The recent financial crisis has sent the stock market careening up and down like a ride at Coney Island, unnerving brokers and casual investors alike. It’s also boosted membership on UpDown.com, a Web site that gives people $1 million in imaginary money to invest in the market risk-free and compete against others’ virtual portfolios.

Stock market freaking you out? You can “invest” $1 million in virtual money online.

“We’ve seen a huge spike in traffic,” says UpDown CEO Michael Reich, who founded the Boston-based site last year with two other fellow Harvard entrepreneurs. “Times have really changed. It’s really important now to understand what’s going on with your money.”

UpDown’s 90,000 members are mostly young and overwhelmingly male. About half of them are real-life investors.

“There are definitely people who use the suite as a practicing environment alongside their real portfolio,” Reich says. “They use it to test strategies they might not feel comfortable doing in the real world.”

UpDown is similar to other sites like Marketocracy.com that recruit investors to manage virtual stocks. What makes UpDown.com different, however, are its social-networking components – there’s an UpDown page on Facebook – and the fact that the site pays prize money weekly and monthly to its top-performing investors. No wonder CNBC has described the site as “fantasy football meets the trading floor.”

Membership on UpDown is free; the top prize to date has been $3,701, although most winners earn much smaller amounts. The site so far has paid out more than $100,000 to its members, says Reich, who hopes to turn a profit through advertising and eventually create a hedge fund that outperforms the S&P 500.

So far the site has produced its share of savvy and not-so-savvy investors. Some UpDown members have lost their virtual shirts. One parlayed his initial $1 million into almost $60 million, while another has earned more than $51 million so far.

Of course, it’s easier to be bold when you’re playing with Monopoly money instead of watching your real-life retirement fund shrivel before your eyes.

“If you’re doing that great [on UpDown], you probably took fantastic risks,” Reich says. “We don’t necessarily consider those people the best investors.”

– Brandon Griggs, Tech Section Producer, CNN.com

So far, online reaction to Google’s new Chrome browser — launched in a beta version Tuesday — has been mostly positive.

“Google Chrome has the ability to change the market as we know it. . .they have finally delivered what might be the perfect end all of the browser wars,” wrote Loren Baker, editor of Search Engine Journal.

“So after a day of using Google Chrome, I have to admit that I’m really happy with it,” wrote Jonathan Dingman of Google Inside, a Web site devoted to Google news. “With a brand spanking new JavaScript V8 engine, it certainly is very fast. This new Google browser is taking browsing to the next level.”

Google employee Matt Cutts, who writes a popular blog about tech issues, has fielded some complaints about Chrome, ranging from the lack of add-ons to concerns over privacy. Some people fear that Chrome will collect personal information about users and share it with google.com. Cutts believes that will not happen.

“I knew that as soon as Google Chrome launched, some readers would ask tough questions about privacy and how/when Google Chrome communicates with google.com,” he wrote. “I talked to the Chrome team to find out if there’s anything to worry about. The short answer is no.”

Google has set up a Chrome discussion group to answer users’ questions about the browser.

Most people surfing the web use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, and it may seem odd that Google, a company best known for its ubiquitous search engine, would release a competing product. But Google also sees Chrome as a way to complement its online applications, like gmail and Google Docs.

Google says it wanted to create a web browser that would be fast and handle scripting languages, such as JavaScript or AJAX, that run web-based applications like online banking and such. They also aimed to make sure Chrome is stable and won’t crash while the user is booking a plane ticket.

In the opinion of Topher Kohan, who analyzes search-engine results for CNN.com, Google got all of that right. Chrome loads pages quickly and seems very stable for a beta, or prerelease, version. The browser puts tabs on top of the window, not under the address bar like IE and Firefox. Early numbers indicate Chrome is already being used by more than 2.7 percent of Web surfers (Internet Explorer is used by 62 percent of surfers and Mozilla’s Firefox by 28 percent).

The downside is that Chrome does not support a lot of third-party add-ons yet, although Google says that it will in future versions. Chrome only runs on Windows at this time, confounding many Apple users, but a Mac and Linux version are supposedly in the works.

Our verdict? Is Chrome fast? Yes, very. And it runs Web applications very well. Is it ready to be your everyday web-surfing tool? Not unless you are into being on the cutting edge, and most web surfers are not. That said, there is a good chance that someday in the near future this is the browser we all will be using.

What do you think?

– Brandon Griggs and Topher Kohan, CNN.com

There’s a new challenger to Google, the 800-pound gorilla of Internet search engines: www.Cuil.com, which looks French but was developed by American ex-Google engineers backed by $33 million in venture capital. Pronounced “cool,” the site began processing search requests Monday.

Cuil (apparently also a Gaelic word for knowledge) promises to search 121 billion Web pages — three times more than Google, it claims – and to deliver more relevant and helpful results. According to Cuil’s site, its technology burrows into the content of each page to place results in better context than search engines that rank quantity of links to Web sites. Unlike Google, Cuil also promises not to collect data about its users’ search histories.

Like a lot of curious folks Monday, I did a few random Cuil searches and compared the results to Google. If sheer numbers mean anything, my highly unscientific test revealed that Cuil has some catching up to do. A search for “Beijing Olympics” produced 20 million pages on Google, 1.1 million on Cuil. “Barack Obama” got 58 million Google hits; on Cuil, less than 6.5 million. Google also led its Obama results with recent news headlines about the presidential candidate, while Cuil’s first page of Obama hits contained only biographical information from Wikipedia and his official Senate/campaign sites.

In fairness, though, we should probably give Cuil a few days to rev its engine up to full speed. A Cuil search Monday morning for “Siamese cats” pulled up nothing; you had to type in “Siamese cat” to get any results. By Monday afternoon that glitch was fixed, and “Siamese cats” produced 43,000 hits. Cuil also appeared to be overwhelmed by traffic from curious users, because another search Monday afternoon produced a near-blank page with the message, “Due to excessive load, our servers didn’t return results.”

I like Cuil’s reader-friendly format, which arrays results in a magazine-like layout complete with thumbnail images and a few sentences of text instead of Google’s bare-bones, pancake stack of links. I don’t think “Cuiling” will replace “Googling” in the popular lexicon anytime soon, but it seems like a promising alternative. What do you think?

– Brandon Griggs, Tech Section Producer, CNN.com

Okay, class, here are a few more summer-reading books you might want to check out.
Please bear with me; I’m a middle manager in a TV network — this is my best opportunity to prove to a large number of people that I can actually read. Sorry I didn’t include any links here — it’s probably inappropriate for us to favor one bookselling site over another. But if you’re interested, you can figure it out……..

We all have a nose, and know how to use it. The study of how we go about that, however, is not too sophisticated. What the Nose Knows, by Avery Gilbert is a great book on an overlooked topic. Want to know how smell works? Where it played a big role in pop culture or history? How industries and marketers have co-opted and synthesized smells for their own purposes? How ’bout the chemical structure of those less pleasant smells we all encounter, or emit? Well, you should get a whiff of this book, then. Gilbert combines a scientist’s sense of wonder, a scent-making professional’s sensibility, and a slightly Beavis + Butt-Head -like fascination with aroma.

Charlatan, by Pope Brock: Dr. John R. Brinkley was seen as a savior of marriages and an author of modern medical marvels. For a fee, he helped countless men roar during the 1920’s — by installing a booster set of goat testicles in them. Many thought it restored virility, despite a total lack of evidence. Many didn’t survive the operation. Brock writes with a flair, describing the mood of heartland America back then, and recounting the work of Brinkley’s nemesis, master fraudbuster Morris Fishbein. It’s a great parable for how gullible we can be, told with a sense of irony that’s probably essential when your subject matter is swindling people through the use of goat testicles.

The Dumbest Generation Mark Bauerlein is an Emory University English professor and former researcher at the National Endowment for the Arts. He makes the case that video games, text messaging, cellphones, and all the trappings of 21st Century communication have turned our children into shallow morons with tiny attention spans. But Bauerlein falls well short of making a complete sale on this. He deftly uses stats and studies to track the inability of young folks to identify, for example, the three branches of government. He also does a good job of tracking how analytical skills have fallen by the wayside, since we have so many electronic devices to do our thinking for us. What’s missing are the benefits — both real and potential — of the wealth of information we have here in the Information Age: How it’s used, and how it could be leveraged better. Bauerlein points out the popularity of games that seem to have no moral compass whatsoever, like Grand Theft Auto, without acknowledging that many other games help with everything from motor skills to organizational skills.

Peter Dykstra Executive Producer, CNN Science, Tech & Weather

Okay, here’s a quick little muse on the official end of Bill Gates’s Microsoft career.

Getty Images/AFP

Nearly ten years ago, an entertaining book called “The Plot to Get Bill Gates” chronicled the widespread perception that the founder of Microsoft was the very embodiment of villainy — a real-life Doctor Evil, or Snidely Whiplash, on the verge of eradicating any trace of competition in the home computing world.  The EC and the US Justice Department were after him, legal Ahabs chasing the Great White Whale of Redmond, Washington.  Gates forced other hardware manufacturers to swallow his bundled software whole.   He built a fatuously unneccessary mansion.  He was decidedly dour and condescending in his rare, tightly-controlled public appearances.  And maybe worst of all:  This billionaire, this ruthless tycoon, this fabulously successful Evil Genius looked just like the guy who used to get beaten up in your high school gym class.

Today, Gates takes a big step toward one of the greatest image reversals in history since Ebenezer Scrooge turned jolly.  While he’ll retain his Microsoft chairmanship, Gates is embarking on a “reordering” of life’s priorities that will have him focusing on the staggeringly large charitable effort he started several years ago with his wife, Melinda.   Their charity dwarfs that of previous tycoons like the Fords and Rockefellers, tackling tuberculosis, malaria, and other diseases that kill millions in the developing world.  Dollar-for-dollar, it’s easily the biggest philanthropic effort in human history.

So, the question remains:   Did Gates have a Charles Dickens-like life-changing revelation?  Or is he consumed with changing his place in history?   Or was it, as Gates himself has said, a “scolding” from our old CNN boss, Ted Turner, that the “super-lucky” should give much of their money back.  Answer:   Who cares?   Hats off to him.

So, I’m no longer one of those out to “get” Bill Gates.   I even forgive him for the Vista Operating System.  I’ll take a few extra “error” messages, and resist getting mad at a guy who’s saving tens of thousands of lives– with much more good, desperately-needed work likely to follow.

Peter Dykstra   Executive Producer  CNN Science, Tech & Weather

What do the Numa Numa guy and Perez Hilton and Kos and the Obama Girl have that you don’t? Why can’t you be an Internet sensation, too? There’s no reason why you can’t, says a guy who’s ridden the web to his own level of fame, though perhaps not quite yet fame on the scale of, say the Chocolate Rain guy.

Scott Steinberg, publisher of the tech web site DigitalTrends.com, says there are lots of ways anyone can achieve fast fame on the web without spending a lot, if any, money. He’s done it by writing a book, “Get Rich Playing Games.” Steinberg says, “If you publish a book on anything, suddenly you’re an expert.” And his work led to interviews on CNN and lots of other media outlets. Yet he says the book cost peanuts to produce, thanks to online print-on-demand.

Steinberg says print-on-demand services like Lulu, iuniverse, Wordclay, AuthorHouse, and BookSurge let would-be authors publish a book for as little as eight dollars up front. And he says that for as little as a few hundred dollars you can have a hardback or paperback copy with professional illustrations, an ISBN number and distribution to Amazon and Barnesandnoble.com.

But you don’t have to write a tome to get noticed. You could come up with an iconic symbol or a new catchphrase, and have it put on bumper stickers, t-shirts, or mugs, for all the world to see (and buy). Steinberg says, “Anything that you’ve seen in a store you can produce for pennies using your own custom designs.” Who knows, you might create the smiley face for the 21st century!

Maybe you have a catchy slogan, photo, or piece of art. Steinberg recommends checking out sites like Zazzle, CafePress, PrintMojo, and Spreadshirt . Such sites can plaster your idea on any number of keepsakes or accessories, from beer steins to thongs. And they’ll sell your creations for you, managing inventory and Paypal. Steinberg says, “You worry about the spotlight, let them handle the details.”

Maybe you don’t care about selling anything — maybe you want your FACE famous, a la “Leave Britney alone!” guy. (I think he’s a guy.) Steinberg says all you need is a $20-$40 web cam or a $100-$200 camcorder, and a Mac or PC. Then, Steinberg says, “All you need is time and energy and something interesting to talk about.” You can upload your thoughts not only to YouTube, but to Viddler, which Steinberg says accepts longer videos than YouTube, or Metacafe, in which users vote for the best content and push it to the front page.

You don’t actually need to shoot video and edit it. You could start your own live streaming video channel, and interact via chat rooms with your viewers, on sites like justin.tv. I just spent five minutes there watching a guy beat a boss in Zelda as he narrated and responded to often inane chat room chatter. (That’s five minutes of my life I’ll never get back.) There’s also Ustream.tv, Stickam.com, and BlogTV.com, where I lost a couple of minutes watching a kid named Adam lip synching and emoting to Bohemian Rhapsody. He didn’t stop even when his phone started ringing.

Of course, there’s also blogging. You don’t have to create your own blog from scratch — Steinberg says there are myriad sites like LiveJournal, Blogger, and WordPress (which, of course, you’re reading now) that will host your blog. One WordPress blog — stuffwhitepeoplelike, was launched in January and already has led to a book deal with Random House — “The Definitive Guide to Stuff White People Like” comes out next month. SciTechBlog is still waiting for its book deal.

In planning your way to web fame, Steinberg says you need to be original and singular - avoid what everyone else is doing. Find a topic no one else is tackling (or at least not tackling well) and keep your message clear and consistent. Your readers or viewers need to be able to understand what you’re saying almost immediately.

Then, let your personality come through. The celebrity gossip blog PerezHilton.com is dripping with personality. Steinberg says the site gets nearly nine million page views a day and the creator now has his own VH1 TV series and gets paid to go to clubs.

Finally, Steinberg says you need to promote yourself. Start a page on social networking sites Facebook and/or Myspace. (You can also start your own personalized social network with Ning, CrowdVine, and KickApps.) Talk yourself up in newsgroups and Internet forums. Send out press releases. But be careful not to cross the line between promotion and obnoxiousness. As a journalist, I get releases from folks who cross that line regularly!

Steinberg says you shouldn’t seek fame via the Internet in order to get rich overnight. Do it because what you think matters just as much as what a celebrity thinks.

Steinberg’s tips for fast fame must have some validity — I’m blogging about him, right?

Diane Hawkins-Cox, senior producer, CNN Sci-Tech Unit

My initial excitement over the cheaper, faster iPhone quickly faded when I learned that the new low price is somewhat deceptive.

While the price seems to have dropped, do the math before you go the iPhone 3G route.

While it’s true that the device itself will cost $199, actually using the thing would become a significant monthly expense. In fact, the AT&T press release states that data plans for consumers will be available for $30 per month, in addition to voice plans starting at $39.99 per month. Bottom line: $69.99 per month if you’re going to use both internet and voice features. That’s a $10-per-month increase from the iPhone plans that have been in effect since last July. Business customers will have to pay even more: $45 per month on top of the voice plan.

Again, AT&T is the only carrier you can use with the iPhone 3G, and you must sign up for a two-year contract. And don’t forget these prices don’t include tax.

Let’s think about this: would you rather get an iPhone now for $399 and pay $59.99 per month, or wait until July and pay $199 for the iPhone 3G with the $69.99 per month plan?

After two years, you will have spent $1838.76 on the slower, more expensive iPhone with the cheaper plan — and $1878.76 on the cheaper, faster iPhone with the more expensive plan. At the end of the day, the iPhone 3G is actually $40 more expensive. Regardless of the $200 price drop on the product itself, each iPhone customer is paying more than $1800 in usage fees. And that’s a lot of money no matter how you look at it.

The bottom line is that the total price for owning and using an iPhone for two years isn’t going to change much at all with the new iPhone 3G.

Why is this happening? Apparently AT&T and Apple have changed their business relationship so that they don’t share revenue anymore. The cost of the device itself is getting subsidized, and the cost of the monthly plan is going up.

–Elizabeth Landau, Associate Producer, CNN.com

When the iPhone frenzy first began last summer, a lot of people like me held back, vowing to wait for Apple to reduce the price and make the technology even better.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced the next generation of iPhones Monday at a conference in San Francisco.

Now, says Apple CEO Steve Jobs, that day will soon come. Not only will the minimum price tag come down to $199, but the next generation of iPhones will have 3G technology.

What’s that, you say? As CNET explains, 3G brings wireless broadband data services to your cellphone, meaning you can surf the internet at very high speeds. Apple’s Web site says the iPhone will use HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access) protocol to download data over UMTS (Universal Mobile Telecommunications System) networks. The bottom line is that it will seamlessly switch between networks to get data as fast as possible.

But are we really ready to shell out the $199 for this better-than-ever iPhone?

If you had an incredibly powerful slender little friend in your pocket that could check your e-mail, locate your precise position in the world, call anyone you wanted and cue up your favorite songs, you would play with it a lot. A LOT.

In fact, you’d want to play with it so much that you might stop paying attention to conversations with your friends and family because you’d constantly want to check your e-mail or verify a fact that someone just mentioned. Trivia nights would be particularly torturous, as you could just find out the answers in seconds. You might feel like a perpetually-distracted teenager. Gadgets like these tend to bring out the perpetually-distracted teenager in us all, especially those of us who weren’t teenagers very long ago.

Yet, this could be a great purchase for those of us without cars who commute on trains and buses, and wouldn’t have to worry about keeping our eyes on the road while we surf the Web. And don’t forget that $199, after all, is merely three-and-a-half tanks of gas these days. The iPhone could thus take your mind anywhere you want to go when the bus is definitely not going anywhere soon. When put like that, it does seem like an amazing investment.

I’m also intrigued by the new iPhone’s applications, such as the mobile blogging software. Apple will also launch a nifty music program for the iPhone — Moo Cow Music’s Band — that allows you to compose music with multiple instrument sounds on the go. That concept alone makes musicians’ mouths drool. At last, we won’t be restricted to playing “Mary Had a Little Lamb” with touch-tone phone numbers.

Still, remember that the iPhone is still only compatible with AT&T, meaning those of you who have other networks will have to abandon your plans. This isn’t an issue for me –- my original 2001 Nokia brick was hooked up to AT&T before it was Cingular and then became AT&T again! –- but all of you with other carriers may have some paperwork and contractual fees to deal with. Consider also that Samsung is apparently coming out with a 3G phone hooked up to Sprint. Check out this comparison of upcoming 3G phones.

So, as long as you’re willing to use it responsibly and do that AT&T thing, getting the new iPhone 3G seems like a pretty good idea. But that might mean thousands of people camping out in front of Apple stores who also think it’s a good idea. Ugh, this could be complicated. But afterwards tracking flights, finding a restaurant, and looking up the names of the pandas at Zoo Atlanta will be so, so simple.

–Elizabeth Landau, Associate Producer, CNN.com

I sat down a few hours ago to fire off a quick blog about today’s Webby Award nominations… but it’s been hard tearing myself away from surfing the nominees.  There’s lots of material you’ll want to forward to friends. 

For the past twelve years, a group of Internet industry experts and luminaries have handed out the Webby Awards.  In 1997, the inaugural honors were bestowed upon a handful of Web sites in 15 categories.  Today, there are more than 100 categories ranging from “Activism” to “Weird,” covering not only Internet sites but interactive advertising, online videos and mobile phone entertainment.

You’ve probably already seen a number of the nominees.  A lot are heavily viewed, like Facebook, Flickr, and yes, cnn.com.  And I must mention that Anderson Cooper 360 is up for best fan site.  (Sadly, SciTechBlog is not mentioned for best blog — go figure!)  And a lot of the nominees have probably graced your inbox, like the 30-second Bunnies Theatre version of Brokeback Mountain or the angst of Lonelygirl15.  But you probably haven’t seen many of the nominees, like a video of breast reconstruction after a mastectomy (and you may not want to!)

The Webby Award honorees are nominated and chosen by a 550-person judging academy called the International Academy of DIgital Arts and Sciences.  Members include “Simpsons” creator Matt Groening, “Father of the Internet” Vinton Cerf, and movie mogul Harvey Weinstein.  But you can also be a judge in The Webby People’s Voice Awards.  These honors will be given in more than 70 categories — get your vote in by May 1.

Winners will be announced May 6, and honored at two separate ceremonies in New York City — June 9th for The Webby Film and Video Awards and June 10th for The Webby Awards Gala.  Winners are allowed just five words to deliver their acceptance speeches.  One of the most memorable is Al Gore’s Lifetime Achievement Award speech in 2006 — “Please don’t recount this vote.”  You can browse past acceptance speeches on the Webby Web site.

Okay.  Now back to Cute Overload.

–Diane Hawkins-Cox, Senior Producer, CNN Sci-Tech Unit