Aard Times
The Smartest People in the Room

Picture your best friend.

Funny. Informed. Quick to buy the next round of manhattans, or spearhead a late-night Atlantic City excursion.

Now imagine that his expertise spans the far reaches of the human experience, covering everything from offshore banking to animal husbandry (makes great small talk at the local greenmarket) and you've got Aardvark, now fielding life's most burning questions on vark.com.

Unlike legions of soulless search engines, Aardvark takes your query into the wonderful world of social media and funnels it to an actual living, breathing human. With feelings. One who understands the urgency of sourcing a tennis racket at 3am on a Sunday. Just type a question, and through some miracle of modern technology, you'll get a personal message in minutes from an avowed expert with intimate knowledge of your topic of curiosity.

As in life, nothing is free—in lieu of cold, hard cash, Aardvark will only ask that you pay it forward by fielding questions on subjects of your expertise (miniature golf, pipe tobacco and taxidermy, naturally). But like a true pal, they'll thank you with personal messages of encouragement after cracking a tough one—you should have seen the praise we got for our answer on mounting a deer head. And since no friend or app is perfect, you'll likely hit the occasional hiccup: our query about coffee shops in Chelsea was outsourced to a UK soccer expert.

But we'll take a good soccer match over coffee any day.