Words (her show), but what makes here more of a geek than iJustine. In my opinion, iJustine is way geekier having been on MacBreak. I digress. Here are my picks for the Top 10 Hottest Geeks, they are mostly overlapping (w/ manolith.com’s picks) but these are the one’s I see deserving of the award.

Leah Culver

Leah Culver is one of the co-founders of Powance, a social micro-blogging service that has since been acquired, and is now coding at Six Apart. She’s insanely cute, an incredible programer, and is a true to geek in every sense of the word.

Jade Raymond

Jade Raymond is the single reason I love Canada. She’s a Canadian executive video game producer at Ubisoft were she lead the creation of the widely popular Assassin’s Creed and Assassin’s Creed 2. She’s also a correspondent on G4′s The Electric Playground, a TV show focus on video games. What’s hotter than a hot geek creating one of the hottest games of all time?

Marissa Mayer

Marissa Mayer is the vice president of search product and user experience at Google and is one of company’s many public faces. She’s the gatekeeper for many, if not all of Google’s product releases. She’s been named by Fortune magazine as one of the 50 most powerful women in the world and is the youngest woman ever to make the list.

Veronica Belmont

Veronica Belmont is a A/V nerd that started her career as an audio engineer at CNET, where she became a cohost on BOL. She’s an avid gamer and is a science fiction geek. She currently hosts two shows, Core on the playstaion network and Tekzilla with Patrick Norton at Revision 3, and writes a biweekly column at MaximumPC called Trending Topics.

Jessica Lynn Horn

Jessica Lynn Horn, also known as Jessica Chobot is a host (IGN Daily Fix) and writer for IGN.com Entertainment. She’s a hardcore anime and gaming nerd. Have you noticed, I love cute gamers!

Morgan Webb

Morgan Web is a host and senior producer of G4′s X-Play and Underground. She also writes a monthly video game column at FHM entitled “Tips From The Gaming Goddess”. She’s a avid gamer and tech enthusiast, what’s not geeky about Morgan?

Felicia Day

Felicia Day maybe an actor, but she’s also straight up GEEK. She’s known for creating the internet sensation, The Guild, a sitcom centered around World of Warcraft. She’s uber cute and you can be find her logging massive hours on WOW.

Natali Del Conte

Natali Del Conte is a technology news journalist and a host on CNET’s Buzz out Loud and Loaded. She’s a serious geeks that brings here tech savviness to audiences of all kind.

Amber MacArthur

Amber MacArthur was the geek from TechTv’s Call for Help. She currently produces CammandN, a video podcats about tech, and Girls Go Geek, a show that highlights women in tech for XBOX. She also host net@night with Leo Laport on the Twit Network, where they geek-out about the web.

Cali Lewis

Luria Petrucci aka Cali Lewis along with hubby Neal Campbell produces and hosts Geek Brief TV, an video podcast centered around gadgets. Her show is geeky and she’s hot, that makes her a hot geek!

Last week at I/O, Google gave us an early look at Wave, a new form of communication and collaboration tool that is slated to be out later this year. They are aiming to redesign the way we communicate and collaborate by reinventing email for the present. It does so by bringing in tons of intuitive functionality (drag and drop, privacy, embed, real-time everything) and utilizing the latest technologies (HTML 5 via the Google Web Toolkit). Google Wave uses an open protocol and the project will be open sourced, so anyone can build their own Wave system and still remain interoperable. They will also be releasing an API for Wave soon that will allow developers to extend the functionality of Wave even further. This is truly a remarkable product and one that I really look forward to using. If you haven’t watch the demo (embed) already, it’s worth bookmark for later when you have time.

Update: If you really don’t have the time to sit through the 80 minute demo, Lifehacker.com has compiled eight 30-60 second clips that highlight the best parts of Google Wave.

Buying a car in America is (usually) never a good experience, car salesmen always looking to up-sell you accessories / features you don’t need and basic negation of term / price of vehicle is not for the faint-of-heart. Having been through the process of purchasing both new and used cars, I am speaking from first hand when I say it takes a good amount of effort to get a good deal. Sticker Price is usually what all dealers profess their price is and your job is to lower that price as much as possible. Of course there are cases when the Asking Price is higher than Sticker Price, but your key to getting the best deal is researching the current demand and having the data to backup your offer. TrueCar is making that effort easier on the consumer, they collect and analyze data from 25% of the automotive sales in the US and they paint a clear image of what cars are really selling for.

You enter your zip code and search for the make and model of car you are looking to buy. TrueCar weeds through the data and provides you with an easy to read bell curve, showing you the average paid relative to the vehicle’s Dealer Cost, Factory Invoice, and Sticker Prices. They also provide sales history for the past six months so you can get a picture of where the price is heading. Their interface is very intuitive and the service they provide is very beneficial to consumers. It’s free and a must for anyone looking to purchase car.

[Via TechCrunch]

Kevin Rose, founder of Digg announced yesterday that the DiggBar is now available. It provides an easier way to shorten URLs (just add “digg.com/” before any URL), enabling you to not only digg stores, but share them via twitter, facebook or email. It also provide analytics right in the toolbar such as number of views, comments on the story, and related stories. There’s no software to install, check it out here.

Here’s the official DiggBar demo video:

DiggBar from Kevin Rose on Vimeo.

[Via Digg Blog]

Our favorite torrent tracker site just posted this hilarious logo stating the WB (Warner Brothers) loves The Pirate Bay. Is there something I don’t know about?

Today, Facebook will be rolling out a redesign of their homepage. Selected users will see the redesign first, the remaining FB users will see it over the coming days. The new design will boost Real-time updates (very Twitter like), which allows users to post and receive immediate updates from friends, family, companies, and public figures. The emphasis will be on sharing media and links, which I’m really excited about. My biggest grip about FB’s previous update function was the nested message on the top that always asked you “What are you doing now?” and the attachment of your name with every status update. The new ‘Publisher’ interface will let users share links, photos, status, messages; and will make pulling in twitter messages more practical. I have yet to play around with the new interface, but can’t wait to see the update in my account.

Update: Facebook’s new publisher interface is NOT satisfactory! Yes, it can import feeds in real-time, but there is one major design flaw. The fact that the new publisher interface allows you to update more than just your status, your name SHOULDN’T be included with ever update as part of the content. This makes updates harder to read and impractical to use. They already have your FB icon identify the owner of the content, WHY must they also include your name to break your content? This needs to be seriously corrected!

[Via TechCrunch]

Domino’s Pizza is really pushing the envelope on how consumers interact with the pizza ordering and creation process. Last year (2008) when I ordered pizza for my Super Bowl party using Domino’s online, I was surprise to see how easy it was to create, customize and have pizza delivered to my door without having to interact with a live human being. This year, the experience was even better. Not only was I able to customize and create my order online, I was able to fully track my order from creation to ready for pickup/delivery. This is awesome because it keeps the consumer informed and that’s the single greatest thing when ordering food, knowing how exactly how long your food is to due to arrive.

Jerry Yang discuss the negative coverage Yahoo has been hit with in the last couple of months and the future of the portal/search giant at the Web 2.0 Conference.

Microsoft Research Asia Innovation Forum conducts the most cutting-edge fundamental research in computer science. It is Microsoft’s premier research lab in Asia Pacific and it aims to drive the usage of computers and the Internet to foster more healthy knowledge economies in the Asia Pacific region.

The heavily sought after tickets for the “Microsoft Research Asia 10th Anniversary Innovation Forum” celebrated the lab’s efforts on “turning ideas into reality” for the past decade. More importantly, it brought together some of the best visionaries in our time to explore new avenues for us to make a contribution to the world.

I was on hand last night at the HK Convention & Exhibition Center for Bill Gates keynote speech. He spoke very little about what Microsoft Research Asia Labs was doing, instead he gave a motivational speech encouraging the students within Hong Kong to embrace innovation, think outside the box, and challenge traditional procedures to create more green, efficent, and effective lifestyle centered around technology.

In addition to Bill Gates keynote, there was panel discussion that consisted of Bill Gates and three of Hong Kong’s top University Presidents, Professor Paul Ching-Wu Chu, President of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology; Professor Lawrence J. Lau, Vice-Chancellor and President, The Chinese University of Hong Kong; and Professor Lap-Chee Tsui, Vice-Chancellor and President, The University of Hong Kong. Dr. Hsiao-Wuen Hon, Managing Director, Microsoft Research Asia served as the moderator to their discussion.

The discussion amongst the panelist was very much centered around education and was fueled by very generic questions, nothing that you may not have heard answered by Mr.Gates already; however, I still felt  the forum was a success. The presence of Mr. Gates and our fellow University Presidents has inspired me (and possibly my fellow classmates) to innovate and not give up on what we want to achieve.

Pegged by the numerous issues I’ve encountered when upgrading from WordPress 1.x to 2.2, I have been hesitant to upgraded to the much talked about v2.6. However, with the release of their WordPress iPhone app, I was force to make the transitions. I completed the update last weekend and the process (kind of) painless. The only issue that I ran into was my categories table got deleted in the DB upgrade, but it wasn’t all that difficult to resolve. A bit manual, but David Cumps has the solution here. Overall, the update has been really great. The media library is intuitive, the plugin manager is a godsend, but even more the ability to blog from your iPhone via the new app is worth the upgrade alone.