Open up your mind and say, ahh...

The motorcycle that Henry Winkler rode onscreen as Arthur “The Fonz” Fonzarelli in Happy Days is up for auction. We don’t know if it runs, but any mechanical problems can surely be fixed with a swift elbow to the fender.

The bike itself is a 1949 Triumph Trophy TR5 Scrambler Custom, and it got far more screen time than Chuck Cunningham. ABC feared that Fonz’s leather jacket would mark him as a troublemaker, so producer Garry Marshall convinced the network that it was an essential piece of motorcycle safety equipment. Hence, if Fonzie were to appear on screen in full retro regalia, the bike would have to be nearby.

Even without the Fonz connection, the bike would have a famous pedigree since it was owned by stuntman, racer and Triumph dealer Bud Ekins — a guy even cooler than Fonzie himself. He’s best known for dying his hair blonde and performing the stunts that studios wouldn’t allow his friend Steve McQueen to do, including the fence jump at the end of The Great Escape and some of the driving in Bullitt.

When Happy Days needed an authentic bike for Fonzie, Ekins obliged by removing the bike’s front fender, spray-painting the gas tank silver and replacing the handlebars. That’s how the bike looks today. If you’re interested, it’ll be up for bid at Bonham’s Classic California Sale, held November 12th at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles.

The auction does come with a few odd caveats: Interested parties can only bid by giving the “thumbs up” sign, and the winning bidder will have to sign all the relevant paperwork in a men’s bathroom.

Photo: ABC Photo Archives/ABC via Getty Images, courtesy Bonham’s

A passionate group of Concorde fans in England have been working on bringing one of the supersonic airliners back to life. Retired in 2003, the Concorde was the only supersonic airliner to carry passengers in regular scheduled service. One of the retired airplanes, G-BOAC, was flown to an aviation museum in Manchester where it is on static display. But that wasn’t good enough for a team of former Concorde engineers, mechanics and fans of the world’s fastest airliner.

Colloquially known as ‘Alpha Charlie,’ the Concorde in Manchester has been at the center of a heated effort to bring one of the airplanes back to life. Back in March, a group known as Heritage Concorde was able to get Alpha Charlie off of life support (ground power) and running under its own native power. The official purpose was to get the airplane’s electrical and hydraulic systems working so the iconic nose visor could be moved and repairs could be made to a broken windshield. Of course many hoped it might just be the first step to at least keeping the airplane in working condition and have the ability to power it up during special occasions.  Some even dreamed of it flying for special occasions (read: London 2012 Olympics).

Since March, the team at Heritage Concorde was able to fully restore all three hydraulic systems on board the airplane as well as the electrical system thanks to the help of numerous volunteers including former Concorde maintenance personnel. Alpha Charlie was powered up on several occasions over the summer (short video from the cockpit after the jump) and the group planned on showing off the somewhat operational airplane this fall.

Unfortunately legal reared its ugly head and the project has been shut down.

A strong effort was made to alleviate the concerns of the museum in Manchester, but in the end the Heritage Concorde team was told to drain all the hydraulics and kill the electrical system. The short version is the insurance for the airplane covers a static display, not a living airplane. The museum says its main concern is for the safety of visitors, staff and volunteers. So this week the program was officially ended.

There are other groups working on preserving one or more of the various Concorde aircraft on display including a group in France. Work continues to keep the airplanes from simply collecting dust, but few expect to ever see a Concorde flying again.

Photo/Video: Heritage Concorde

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.

Each weekend, Mashable hand-picks a few startups we think are building interesting, unique or niche products.

How we as consumers of physical and digital content view and experience the world around us is changing, and the startups highlighted here are all dedicated to helping us better find, discover and consume content.

SocialGuide, which focuses on social media ratings of broadcast television shows, gives us a real-time glimpse at how viewing audiences are reacting to content. New video search engine Smivi aims to give us better tools to shift through the troves of the web’s video library. And, Sparkatour, a mobile guide maker optimized for museums, could come in handy when we’re exploring and consuming real-world content.

SocialGuide: Social Media Meets TV Guide

Quick Pitch: SocialGuide is a social TV guide and ratings system that mines, filters and displays conversations about TV on social networks.

Genius Idea: Television show ratings that pivot around social conversations.

Mashable’s Take: Social media and armchair quarterback TV commentary seem to go hand-in-hand. Brooklyn-based SocialGuide, which launched in April, reveals much of this online chatter and makes sense of it in a TV guide-like fashion.

The service’s “Most Social Now” algorithm is a real-time ranking of TV shows generating the most online buzz. You can use SocialGuide to see which shows are super social, filter results by show genre, limit shows to just those your friends are watching or simply check out what’s on now.

SocialGuide also spits out “The Social 100″ report of the top programs across 170 different cable networks. You can view the report in daily, weekly or monthly increments and check out the social performance stats for the top 100 shows.

SocialGuide has raised $1.5 million in funding from angel investors. In addition to its web app, the startup has TV companion apps for iPhone, iPad and Android.

Smivi: Smart Video Search

Quick Pitch: Smivi is a video search engine that lets you follow searches and find live events.

Genius Idea: Discover live videos as you search.

Mashable’s Take: New video search engine Smivi launched its beta application Friday to help users better search for and discover online videos across the web — not just on YouTube.

“At its present data stage, Smivi has crawled videos from many of the top websites,” explains creator Danny Witters. “Smivi searches across numerous video sources and puts all relevant results, whether they are from YouTube, TED.com or ESPN.com, in one convenient place.”

Smivi also supports categorial search to help you filter video searches (use “search query .category”), and has a follow feature so you can keep track of your queries. Smivi also has a live search marker that informs you when videos on the results page are being live streamed.

Sparkatour: Mobile Phone Museum Tours

Quick Pitch: Sparkatour enables small to medium-sized museums to easily create a mobile multimedia-guided tour of their art collections for their visitors.

Genius Idea: Giving museums and their visitors a more practical alternative to audio guide hardware.

Mashable’s Take: Carrying around bulky audio hardware while touring a museum feels unnecessary, especially considering that most of us already tote around more-capable machines in our pockets. Such is the belief of Sparkatour, a San Antonio-based startup that helps museums create mobile guides to replace antiquated audio tours.

“Museumgoers are becoming increasingly more technologically savvy and want to interact with the pieces of art in different ways,” Sparkatour co-founder Kyle Rames explains. “Museums can leverage their visitors’ devices instead of purchasing equipment.”

Museums, for a cost, can use Sparkatour to quickly create a mobile app that includes all their video, audio and image content. They can even assign guests numbers to use as visitor keys to gain access to specific tour content.

Sparkatour’s first client is the San Antonio Museum of Art. The museum created a mobile guide for the last destination on its “The Missing Peace: Artists Consider the Dalai Lama” exhibit. San Antonio River Foundation and The National Ranching Heritage Center are also said to be soon releasing mobile guides of their own.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Ary6

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark, a startup program that gives you three-year access to the latest Microsoft development tools, as well as connecting you to a nationwide network of investors and incubators. There are no upfront costs, so if your business is privately owned, less than three years old, and generates less than U.S.$1 million in annual revenue, you can sign up today.

You’re looking at one of the finest examples of automotive Art Deco: the 1938 Hispano-Suiza Dubonnet Xenia. Go ahead, stare. Now wipe that drool off your keyboard.

Currently on display at the Mullin Automotive Museum in Oxnard, CA, the Xenia was based on an existing Hispano-Suiza H6 that was heavily modified to feature a unique independent suspension designed by driver, pilot and aperitif heir Andre Dubonnet. Each wheel was mounted on a single arm that extended forward from kingpins at the end of the axle, while sealed, oil-lubricated coil springs and shock absorbers ensured a smooth ride.

The “Dubonnet suspension” was later licensed to Alfa Romeo and Simca, and also sold to GM who marketed it as a “Knee-Action” suspension. The sealed coil springs were leak-prone and wildly expensive to repair, however, and the technology never made it into post-war cars.

Suspension aside, the Xenia’s hand-built coachwork by Jacques Saoutchik makes a Talbot Lago look like a Renault Fuego by comparison. It fits in the Mullin’s “French Curves” collection of pre-war French vehicles (Hispano-Suiza, though Spanish in heritage, built many of their cars in France through a French subsidiary), but park the Xenia next to any other car of the era, and it looks like the Clampetts are in town.

Photos: Mullin Automotive Museum

Is Jonathan Ive, Apple‘s senior vice president of industrial design, packing his bags and moving back to the UK? Worse, did Apple tell him if he moves back to England he can’t keep working for Apple? That’s what the Times of London is reporting.

According to the Times (behind a paywall) and the Daily Mail, Ive received an option grant in 2008 that’s now worth $30 million, and if he sold that stock, his combined net worth would be $128 million. According to the report, the designer (called Jony Ive by his friends) has been “at loggerheads” with the Apple board about the amount of time he spends in the UK, where he would like for his two children to go to school.

According to the Times, an anonymous pal of Ives was quoted as saying, “unfortunately he is just too valuable to Apple and they told him in no uncertain terms that if he headed back to England he would not be able to sustain his position with them.”

Why is Jonathan Ive so important, anyway? The 44-year-old designer is the head of the industrial design team that created most of Apple’s iconic products. He’s known as the driving force behind the design of the iPod, iPhone, today’s iPad and the upcoming iPad 2, all the MacBooks and the iMac, among others.

Given the illness of Steve Jobs and murky succession plan, this latest story about Ive could be another upcoming obstacle for Apple, spurring further worries about the future of the company. However, an Apple spokesperson told the Times of London that any claims of Ive leaving the company are “speculation.” We’ve asked Apple to tell us if the report of Ives’s situation is true, and we’ll let you know soon as we receive a response.

Will Ive cash in, hanging up his Apple hat for good? Perhaps a quote from Ive might yield clues: “Apple stood for something and had a reason for being that wasn’t just about making money,” he said in an interview with the Design Museum.

We’re thinking whether Ive stays with the company or leaves to spend more time with his family in England, it won’t have anything to do with money.

Last year at SXSW, Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley joined Frank Eliason (previously @comcastcares), Altimeter Group’s Jeremiah Owyang and me on stage to discuss the shifting landscape of social engagement. While I focused on the sociology of engagement and the impact it is having on culture and society, I also sought to balance the conversation by demonstrating the impact of digital actions and interaction between people and businesses.

Whether intentional or not, Crowley and team unlocked the elusive gates that separated the last mile of engagement between local businesses and their customers and prospective patrons. The rising generation of social consumers embraced geo-location services to share physical experiences, connect with their social graph in the real world and also earn rewards for their check-ins, which is rapidly becoming a powerful form of peer-to-peer endorsements and recommendations. Crowley, quite literally gamed the system that was once solely controlled by giants such as the Yellow Pages,  Google and Yelp. The Foursquare team bridged the gap between people and places both online and offline.

Later in the year, we caught up again for a cover story I wrote for Entrepreneur magazine.

Foursquare redefined the role of the patron and the relationship between businesses and customers. “The network started to take on a life of its own,” Crowley said in the interview for Entrepreneur. “Foursquare gave everyday people, venues and local merchants a voice. It opened the doors for businesses to see a whole new way of seeing their customer.”

In the Game of Foursquare, What’s the Score?

Foursquare’s rapid rise from New York startup to media darling is quite remarkable. If you judge the service by its badge, or shall we say badges, you might miss the bigger picture. The essence of Foursquare is powered by its community. In this mobile Utopia, people earn positions of prominence by exploring and improving the experiences of other explorers. It’s a form of social hierarchy that’s alluring and rewarding. For a more recent example, it’s not unlike the fledgling blog darling Quora.  The ties that bind its users are woven through social ties and recognition that’s earned through participation and contribution.

Foursquare continues to evolve and the team recently released an infographic that visualized collective achievements and user behavior. To make it easier to consume and also appreciate its progress, let’s review some key milestones.

In 2010, Foursquare experienced 3,400-percent growth over 2009, reaching 6,000,000 users to date.

This year, Foursquare received over 380 million check-ins.

The largest swarm to date is the Rally to Restore Sanity, which saw over 35,000 check-ins on October 30th, 2010.

A Day in the Life

The team also revealed a “day in the life” of the typical Foursquare user.

Most people check-in to eateries, gaining momentum at 8 a.m. every day and thinning out just after midnight.

Check-ins to work or the office also follow a similar pattern. Work days typically seem to see the greatest volume of check-ins between 7 – 8 a.m. continuing to midnight.

Retail therapy is in session all day, racking up check-ins around 10 a.m. and winding down shortly before 10 p.m.

A few hotels have done well in the luring of check-ins.

The top hotels, in order, include:

1. Ace Hotel, New York
2. Wynn Hotel & Casino, Las Vegas
3. The St. Regis, San Francisco

Foursquare users are an eclectic bunch.

The top 3 art galleries visited in 2010 are:

1. MOMA – Museum of Modern Art, New York
2. Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Washington DC
3. Gallery of Modern Art, South Brisbane, Australia

Where did people check-in to hear live music in 2010?

The Top 3 music venues:

1. Terminal 5, New York
2. Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles
3. Mercury Lounge, New York

With all of this checking-in, users work up an appetite and a need to quench their thirst.

The top 3 establishments for food and drink are:

1. Union Square Greenmarket, New York
2. Whole Foods, Austin, TX
3. Pike Place, Seattle

In 2010, brands also realized the opportunity to link terrestrial experiences with real world activity.

The top brands in 2010 included:

MTV – 118,370 followers
Bravo – 114,202
History Channel – 101,352
ZAGAT – 97,883
VH1 – 76,494

As Foursquare continues to attract users and check-ins around the world, users gain an upper hand in balance of power between patronage and magnetism. It’s a balance that venues will need to examine in order to expand their reach beyond traditional customers and even online customers. The future of relevance lies in romancing and rewarding the social consumer.

Tesla Motors is taking a page from BMW’s playbook and rolling out its very own art car.

The Silicon Valley automaker teamed up with artist Laurence Gartel to create a one-off Roadster to celebrate the Art Basel Miami Beach festival. Tesla Motors, never shy about tooting its own horn, hailed the car as “showcasing both cutting-edge electric driving technology and visually stunning artistic achievement.”

A list of Gartel’s exhibitions is about as long as the cord used to charge the Roadster. Highlights include the Museum of Modern Art and Joan Whitney Payson Museum, and his work is included in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian and Bibliothèque Nationale de France. He is considered a pioneer of digital art, and we really like what he’s done with the Roadster.

Tesla offered zero information about Gartel’s inspiration for the paintjob, which is actually a wrap. But if you like it, you can buy it. Wired.com reader Laurence Getford spotted the car in Miami and sent us the photo above. Three more from Tesla appear below.

Photo: Laurence Getford

Photos: Tesla Motors

If enough people complete them, tiny tasks can accomplish great things. Companies like Yelp, for instance, have used the input of millions to create review databases. iStockPhoto pools images from a huge group of photographers to make a cohesive collection. Newer companies, like Waze, which leverages its user base’s smartphones to create maps, are consistently coming up with new and innovative ways to use crowdsourcing.

The art world has also leveraged the power of crowdsourcing to create some stunning works. These seven projects involve many people coming together to contribute to a bigger picture.

1. SwarmSketch

Sticking to its crowdsourcing theme, SwarmSketch randomly chooses a popular search term as the topic of each week’s collective drawing (this week, for instance, you can contribute to “Black Swan Movie”). Each artist can contribute just one short line per visit, after which he or she is asked to vote on how bold other users’ lines should be.

To date, the crowd has drawn about 195,000 lines in 350 sketches.

2. The One Million Masterpiece

The creators of this website call it a “snapshot of our global society.” Their project is an online canvas composed of 1 million squares and they’re hoping to get people from all over the world to paint pictures that fill them. The end artwork will be printed on a giant 80-meters wide by 31-meters high canvas.

“By working towards a common goal, but having the space for individual expression, we are hoping that a collaboration can evolve that communicates a single powerful message in its numbers, yet maintains the intimacy of the individual,” the website explains.

There’s a long way to go before the project is complete, but so far about 28,300 artists in 174 countries have completed squares.

3. Learning to Love You More

From 2002 to 2009, Learning to Love You More posted assignments from artists Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher. Participants who accepted these assignments — such as “repair something” or “interview someone who has experienced war” — turned in photos, Word documents, videos and audio clips of their completed tasks.

The collection of projects inspired a book and was presented at venues that include The Whitney Museum, The Seattle Art Museum, and the Wattis Institute. In 2009, the website was acquired by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

4. The Sheep Market

Back when Amazon’s Mechanical Turk was a new idea, artist Aaron Koblin used it as a way to hire workers who were instructed to paint “sheep facing left.” Each sheep earned $.02. The resulting Sheep Market allows you to choose a sheep from a selection of 10,000 and watch how it was drawn.

In a paper on the project, Koblin wrote that “The inspiration for The Sheep Market project stems from the urge to cast a light on the human role of creativity expressed by workers in the system, while explicitly calling attention to the massive and insignificant role each plays as part of a whole.”

The Sheep Market was the first of many pieces that Koblin has created using crowdsourcing.

5. The Johnny Cash Project

In order to earn a place in the credits of this tribute to Johnny Cash, all you need to do is submit one frame of a video that is being created for his last studio recording, “Ain’t No Grave.” The website provides a reference image, which you can practically draw on top of using the site’s custom tool, so there’s no need to be shy about your art skills. The project then combined those frames to make a moving video.

The project is directed by directed by Chris Milk, a music video director who has worked with Kanye West, U2, and directed Arcade Fire’s recent HTML5 video experiment. Aaron Koblin, who created The Sheep Market, is one of the creative directors.

6. Explodingdog

Sam Brown puts pictures to titles submitted by the crowd. Some recent pieces include “I haven’t seen land in days…” and “I’m still not convinced that I’m a robot.”

7. Collected Visions

Since 1996, artist Lorie Novak has been accepting family snapshots on her Collected Visions Website. Visitors to the site can search through about 1,200 submitted photos and put them together with their own text and other photos. Their photo essays are also displayed on the site.

Novak writes on the site that the project, which is sponsored by the Center for Advanced Technology at New York University, “explores the relationship between family photographs and memory.”

Which projects spoke to you? Are there any that you love and would like to share? Let us know in the comments below.