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As it has taken off, Formspring has started to draw the attention of some major brands — last month, Fiat used it to help launch the Uno in Brazil, and Marvel Executive Editor Tom Brevoort regularly takes to the site to answer fan questions (he’s responded to over 3,000 of them). Red Bull has just launched a new page. As with Facebook Pages, Formspring gives brands a relatively easy way to engage directly with their fans — this could well be the start of a new trend.

The scanner works by sweeping a red laser beam across any object that you can put in front of a webcam. When an object is close to the camera, the beam seems to have shifted to the side. That provides a key bit of information about the depth of the point being scanned. With a bit of number crunching, a computer can use the position of the beam to calculate the thickness of that object.