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When I first heard about this “Thanksgiving” thing, I thought it sounded like a great idea.

We Brits spend a ridiculous amount of time each day giving thanks to strangers - we say thanks to people who hold doors for us, thanks to people who stop their cars to let us cross the road, thanks to waitresses when they give us our bill; even thanks again when we hand over the money to pay. But apparently you Americans - innovative people that you are - had found a way to streamline the process.

Rather than waste hours each day expressing gratitude, you had decided to compress all of your thank-yous into one annual 24-hour-period of uninterrupted Thanks Giving. Get all that politeness out of the way in one go. An inspired solution, I though, and one we should copy back home. Hell, we should have a ’sorry’ day too - we’d reclaim weeks of time.

But apparently I’d got the wrong end of the stick. Having consulted Wikipedia, it turns out that today is not about mundane expression of gratitude, but rather about big-ticket Thank-yous. For friends, family, a baby’s laugh, spreadable cheese. Stuff that really makes it a joy to be alive, and living in the home of the brave.

In just under an hour, I’m heading out to my first ever Thanksgiving dinner; I gather there will be turkey involved, and sweet potatoes - whatever they might be. And, despite my British cynicism, I’m very excited. But before I go, given that today’s celebrations began with some Brits moving to the USA and giving thanks for its awesomeness, I thought it might be appropriate to share five things - technological and otherwise - that make me… well.. thankful that a few months ago I too decided to make America my new home.

Here goes…

If you’ve ever tried searching the web for financial advice, you probably know just how much junk there is out there. Sure, there may be a few diamonds in the rough, but oftentimes the best results go to the finance ‘experts’ who are good at SEO - not the ones who know what they’re talking about. Investimonials is a new site launching this week that’s looking to offer an unbiased view of the variety of financial brokers, services, videos, and books out there. And to do that, it’s turning to the site’s community to submit their own reviews (it’s essentially a TripAdvisor for financial goods).

The new site was founded by Timothy Sykes, a controversial financial expert who was named to Trader Monthly’s 2006 “Top 30 under 30″ and had a once-successful hedge fund that shut down in 2007 after taking heavy losses. Since then, though, he’s mounted a comeback and is now one of Covestor’s top ranked traders (though some people aren’t fans of his tactics).

If you’re anything like me - and let’s for all of our sakes pray that you’re not - then your first thought as you stagger back to your desk today, bloated and giddy after Thanksgiving, will likely be “what can I do to kill time until the end of the week?”

Actual work is out of the question, obviously. If you’re a PC person then there’s always Minesweeper, while Mac users can make a start on editing their Thanksgiving videos in iMovie. Linux fan? I suppose once you’ve finished your daily six hours of masturbation, you can just fill up the rest of the time pompously explaining to the rest of us precisely why what we’re doing is wrong. You know, the usual.

But, regardless of our OS allegiance, there’s one activity we can all enjoy together - and that’s taking a look back at the last seven days of TechCrunch. So let’s get started, shall we?

(And Linux users, please wash your hands before clicking. We all know where they’ve been…)

This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.

Name: Guestlist

Quick Pitch: Guestlist builds event pages, sells event tickets, and manages your attendees while utilizing an intuitive interface.

Genius Idea: In an already-crowded online events management space, Guestlist tries to stand out with a simplistic and elegant interface. However, with established players like EventBrite, does it differentiate itself enough to compete?

Guestlist includes all of the basics for creating and publishing an event. You can name your event, set dates and times, create tickets (paid and/or free), link it to your PayPal account, add a location and some descriptive information, and you’re up and running. Pretty much anyone can figure out the interface and get an event published. The company’s promise to be one of the “easiest way to sell tickets to your events” holds true for the most part.

In fact, you can see the final result in this example Mashable event. It didn’t take more than 3 minutes to get this set up. Guestlist also comes with some simple attendee and order management tools.

Unfortunately, the cold hard truth is that Guestlist doesn’t really add anything unique to the event management space. EventBrite is also simple to get started and has the same features, but adds things like vanity URLs, more control over event descriptions, and is far more customizable. Guestlist is dead-simple and is best suited for people that really don’t want a lot of hassle in getting an event page off-the-ground, but it won’t survive unless it adds value beyond what others in the market already provide.

Spark of Genius Series Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark

BizSpark is 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.

Entrepreneurs can take advantage of the Azure Services platform for their website hosting and storage needs. Microsoft recently announced the “new CloudApp()” contest– use the Azure Services Platform for hosting your .NET or PHP app, and you could be the lucky winner of a USD 5000* (please see website for official rules and guidelines).”

Reviews: PHP

Tags: bizspark, eventbrite, Guestlist

The Social TV Forum Europe (www.social-tv.net) is the 2nd event in the Social TV Series. The event will be held at the Olympia in West London on the 16th March and is part of the Social TV Series (www.socialtvseries.com). The Social TV Forum Europe will address the latest in social TV applications & widgets, the launching of new services and its role in building new revenue streams for platform providers and broadcasters. Will Social Media interactivity bring value for TV users? Can social interaction via the TV generate operator revenues? Social TV, defining next generation TV services? Importantly, will TV go the way of the iPhone?

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As one of the hot social-location properties, Foursquare has a wealth of information about where you go. Unfortunately, it doesn’t really offer many good ways to visualize it. In fact, Foursquare only focuses on providing a text stream of your check-ins. A new app takes that data and puts it on a map.

4mapper, built by John Wiseman, is a very simple application. Once you authorize it to use your Foursquare data (via Foursquare’s new API), it will pull your location information and place it on top of a Google Map. Your check-ins are displayed as white dots on the map. The more times you have check-in to a certain place, the larger the dot will be. Clicking on these dots will give you more information about where you checked-in. And you can zoom in on the map for better detail about your check-ins.

GDS International has built up quite a reputation amongst the fortune 500, the world-wide media giant has had double figure growth every year for the last five years and has offices in almost every continent. They now boast the fastest growing news source amongst the executive community in the world increasing its reach by 200,000 across all verticals every month through their new digital initiatives.

Because of this the worlds Business leaders are queuing up for an opportunity to work with GDS International, below is the top 10 executives that have played a major part in the company’s success in 2009.

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