Open up your mind and say, ahh...

If you’re looking for cash for school, then you may not have to look any further than your fellow alumni. Meet SoFi, a social lending service that lets alumni of a school help finance the education of future graduates and earn a bit of a return on their investment as well.

The way the program works is simple. Alumni invest money in their particular school’s funding, and then students apply just as they might to any other college loan. Loans are given to students for a 6.24% interest rate (5.99% if they sign up for auto-pay), alumni earn 5% back on money they’ve invested, and SoFi keeps roughly 1%. Alumni can invest with cash, or can invest funds through their IRA.

“The student loan market is broken” Dan Macklin, Co-founder and VP of Business Development at SoFi told Mashable. “Students have very little choice on where to get their loans from. Why can’t we use the social groups that are out there and lend between those groups?”

In addition to lending SoFi also creates a social network for each school where alumni can see the students they’re helping finance, as well as check out what classes those students are taking and what their ultimate career goals are. Likewise, students can learn more about who’s lending them cash, and potentially call upon those alumni for advice on things like internships or to get help on a project.

“All this is about giving the students what they need and helping the student succeed in what they want to do,” says Macklin.

When an alumnus lends money, it’s the same as “buying a share” of the entire group of students at a school who have loans. As the students pay back the loans over time, the alumni get paid back. Macklin says students are less likely to default on these loans, because they know the people lending the money to them.

SoFi got its start last year at Stanford, and today is announcing an expansion to 40 colleges and universities across the country. The initial run of the program raised close to $2 million from 40 Stanford alums, and was able to fund 20 students.

Macklin says that the program has helped not only finance student’s education, but also build relationships with alumni that might not have otherwise existed. Students have gotten coffee with lenders, and Macklin says both parties “get a social and emotional return” from taking part in the process.

SoFi already has an alumni ambassador in place at all of the schools it now supports, as well as alumni who have already committed to being part of the project. Starting today students at those universities can preregister for loans, and alumni can start officially signing up to donate.

What do you think about SoFi? Would you consider loaning money to students at your alma mater? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, franny-anne

The web still hasn’t become its own operating system but, man, parts of it are close. Take these surprisingly powerful and useful app-like websites, for example.

Do you remember how web browsers worked in 1998? Even back in the days of dial-up, Microsoft was so worried that your browser might replace your desktop that they nearly tore themselves apart trying to stomp down Netscape. That’s right, Netscape, a web browser that some of you reading this may not even remember. But take a look around the web right now, and it turns out Microsoft was right to be concerned–you’ll be amazed at just how much it’s possible to do, and do surprisingly well, in a browser.

We’re not talking the obvious, if often impressive stuff: email, calendar, and document management from Google, Zoho, and Microsoft itself. These are the sites that will save you hard drive space and clutter, and help you get by without having to shell out for software to just do that one thing you need. And they are definitely worth a bookmark or six.

Multi-track audio editing and recording: Myna

Need to chop together an audio interview, add some music to a talk, or otherwise tweak some audio? If you don’t have a Mac with GarageBand handy, or you’re not quite trained in the ways of Audacity, you can fire up Myna, Aviary’s free multi-track audio editor. Not only can you drop in audio files and make non-destructive edits, but you can record your voice or ambient sound straight from your browser tab. Aviary makes a whole suite of nifty browser-based tools, including some very handy image editors, but you should really check out …

Photoshop-like photo editing: Pixlr

When you need something more than just crop, resize, and save, Pixlr is where you turn. Multiple layers, a big undo/redo memory, unsharp masks, burn and dodge tools, curves and levels, and a big selection of filters are all packed in here, with much more to discover. That would all be so much pipe dream if the app wasn’t so fast-loading and responsive, even compared to its less-ambitious counterparts.

File conversion/Swiss Army knife: Zamzar

It’s 10 minutes until that Big Thing is due, and you just realized: You’ve got it in X format, and it needs to be Y. Sometimes X or Y can be really tricky, like a WordPerfect document (lawyers!), a TIFF image (publishers!), or a Pages package (Mac snobs!). Head to Zamzar, which isn’t particularly pretty or fancy, but does take in files and email them back to you in whatever format you need. You can also download web videos and send big files from Zamzar, just because, well, they figured they’d make it even more useful.

Chat, particularly Skype chat: Imo.im

In the life of every web-adept worker, there comes an encounter with a person, or an entire team, who uses Skype as their main means of chat. Skype may be free, but it’s also a bit hefty and annoying if all you want to do is chat. So sign into Imo.im, which runs chats through its web interface and doesn’t require a separate account. You can also open your GTalk, AIM, MSN, and Facebook chat accounts within the same frame, if you’d like.

Presentations: SlideRocket

Microsoft’s web-based PowerPoint tools are meant as a complement, a view-and-maybe-fix option, for the desktop Office suite. Google Docs’ Presentations and Zoho Show are decent, if you’re aiming for the standard PowerPoint-style presentation. But SlideRocket was built for the web, and its templates and editing tools are good at helping people with lesser design skills (read: this author) look halfway decent. It’s easy to export and download to standard PowerPoint or PDF files, or you can grab SlideRocket’s own presentation tool for a more interactive show. There are free “Lite” accounts that restrict offline access and cut out analytics, but it might not be hard to impress your boss enough to get them to swing for a Pro account.

Instantly copy tricky little characters: CopyPasteCharacter

Got the keyboard shortcut symbol for trademark (™) memorized? Neat. How about copyright (©), all rights reserved (®), and the upside-down exclamation point (¡)? Didn’t think so. CopyPasteCharacter might not seem impressive, compared to the more server-taxing entries above, but consider what a pain it is to have to search out those characters, either on your laptop or on the web, click them, then press to copy them. On this site, you just click on the symbol you want, and it’s copied to your clipboard. You can even create your own personalized set of oft-copied characters, but try to keep in mind that not everybody thinks ✈ is an acceptable way to tell clients that you’re traveling.

Image: Santiago Cornejo via Shutterstock

A new Kickstarter project is aiming to redefine how you shoot video with your iPhone. The Galileo is an iOS-controlled robotic iPhone platform that lets you manipulate the angle your iPhone from another iOS device, giving you the ability to adjust your iPhone to almost any angle you could possibly want.

For instance, if you were video chatting with a child who moved out of sight of the camera you could move the platform to follow her using your own device. The platform could also be used in situations like meetings so you can can follow all the action going on in the room. The platform’s inventor originally created the device in order to have better chats with his son while he was away on business.

Galileo can be controlled from another iOS device such as an iPad or iPod touch by swiping a finger across the screen, and gives you infinite 360-degree panning and 200-degree tilting. You can see everything around the iPhone and above it, with the only unavailable angle being what’s going on below.

The platform is also offering its SDK (software developers kit) for app development, giving app developers the freedom to integrate Galileo functionality into existing apps or create apps and software specifically designed to work with the product.

Galilieo has currently raised close to $270,000 on Kickstarter, and only required $100,000 to go into production. The project will be officially funded on April 21, 2012, after which the device will go into mass production and be sent out to project backers and then likely general consumers.

What do you think of the project? Tell us what potential uses you see for Galileo in the comments.

When it comes to predicting March Madness winners, who knows best: experts, algorithms, or the crowd?

An estimated 45% of Americans will fill out an NCAA tournament bracket this year. That’s more than the number of people who voted in the 2010 midterm elections. And until the clock strikes 12:15 p.m. on March 15, and actual balls start being thrown at actual baskets, each and every one of us can pretend to be the smartest guy or gal in the room when it comes to making March Madness predictions.

But who (or what) really knows best? Last month, we looked at algorithmic, social, and expert approaches to predicting Oscar winners and determined that a combination of expert opinion and algorithmic analysis was the most successful tactic. Now, on the eve of America’s favorite predictive orgy, March Madness, we ask the question again: Are the best predictors robots, writers, or the crowd at-large?

Surely, the people who are paid to watch college basketball for a living know what they’re doing, right? But while all but one of CBS Sports’ expert analysts expects Kentucky to win it all, the predictions vary wildly beyond the championship game. Furthermore, the experts may be more likely to choose upsets because, hey, they’re paid to know something the rest of the world doesn’t. And what better way to prove that than to throw outlandish upsets at the wall and see what sticks? The trouble is, while upsets are bound to happen, they’re usually not the upsets we predict. According to a study conducted by Indiana University (the 4th seed in the South region, by the way), you’ll have an equal or better success rate by trusting the Selection Committee’s seeding and picking zero upsets, regardless of your sports expertise. But since that’s no fun, let’s look at a couple other approaches.

A second option is to put your trust in the wisdom of the crowd. The bloggers at Hoopism have compiled data from the betting information service Sports Insights to display the percentage of real bets placed for or against each team. But since the data is based on actual wagers, the site only contains predictions for early games in which the teams are already decided.

That leaves us with the algorithmic approach, and few have seen more computer-based predictive models than Danny Tarlow and Lee-Ming Zen. Like many, Tarlow and Zen run an annual NCAA tournament pool. But what makes theirs unique is that each entry must be compiled by a machine with no consideration for human judgment.

“Three years ago, I had two things on my mind,” said Tarlow, a PhD student in Computer Science at the University of Toronto. “First, I was working on building a recommendation system similar to the ones used in the Netflix challenge. Second, I hadn’t paid attention to college basketball that year, but I needed to fill out my bracket for a pool with some friends.  At some point, it struck me that I could use the exact same recommendation algorithm I had been coding up to make my bracket predictions.”

Tarlow went on to explain how the computers fared against their human counterparts in last year’s competition. “We included three human-ish baselines: always picking the higher seed, the bracket predicted by Nate Silver, and Lee’s personal bracket.  Against that field, the machines won.” (For the uninitiated, the New York Times’ Nate Silver creates a bracket each year combining human- and computer-based systems.)

Tarlow and Zen both agree that while the success rate of each algorithmic approach can vary greatly, the computers are getting better every year. “The approaches and setups definitely become more sophisticated,” said Zen. “But even then, we’re only scratching at the surface.”

Tarlow agreed that they still have a long way to go. “I’ll just say that I haven’t taken my bank account and headed off for Vegas yet,” he said.

You don’t need to create your own algorithm to get a little robotic assistance for your bracket. There are plenty of free computer-based predictive models out there, from numberFire to Power Rank (which displays its predictions in an attractive visualization). But if there’s one thing most of the predictors agree with, human or otherwise, it’s that the smart money is on No. 1 overall seed Kentucky to take home the championship trophy. Then again, ESPN is quick to point out that the No. 1 overall seed has only won once since the committee started handing out that distinction eight years ago.

All of this reveals what we already secretly knew, even if our pre-tournament egos try to tell us otherwise: There’s no foolproof method to sports prediction, no matter how knowledgable the human, or how advanced the algorithm. So America, stop agonizing over your bracket and get back to work.

Image: Flickr user Erik Charlton