Come on, we've all been there. (Screengrab: Spotsquad.ca)

Be careful, crappy drivers of the world: a new app will encourage passersby to snitch on your dicey park job in exchange for a cut of the parking ticket.

The app, SpotSquad, is being developed by the least fun tech startup in the world, based in Winnipeg, Canada, according to Fox News. Its primary users will presumably be money-grubbing killjoys and people who didn't get into the police academy. 

The snitches can simply download the app, take a photo of the car and choose from a list of infractions. The report is automatically sent to the lot's operator or local law enforcement, Fox News reports, although it won't be submitted as evidence in court -- not yet, anyway, but laws could change to allow that.

SpotSquad is focused just on the Canadian market now, but may expand into the United States, Fox News reports -- terrible news for the cowboys among us who treat parking lots like a survival-of-the-fittest, Wild West scenario.

Maybe this app will be useful for punishing people who illegally take up handicapped spots. But come on, if you report somebody for an expired meter, you deserve terrible parking ticket karma.

Co-founder and apparent descendant of your strictest elementary school teacher Chris Johnson smugly tells SpotSquad's critics, "Just read the signs, follow the rules and you won't have a problem." Twenty bucks to the first person who reports him for a crooked park job.

(Photo: Instagram)

Darwin the Japanese macaque, better known as "Ikea Monkey," is caught in the middle of a vicious custody battle, according to The Telegraph. Darwin rose to fame when a Twitter user tweeted a picture of him wearing a fancy shearling coat and a diaper in a Toronto Ikea parking lot. He even reached Peak Meme status when he was parodied by every lady's favorite porn star, James Deen.

Now his owner, Yasmin Nakhuda, has been forced to battle law enforcement in Toronto who want to take her beloved monkey away from her, as it's illegal in the Canadian metropolis to keep monkeys as pets.

Next up: the Ikea Monkey movie, because everything is awful.

Did you know the Royal Canadian Mint, the agency that produces Canada's money, has been "actively monitoring the evolution of currency and payment technologies for a number of years"? They have! And they've developed their own digital currency, the MintChip.

Apparently the Mint recently diverted some of its research and development funds—who knew mints had these?—into coding MintChip, which uses NFC technology similar to Google Wallet. Today the Mint announced a competition for developers in North America. Build apps with MintChip, which is still in the experimental phase, and you can win $50,000 in gold bullion.

The Mint has prototypes and five patents pending on its technology, says the Mint. The system is designed to work well for microtransactions under $10 and "nano-transactions" under $1. "The Mint hopes that software developers and entrepreneurs will use MintChip to ignite trade and commerce for these very-low-value markets," the Mint says on the website for the competition. The Mint's chief financial officer will give a keynote about MintChip on April 17.

Iowa-based Dwolla is growing by leaps and bounds. Developing world favorite M-Pesa has had revolutionary impact in Africa, serving as a bank for 15 million people. Barclays in the U.K. has introduced a mobile payments called Pingit. And of course, Bitcoin keeps trucking along. Meanwhile, Popmoney, a mobile payments partnership between Moneygram and payment system Fiserv, recently popped up. But this is, as far as we know, the first time a government has sponsored a digital currency.

The MintChip competition is powered by hometown startup ChallengePost and sparked a debate when it was posted to Hacker News with the inflammatory title, "The Royal Canadian Mint just announced a new alternative to BitCoin."