Credit card debt is a undoubtedly serious issue for many Americans. Defaulting on credit card bills can result in damage to your credit score and even bankruptcy. Y Combinator-backed ReadyForZero is launching today as easy to use web-based platform to help guide consumers out of credit card debt.

The site asks you to import your credit card information, including what types of cards you have, the amount owed, and will then walk you through the same steps a trusted financial advisor would give you. Based on your minimum payments, salary and balance, ReadyForZero will figures out an optimal
strategy for what to pay and when. The site will send you reminders and you can track your progress online. While you cannot actually pay your bills directly from ReadyForZero, the startup will eventually allow users to do this directly from the site.

ReadyForZero is trying to help those consumers who are having trouble paying their debt off, as opposed to those who are already in collections or bankruptcy. Essentially the site is trying to help people be able to eventually not carry any balances month to month. The company says that in the US alone there are 100 million people with revolving balances, meaning they carry credit card debt from month to month. Combined they owe $900 billion to banks and credit card companies.

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Continue reading The state of household robots in Japan: looking pretty great

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Tim Draper of Draper Fisher Jurvetson fame may be too chicken to invest in WeedMaps (think Yelp for pot), but that isn’t stopping other companies from sniffing around the startup, looking to score.

In fact, a company called LC LUXURIES LIMITED, or rather its most recently established subsidiary, US Cannabis, is very close to buying WeedMaps. According to this press release, the Nevada corporation has entered into formal negotiations with the startup to acquire the domain name “weedmaps.com” as well as the current operating website.

Best part of the announcement is the statement from James Pakulis, President of US Cannabis:

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The sparkle of starlight off water could be the clincher for finding oceans on extrasolar planets. And it could be observable with the tech that will be deployed in the next generation of space telescopes.

Windows only: We’ve seen utilities to change up the background picture on Windows 7′s logon screen, and insert Picasa and Flickr pics, but one deviantArt user provides a file swap that changes the logon box itself, back to an early-stage “Longhorn” appearance.

To swap out Windows 7′s small, square logon box for the more rectangular and glass-framed look it had back in the early days of Microsoft’s Longhorn drafts for Vista. CyberNet News explains how to make the swap, using a DLL file picked up from a crafty deviantArt tweaker:

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We’re still trying to figure out exactly what Apple’s new Ping social network is good for, but apparently quite a few people are curious about it: it’s already racked up a million users in its first two days. That’s just a third of the people who’ve downloaded iTunes 10, so we’re sure the numbers are will grow even faster as more people snag iTunes and the network effect starts to kick in — and things will get really crazy if Apple and Facebook ever work out their little tiff. Just remember: it’s a social network… for music.

Apple’s Ping gains a million users in first two days originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 03 Sep 2010 19:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Recent greentech IPOs have had mixed and less than stellar results. Here are some wild prognostications of ten potential greentech IPOs coming in late 2010 through 2012. These companies have real products, serious revenue and the prospect of profits in high-growth markets.

Windows: Free app True Time Tracker is extremely simple: Just start it up, let it run in the background, and it will create numerous charts detailing what programs you run, what sites you visit and how much time you spend idle.

We’ve featured numerous time tracking applications before, but True Time Tracker offers more simplicity than most. You just start it up and let it sit in your system tray, and it will track a number of statistics about how you’re spending your time.

If you want to, you can organize your usage by project or subject. Thus, you can use it to categorize your time for the purpose of billing clients (and create invoices straight from the program), or just to see how much time you’re wasting (i.e., you can set work websites and programs as “work” and Facebook and Twitter as “time wasters”). If not, though, you can have it print out pie charts of your time management to PDF at any time. If you’ve found other time tracking applications a bit too complicated, True Time Tracker is worth a look.

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While there are better places to be than sitting at your gate, running from the clutches of airport security to make your flight is no fun either. Here’s a guide for showing up at your gate with James Bond timing.

Photo by Tara Costa

Hipmunk is a simple and fantastic travel search (our take), but they also have some great travel advice. Today Hipmunk’s sharing tips on getting to the airport on time.

The Easy Stuff

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Viking 2, the second mission to Mars, lands on the planet and begins transmitting pictures and soil analyses.