This week's New Yorker cover was not created with the traditional paintbrushes and drawing pads, but instead, with a $4.99 Brushes application on an iPhone.

Portuguese artist Jorge Colombo finger-painted the image while standing outside Madame Tussauds Wax Museum in Times Square. He drew a night scene of a hot dog stand on 42nd Street in about an hour.

So how does the Brushes application work? It records the artist's brush strokes, and then replay them using the free Brushers Viewer utility which is only available on Mac OS X.

Watch a clip below to see how Colombo drew the artwork. (Although it took an hour, the video is a condensed version that lasts less than a minute.)

Hulu is reportedly in talks to sign a deal with both commercial broadcasters in the next few weeks, for a roll-out of the service by September, according to reports.

“Hulu is proposing to launch this September with 3,000 hours of American content, as well as material from the BBC, ITV and Channel 4. It will be playing catch-up in the short-term until it has enough British TV content and will need a unique selling point in the short term," a source close to the negotiations told the Telegraph.

Media experts are predicting that Hulu will follow the British VoD pattern and allow access to the British TV partners’ content the night after it broadcasts, making it available for 30 days.

However the negotiations have come to a temporary halt because Hulu wants to retain control over Channel 4’s and ITV’s advertising sales around all of content on the platform.

A Japanese University in Tokyo is undertaking a new way to take attendance of its staff and students.

In a seemingly controversial but interesting method, Aoyama Gakuin University gave 550 staff and students of its School of Social Informatics a free iPhone, according to The Mainichi Daily News, a Japanese newspaper.

The smartphone uses a GPS function that can determine whether the students or staff are at school or not.

The university is to pay the basic charges itself, ensuring no extra financial burdens will fall on students. The school also has plans to expand their use to setting simple tests and questionnaires, submitting homework and reviewing class video materials, according to the report.

Executives of the world's most popular search engine have been making several appearances over the past two weeks at colleges where they shared words of encouragement for the classes of 2009.

Speaking at the University of Pennsylvania's commencement on Monday, Google chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt told about 6,000 graduates that they need to find out what is most important to them - by living analog for a while.

"Turn off your computer. You're actually going to have to turn off your phone and discover all that is human around us," Schmidt said. "Nothing beats holding the hand of your grandchild as he walks his first steps."

Below are 4 videos of  co-founder Larry Page at the University of Michigan, May 2; CEO Eric Schmidt at Carnegie Mellon University, May 17 and University of Pennsylvania, May 18; and Vice President of Search Product and User Experience Marissa Mayer at the Illinois Institute of Technology, May 18.

The designer of the original iPod, the Bondi Blue iMac, and the iPhone has been chosen as the most creative person in Business, according to a listing by Fast Company.

"He likes to make perfect stuff," says Brunner, offering the first of three keys to Ive's success. That design perfection -- the first touch-screen smartphone, the dominant MP3 player, the first titanium laptop -- has become the benchmark by which companies in all industries judge themselves. "I've even had a plumbing company say, 'We want our showerhead to be our version of the iPod,' " says Brunner, now a partner at the design firm Ammunition. "Ive has this design ability combined with a craftsmanlike mentality."

Good news for Alltel account holders.

The BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8230 will be available on Alltel for just $99.99 after a $70 mail-in rebate, bundled with the customary 2-year contract of course.

The Flip 8230 features a QVGA (240-by-320-pixel) internal LCD, an external LCD with 160-by-128-pixel resolution, the famed SureType pseudo-QWERTY keyboard, and a 2-megapixel camera with video recording. Other features include a built-in GPS radio, a microSD card slot, stereo Bluetooth, and a media player app that can sync with iTunes and Windows Media Player.

Dell will reportedly use Via Technologies chips in select low-power servers, according to a report in the New York Times.

Dell is expected to announce next week a system that has 12 full servers running on Via's Nano chip, the report said. Each server is estimated to consume 15 watts of power.

This will be a large partnership for Via which is currently a player in the Netbook market, while Intel and AMD own the server market.

New photos of the alleged Blackberry Storm 2 surfaced online on Thursday on the site Crackberry.

So what does the new smart phone have to offer?

The Storm 2 has WiFi along with GPS.  The rumored 5MP camera is absent; instead, the image of the device has the same 3.2-megapixel camera as the original Storm. It will also feature a 3.2 megapixel, autofocus camera - apart from being slightly thinner than its predecessor. SurePress seems to have been replaced with TruePress.

The photos also don't show the operating system, giving us no indication as to what the user interface will look like.

Apple is reportedly planning to add cameras to a few of its next-generation iPod models, according to Hardmac.

Citing tips passed on from one of its sources, Hardmac, says that when Apple refreshes its iPod touch and iPod nano players later this September, both will feature a camera like the iPhone.

Adding a camera to the iPod touch may be the company's next move as it works to upgrade the device.  

The report also cites the same sources as saying that this year's iPhones will feature "exactly the same shape and size than the current iPhone 3G, despite fakes and rumors circulating."

Meanwhile, a forum posted on a Chinese Apple website a few days ago, listed what may be the specs to Apple's upcoming iPhone model, including 32GB of storage (up from 16GB), a faster 600MHz processor, 256MB RAM (up from 128MB), a 3.2-megapixel camera with autofocus, a digital compass, and an FM radio.

Oprah did it faster than Ashton Kutcher and racked up 1 million Twitter follows in less than a month. She is now the 8th member to reach a million followers on the popular micro-blogging.

And how did she do it? By sending out only 42 tweets.

However, there is nothing particularly surprising about this, as the "Oprah effect" has been known to make books skyrocket to the top of bestseller's list almost over night.

Meanwhile, Kutcher now has 1.74 million followers and is likely to reach 2 million sometime in the next 10 days. CNN's account has 1.46 million followers.

Oprah is one of the service's recommended personalities for new users to follow.

Oprah on Twitter.