April fools round for tech and econ

It is that season again. Today is April fools day and the Internet celebrates. Here is a convenient round up of contributions from tech and economics.

• Google: as they do every year, Google enjoy a good prank. This year Google maps has an 8-bit mode, Gmail gets taps, Chrome gets multitasking, there’s Street Roo and Sergey Brin himself leads the self-driving car into NASCAR. Of course, that last one is precisely the movies Cars brought about by Pixar under Steve Jobs. More imitation?
• Toshiba: now that’s product differentiation for tablets.
• Think Geek: have a whole heap of new product offerings from the Admiral Ackbar singing bass, to Minecraft Mashmellow Creeps to the iPad children offerings of a Barbie make-up studio and Hungry Hungry Hippos for iPad. Those last two actually sound pretty possible. Last year these people came up with the iCade and that actually went into production. You’ll be pleased to know that today’s inflatable Star Trek captain’s chair is real.
• TUAW: The unknown health effects of iPads.
• Geekdad: finally, gets some retractions of its most popular posts.
• PYMNTS: for economists interested in payment instruments, there is Snookie’s pre-paid card, cards with telephone functionality, and the interchange fee battle moves to a Hunger Games format.
• The Scholarly Kitchen: now calendars want to be free, the Tea Party get interested in research and libraries want Elsevier back.
• Westjet: introduces child-free cabins.
• Munchkin: my favourite of the day is the GPS enabled sippy cup — I wrote up a discussion of this one at Forbes.com.