Four short links: 11 Feb 2009

Investment, search engines, iPhones, and a cool hardware hack. It could be notes from a pitch meeting last year but it's not, it's today's four short links:

1. The Mark Cuban Stimulus Plan, Open Source Funding -- lovely criteria for a company that he'll fund. "8. You must post your business plan here, or you can post it on slideshare.com , scribd.com or google docs, all completely public for anyone to see and/or download"
2. Introduction to Information Retrieval -- readable and real-world book on writing search engines, from three Stanford professors (one of whom happens to be the head of Yahoo! Research). Found via Greg Linden's glowing review.
3. The iPhone Becomes a Web Server (ReadWrite Web) -- I got a frisson reading this. There's something exciting in the idea that I can carry my web app around with me in my pocket. I can't say why, but I feel like having your mobile device offer services to other devices (be they mobile, laptop, desktop, or server) opens the door to different architectures. We played around with this a while ago with desktop web apps, but it didn't fly. I'll be watching this space.
4. Hemispherical Mirror Projection -- very cool, albeit non-trivial, hack to get a Mac's screen projected, with compensation for the distortion, inside a half-dome like a planetarium.