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The U.S. intelligence community wants a sharp competitive edge on the world’s best and brightest ideas. In an effort to find the next big thing before it happens, they’re looking to do away with fallible human trendspotters, and enlist an algorithmic system to “scan the horizon” and tap into the first signs of burgeoning memes in science and technology. Iarpa, the intel world’s far-out research arm, is already wary of trusting big calls and predictions to flesh-and-blood experts alone. Earlier this year, the agency solicited proposals for a system that would evaluate and rank the value of expert opinion based on niche, learning style, prior performance and “other attributes predictive of accuracy.” This time around, Iarpa’s looking for a system that wouldn’t just rate experts, but would take over many of their responsibilities entirely. The agency’s Foresight and Understanding from Scientific Exposition (or FUSE) wants researchers to create “a reliable, evidence-based capability that…reduce the labor involved to identify specific technical areas for in-depth review.” As Iarpa’s solicitation notes, trying to identify the hottest trends before they heat up is time-consuming, time sensitive and susceptible to human bias. Not to mention that most experts are confined to certain geographic regions, cultures, languages and technical niches. But with globalization churning out innovations worldwide, Iarpa wants a system that can operate in several languages and account for cultural differences....... View the full article

Apple's Newest Watch Is ... Wait, What? It's an iPod Nano? What time is it? Who cares! Apple's newest timepiece puts music, video, photos and step-counting front-and-center, and lets the minutes fall where they may. Sure, you can check the time, but that's hardly the point with this attractive piece of wrist jewelry. Its unisex design goes equally well with a man's suit, a lady's sweater or a jogging outfit. One downside: It doesn't come with a watchband, so you'll need to get your own. Fortunately, the clip on the back lets you easily attach it to the strap of your choice. Unlike almost every other watch we've tested, Apple's Nano has a touch-sensitive, high-resolution LCD display. The interface is a little counterintuitive at first, but it's no more difficult than anything from Tokyo Flash. As a bonus, you can rotate its face with a twisty two-finger gesture, making it work for you in any orientation. With its Apple heritage, the Nano is a perfectly usable music player. Available in 8-GB ($150) or 16-GB ($170) models, it has plenty of capacity for storing thousands of songs, and its touchscreen provides a simple, if cramped, interface for selecting tracks. (Tip: Use iTunes to organize playlists before syncing. It'll make it easier to find the music you want.) Sound quality is excellent, though the generic white earbuds Apple includes are nothing to shout about. There's a built-in FM radio player for getting your Ira fix (Flatow and Glass) when podcasts are unavailable..... View the full article

Want Your Music to Sound Like Schiit? Actually, Yes You Do Just because my audio expertise falls somewhere between Cupertino-issue earbuds and Justin Bieber doesn't mean I want my music to sound like Schiit. Or does it? At first glance, the Schiit Asgard Headphone Amp seems to be the kind of fully discrete (non-tube), single-ended (drains juice but sounds great), Harry Potter–in–hardcover–sized, brushed-aluminum beauty that even a Luddite could love. But on first listen, the Luddite may realize it's the kind of specialty device best left to the audiophile. While I did notice a perceptible increase in general clarity when I listened to some lossless White Album tracks on my Grado RS-1s, the improvement was pretty subtle. We're not exactly talking swimming in an infinity pool as opposed to a drainage ditch here, people. However, after some coaching I was able to hear an improvement in separation. That said, I did notice, for the first time ever, that the jet engine backs the entirety of "Back in The USSR." I thought my observations warranted a few second opinions. (Not the jet engine thing. That's a fact.) So I passed it on to two Wired staffers who know a lot about music, which, as it turned out, is where their similarities ended..... View the full article

A report surfaced Thursday evening that the Spotify music service, popular for years in Europe, is “back to square one” in its negotiations with record labels to launch in the United States — another apparent setback in a series of delays for the service, which has already delayed its U.S. launch several times. However, Spotify denies all allegations in Billboard’s article, says a rumor that it approached Napster co-founder Sean Parker to lead the charge is bogus, and — most importantly — maintains that it’s on track to launch in the United States by the end of the year. “The allegations in the article are without any substance,” Spotify head of communications Jim Butcher told Wired.com. “We are in fact in a very good place with our label negotiations which have moved forward significantly, and we’re still on course for launch by the end of the year. Any talk of ‘back to square one’ is completely unfounded speculation and quite simply not true.” In addition, a source close to the situation said that Spotify has all but signed deals with some of the major labels for its U.S. launch. To be fair, Billboard allows that Spotify might be able to launch here by the end of the year if it is willing to sign short-term contracts with the labels…. So, what’s the hold up? And why no longer-term contracts?........... View the full article

Dell Streak Smears Line Between Phone and Tablet Ed. note: Dell has not announced a price for the Streak. Here's what you need to know about me. I spend more time checking e-mail, playing with apps and browsing on my smartphone than actually talking on the device. So what if there was a gadget that had an enormous screen that also focused on apps and reading. Oh, with a phone feature, too. That would look a lot like the Streak, a 6-inch slab of glass and electronics running the Android operating system — except it bills itself as a tablet. Streak is targeted at smartphone users who crave a larger display but still need a device that's portable and could potentially replace their phone. The Streak isn't there yet. It is a bit of everything — a brilliant 800 x 400 display, a 5-megapixel camera, a reasonably capable phone, a solid browser and access to Android apps. But it doesn't blow you away with any of the features. There was nothing about it that made me want to abandon my current phone or tablet. The Streak's 5-inch touchscreen display is just a tad bigger than the latest crop of Android smartphones (HTC Evo and Droid X each sport a 4.3-inch touchscreen) but significantly smaller than the iPad's 9.7-inch display. That puts the device in this awkward middle ground: too big to be a real phone, too small to directly take on the tablets............ View the full article

Back in February when we first caught wind of BeBionic's myo-electric, very realistic bionic hand, we were quite impressed. The finished product was just unveiled at ISPO World Congress in Leipzig Germany, and it's looking even better than our first glimpse gave away. We don't know a ton more about how the hand functions -- it boasts a fully integrated wireless chip, fully customizable functions to control speed, grip force, and grip patterns, plus aesthetic bonuses such as silicone skin overlays in 19 different tones. The BeBionic hand is now due for worldwide distribution in June of this year -- but check out the teaser video below if you're still curious.Continue reading BeBionic officially unveils its incredible myo-electric bionic hand View the full article

Three years have passed since the last version of Office was released, so naturally it's time for Microsoft to convince you that you need a new one. Office 2010 arrives, heralding more than 100 new and improved features. The suite on the whole is compelling but, in typical Office fashion, has more software than any sane person could possibly need. It also boasts integration with Microsoft's much-ballyhooed Web Apps, a potential Google Docs competitor that lets you create and edit documents using a free web-based interface............ View the full article

A lot of people laughed when General Motors rolled out the electric EN-V city car last month, but the underlying principle driving its creation is sound: As our cities grow ever more crowded, we need to seriously rethink personal mobility Sixty percent of the world’s population will live in urban areas by 2030, and there will be as many as two billion cars on the road. Clearly mass transit and smart growth will play increasingly important roles, but the automobile isn’t going anywhere. GM isn’t alone in looking for ways to build cars that pollute less and take up less space. Volkswagen’s bullet-shaped L1 diesel-hybrid concept is another example of a redefinition of the car......... View the full article

On the eve of the launch of Apple's iPad, I am thinking of Ed Roberts. He never became a household name, but as the man behind the Altair computer — a kit for lunatic tech hobbyists released in 1975 — he was responsible for launching the microcomputer era. When nearly everyone in technology thought that computers would forever be restricted to big institutions, Roberts envisioned the machines as tools of empowerment. "If I were to give you an army of 10,000 people, could you build a pyramid?" he said. "A computer gives the average person, a high school freshman, the power to do things in a week that all the mathematicians who ever lived until 30 years ago couldn't do........... View the full article

It's not exactly news that the Department of Defense is looking at ways to make hacking a more practical weapon, but it looks to really be stepping up its game with its latest project, which promises to make complicated attacks as simple as a few button presses. That would apparently be possible thanks to a slightly mysterious device that'd be small enough to carry around in a backpack, but powerful enough to do everything from breaking into a wireless network to hacking into SCADA (or Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems (used at power plants, nuclear facilities, and the like). While complete details are obviously a bit light, the system would apparently be able to, for instance, map out the nodes in a wireless network, cause them to disconnect, and watch them come back online to identify weak spots. It would then present the "hacker" with various attack attributes that could simply be adjusted using sliders on a touchscreen. No word if the soldiers will also be rewarded with Achievements. View the full article

Fewer products are more appropriately named than the Logitech Harmony series of smart remotes. They do wonderful things to take home entertainment systems, comprised of a disparate jumble of mismatched devices, and turn them into peaceful entities that work together for the betterment of your living room -- you half expect doves with olive branches in their mouths to fly out of the box when you get one. Alas, there are neither birds nor branches included with the company's latest entrants to the series, the 600 and 650 announced two weeks ago, but still they offer the best value amongst the current Harmony lineup. Can they broker successful negotiations amongst all your devices? Read on to find out..... View the full article

Despite a few harrying run-ins with some large white tents at Manhattan's Fashion Week-hosting Bryant Park, we can honestly say we have no idea what's "in" this year for arcade gaming headgear. Still, even with Konami's lack of zebra print or a sly celebrity endorsement, we've got to hand it to them for this fashionable new "Metal Gear Arcade" number. The arcade game is based on Metal Gear Online, but the head gear adds 3D and head-tracking to the experience. There's also a physical gun controller, and the sit down arcade cabinets pump out your gunplay in huge 5.1 sound. This new arcade incarnation of the game will be playable at the AUO Expo in Japan this week, but we have no idea how long it will be until we can look this badass from the comfort of our own couch.... View the full article

We'd already seen first hand what kind of GPU improvements Apple made with the iPhone 3GS (in comparison to the iPhone 3G, anyway), but if you've ever wondered how Cupertino's latest stacked up against Google's Nexus One in the graphical department, your answer is just a click away..... View the full article

MOUNTAIN VIEW, California — Google says there’s already plenty of social networking information out there, and what the world really needs is a way to wrangle Twitter, MySpace and Facebook to tame information overload. If its “solution” guts the existing players, so much the better for the search giant. Google has largely failed in its attempts to build a social networking site before, so it’s taking a different tack: With the Tuesday launch of Google Buzz, the company is pushing a new way to organize by building on a “destination” that millions of people already visit constantly, every day: Gmail. “Buzz is like an entirely new world inside of Gmail,” product manager Todd Jackson said. “Organizing the worlds’ social information has become a large-scale problem, the kind Google likes to solve.” Buzz is a distributed social networking service that lets users post publicly via their Google profiles, or privately via their Gmail contacts. Adopting Gmail’s rich e-mail handling capabilities, Buzz shows up as a virtual folder in Gmail, making small posts from friends and the comments on them part of their e-mail inbox........... View the full article

After months of speculation, Apple has unveiled its tablet, called the iPad. The slim, large screen device evokes much of the same user interface as the iPhone, but it’s bigger and has some surprise features including Apple’s own custom chip. Here’s the rundown on specs and some highlights of the device. * The tablet is 0.5 inches thick and weighs 1.5 pounds. * It has a 9.7-inch display with 1024 x 768-pixel resolution. It also has capacitive multitouch that’s similar to the iPhone. * The device runs Apple’s own processor, a 1-GHz Apple A4 chip — possibly the fruits of of Apple’s $278 million acquisition of PA semiconductor in 2008. * The iPad will have 16-GB to 64-GB flash storage. * It includes speaker, microphone and accelerometer so you can use the device in both landscape and portrait mode. There’s also a compass. * It has up to 10 hours of battery life and one month of standby time. * It offers Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity * It will include optional 3G access from AT&T. For $30 a month, users can get unlimited data. For iPhone users already crying out in pain about their bondage to the AT&T network, here’s something to sweeten the deal: No contracts are required for the data plan. iPad users can cancel their data connectivity at any time. * Unlimited data will cost $30 or users can pay $15 for up to 250 MB of data. * The iPad will cost $500 for 16 GB, $600 for 32 GB and $700 for a 64-GB model. But if you want 3G connectivity, add another $130 to the price tag. It’s worth noting that these specs are nothing like what entrepreneur Jason Calacanis claimed when he tweeted Tuesday night that he had been testing a tablet....... View the full article

Kingston's upping the ante on its solid state drive series in pretty much all the ways that count. The SSDNow V+ line boasts a 512GB upper limit, twice the previous generation, with iterative options for 256GB, 128GB, and 64GB. Read / write speeds have more than doubled to 230MB/sec and 180MB/sec, respectively. Best of all, these suckers now support TRIM. Prices range from as low as $268 for standalone 64GB an can go as high as $1968 for 512GB, with an extra $15 or so tacked on if you want the bundle instead -- still alluring, still not for the feint of funding, but the good news is, if you don't need Trim or the extra speed, the original SSDNow V series is available for much smaller dents on your wallet. Kingston SSDNow V+ Features and Specifications: * Sequential Speed*: 230MB/sec. read; 180MB/sec. write * Innovative: 2.5" form factor; uses MLC NAND Flash memory components * Silent: runs silent and cool with no moving parts * Shock Resistant: no moving mechanical parts means the SSD handles rougher conditions * Supports S.M.A.R.T.: Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology * Guaranteed: three-year Kingston warranty, 24/7 tech support * Interface: SATA 1.5Gb/sec. and 3.0Gb/sec. * Capacity1: 64GB, 128GB, 256GB, 512GB * Storage temperatures: -40° C to 85° C * Operating temperatures: 0° C to 70° C * Dimensions: 69.85mm x 100mm x 9.5mm * Weight: 84 grams * Vibration operating: 2.17G * Vibration non-operating: 20G * Operating Shock: 1500G * Power specs: 2.6W active; 0.15W idle * Life expectancy: 1,000,000 hours MTBF View the full article

Autsch! In light of the recent attacks on Google China and Microsoft's revelation that an Internet Explorer security flaw served as an impetus in the assault, Germany's Federal Office for Information Security has released a warning to its population: avoid IE. Specifically, the report calls out the latest three versions -- 6, 7, and 8 -- but let's face it, those older versions should be avoided on grounds of usability alone. Boy, bet the Bonn-based agency is happy about that Windows 7 web browser ballot screen, eh?Germany advises its citizens to say 'nein' to Internet Explorer View the full article

When Cowan's latest leaked back at the beginning of November we knew just about everything we really needed to know except for one crucial bit of intel: what it looked like. Now the company has thoughtfully taken care of that, throwing up a teaser page for the product that shows off a simple, sophisticated brushed metal exterior punctuated only by a pair of buttons on either side and three LED status lights. It's perhaps a bit chunky, with a wide bezel and a little more depth than we'd like, but it should be reasonably comfortable to use whenever it releases. The 4.8-inch, 1024 x 600 touchscreen LCD is confirmed, backed by a 1.3GHz Intel Atom processor that is probably going to struggle a little bit to keep up with Windows 7, which the company has chosen to bless this device's (unannounced) storage with. That's all we know for now. View the full article

We're a few precious breaths from 2010, and if there's anything we're looking forward to, it's some wicked fast USB 3.0 storage -- Intel be damned. Set to hit shelves sometime in January, A-DATA's N002 Combo Flash Drive sports both SATA II and a USB 3.0 connection. Using the latter, the drive boasts up to 200MB/sec read and 170 MB/sec write speeds. Or if you're feeling retro, you can take advantage of that backwards-compatibility and connect via USB 2.0. Now, we don't know how much this bad boy will cost, but it will be bundled with A-DATA UFD to GO software. Of course, this thing is not nearly as cute as the Kissing Octopus USB drive, but we're sure it's not without its charms.A-DATA's USB 3.0 / SATA II flash drive announced for January View the full article

What do you do when you've got two disused shipping crates, some photovoltaics, and a couple buckets of toxic green paint? Why, you make a solar electric vehicle charging station, the first in New York as it happens. It was created by Beautiful Earth Group, which whipped up this self-contained charging station to juice the company's car, a similarly painted BMW Mini E that just so happens to fit nicely inside -- so long as you don't want to open the doors too wide. About three hours charges the little sucker up for its maximum range of 100 miles, which ought to be just enough to get you out to the Hamptons. Not that you'd want to go there this time of year.New York gets its first solar EV charging station, you can't use it View the full article

Sure, you've been hearing NVIDIA toss around names like CUDA, Fermi and Tesla for what seems like ages now, but we're guessing this is the sort of thing that'll get most folks to really take notice: a promise to cut supercomputing costs by a factor of ten. That rather impressive feat comes courtesy of the company's new Tesla 20-series GPUs, which come in the form of both single GPU PCI-Express Gen-2 cards and full-fledged GPU computing systems, and promise a whole host of cost-saving benefits for everything from ray tracing to 3D cloud computing to data analytics. Of course we are still talking about "cheap" in supercomputing terms -- look for these to run between $2,499 and $18,995 when they roll out sometime in the second quarter of 2010.Filed under: Desktops View the full article

Matrox has been distancing itself from the consumer market for awhile now, but even we couldn't resist this one. Hailed as the planet's first single-slot octal graphics card, the M9188 supports up to eight DisplayPort or single-link DVI outputs, and if you're up for getting really crazy, you can hook up a pair to drive 16 displays from a single workstation. The card itself packs 2GB of memory and supports resolutions as high as 2,560 x 1,600 (per output), which should be just enough to create the Google Earth visualization system you've always dreamed of. In related news, the outfit also introduced the far weaker 1GB M9128, which can drive a grand total of two displays for $259. Oh, and as for pricing on the octal guy? Try $1,995 when it ships later this quarter.Filed under: Peripherals View the full article

The fine folks at both HotHardware and PC Perspective have run the new ASUS P7P55D-E Premium motherboard through its paces, which has the particular distinction of handling both USB 3.0 and the up-and-coming SATA 6G through controllers by NEC and Marvell, respectively. Lucky for us, both sites' tests came to similar conclusions. The Seagate Barracuda XT SATA 6G drive has almost zero improvement over SATA 3G, other than in some burst speeds due to the fancy cache on the 6G -- the bottleneck here is the drive, not the controller. Meanwhile, USB 3.0 has speeds that are roughly 5 to 6 times faster than USB 2.0 with the same drive, a huge win for fans of external storage the world over. Perhaps even better news is that an ASUS US36 controller card with USB 3.0 and SATA 6G support is a mere $30, so this stuff is already basically within reach to the average desktop user. View the full article

Oh, brother. As we all know so well, the office can be a draining place. But devices such as these could make even the most burnt-out middle manager excited to clock in. The USB PC Prankster looks like a stock flash drive, but as you can clearly see above, a few toggle switches enable it to become quite the headache. Once plugged in, the unlucky PC that it's attached to will have its Caps Lock enabled and disabled at random, see garbled text splattered about quarterly reports and be victim to uncontrollable, erratic cursor movements. Thankfully, the drive will never activate the Enter key nor close or save documents, so you can rest assured that it's all in good fun. Turning your office up on its head costs just £19.99 ($33), but you'll have to wait a tick 'til it comes back in stock. View the full article

It's widely acknowledged by users, media, and even Steve Ballmer himself that Windows Mobile is in dire need of a ground-up revamp, and it's happening -- but not quite yet. That's Windows Mobile 7 you're looking for, and realistically, it's not going to be in your pocket for at least another year. That leaves Microsoft in a bit of a pickle: how do you facelift version 6.1 -- which is already a facelift of 6, which in turn was a facelift of 5 -- just enough to eke another year or two of life out of it? Is it even possible? Let's have a look. Gallery: HTC Pure and Windows Mobile 6.5 hands-on Gallery: Windows Mobile 6.5 screen captures View the full article