Square Cash lets anyone with a debit card send money instantly over email

What if sending money was as simple as sending an email? That’s the premise of Square Cash, launching today for all debit card users in the US, using any email service. To use Square Cash, all you do is compose an email to a friend, type the amount you way to pay in the subject title, and cc cash@square.com. If it’s your first time using the service, you’re directed to Square’s website where you type in your debit card number — and you’re done. There are no accounts to create, apps to download, friends to add, surcharges to pay, or bank account numbers to look up. 

ThinkUp launches new crowdfunded app to help users mine data from their own social networks

Veteran blogger Anil Dash is creating a service for quantified selfies, a Klout for the indie web

Google’s new gesture patents could let Glass users ‘heart’ things in real life

(Source: lj7stkok)

'Crazy 4 Cult' turns your favorite movies into works of art

Fine art inspired by Stanley Kubrick and Joss Whedon

Best New Apps: Frax HD

Frax HD is intimidating at first. It’s all about fractals; visualizations of complex mathematical equations that twist and turn to create beautifully strange images. The technical explanation is enough to make your head hurt, but thankfully you don’t really need to understand any of that 

'The Fifth Estate' review: truth is more interesting than fiction

Benedict Cumberbatch shines in a mainstream take on the WikiLeaks story

Watch Pixar get spooky in its ‘Toy Story OF TERROR!’ trailer

Pixar showed a trailer for its first ever TV special back in August. Now The Wall Street Journal has a new clip of the Halloween-themed feature in action. Toy Story OF TERROR! is a 22-minute mini-movie that tracks a bagful of the Toy Story toys as they’re carted to grandma’s house. 

Apple sends invites for October 22nd event: ‘we still have a lot to cover’

This time it won’t be about phones, but Apple has more to talk about this fall — the company’s just sent out invites to an event on October 22nd in San Francisco. It’s likely that this is where it will announce new iPads, along with the final features and availability of OS X 10.9 Mavericks, new MacBook Pros, and maybe even the wild new Mac Pro we first saw at WWDC in June. We may also hear about Apple TV, and rumors continue to fly that Apple’s working on a smartwatch. Whatever there is to see, The Verge will be there live with up-to-the-second updates on anything and everything the company might show. 

This just in: why news is Twitter’s next frontier

Twitter is moving more aggressively into the world of journalism, building a new alert system for breaking news and hiring someone to build new partnerships with the media industry. Together, the moves point to a service that is as much a broadcaster as it is a social network, owning live events with a core product that predicts its users’ interests without having to ask for them. Whether it realizes that vision remains anyone’s guess — but if its latest experiment proves successful, Twitter will have gotten a lot closer to it. 

Rovio takes on ‘Mario Kart’ with ‘Angry Birds Go’

Rovio’s Angry Birds are quickly becoming as recognizable as Super Mario, and soon they’ll have their own very own kart game to match that level of fame. The developer just released the very first gameplay trailer for Angry Birds Go, a game that takes the Angry Birds style and translates it to a 3D racing game. 

Nike announces new and more colorful Nike FuelBand SE

Nike has announced the new Nike Fuelband SE at an event here in New York City. The band now has some color, with the options of yellow, pink, or red accenting an otherwise black body. Besides the slightly updated design, there doesn’t appear to be any new features. The band is still based around Fuel points, which is Nike’s abstracted version of activity quantification. 

Aviate: an always-changing, intelligent home screen for Android

What if Google Now was made of the icons on your home screen?

Robotic petting zoo replaces furry animals with inquisitive plastic tentacles

The residents of Minimaforms’ Petting Zoo aren’t goats or calves, but clusters of plastic tubes that dangle from a bracket placed in a ceiling. But just like the fluffier residents of a real petting zoo, the “pets” featured in this installation react to human contact, craning their tubular bodies around as visitors to Petting Zoo — installed at Orléans’ FRAC center — move around the project.