Mpire, a deal finding site that's generated a lot of buzz, will announce the launch tomorrow of Mpire Labs, a place to develop innovative new ideas similar to the ethos of the YouTube TestTube project (which itself is based on Google Labs).
The first public project to be launched by Mpire Labs is Shopwave, a Flash-based tool for browsing items. They're only using a selection of the items available from merchants, they say, because this is more about testing the interface at the moment than actually getting people to buy items. It's certainly interesting, but I just find these 100% Flash sites can be slow and unwieldy.
Mpire is also announcing a few other updates: a mashup of Amazon and Epinions to provide user reviews on the site and an Mpire plugin for IE7 (it was previously only available on Firefox 2.0). Releases like Mpire Labs show that companies are willing to experiment a little: roll out as many ideas as you can, let some (or most) fail and keep the best ones. It's the way all web development should be.