A friend and collegue of mine, Rick Wagner <http://blog.ohgeeks.com/>, spent a good deal of time over ten weeks working as the lead for his graduate school programming project at OSU. He built a really cool in-site chat client using Microsoft Membership Framework, which could become a side project. The site the group worked on is actually a pretty cool idea. It's a global news aggregator that can translate stories to your native language. If there was a story in Japan that you were unabe to read, mondokio should help to bridge the gap. In Brady Calestro's, mondokio founder, own words, "The problem we’re addressing is that you can't understand an international news story through only one, culturally specific news source. Doing so inevitably misrepresents the reality of that story."

Stop by and give the site a try, went live today, and enjoy. Oh, and thanks to the hard work of Rick and his team, it should be iPhone friendly ;)