Favors are the currency of business. Or at least one them. You do someone a favor, and they return it. It’s a practice as old as business itself, but as with so many parts of the business game, there are ways to improve it.

Favo.rs — an aptly named San Francisco startup — aims to do just that. On Wednesday, as it emerged from stealth mode, the company launched an online marketplace where members can barter for favors. “We thought about what makes Silicon Valley tick — and the business world in general,” co-founder Adam Rodnitzky tells Wired.com. “And came up with this.”

When you join the...

Leave it to the Android community to hack a new device. On Wednesday, an eager Android developer posted a video to YouTube, showing off the new — and still unreleased — version of Android, aka Ice Cream Sandwich, running on a Kindle Fire tablet.

It’s an odd mashup, to say the least. First of all, only developers have access to Ice Cream Sandwich at this point, as the first device to run the software — Samsung’s Galaxy Nexus smartphone — hasn’t yet been released. Second, although the Kindle Fire is indeed an Android-based tablet, you’d never know by looking at it. Amazon slapped a heavily modif...