The Invisible Hand Says Cubs May Win It

Inkling is a fantasy stock market that predicts outcomes based on the free market. It works like this: users create questions and potential outcomes (”Will it rain tomorrow?”, “At which major technology conference will Bill Gates shed his human skin and reveal his angelic beauty high above Mount Rainier?”) and other users buy and sell shares based on their belief that a particular outcome is true.

We go into a bit more detail about Inkling and gadgets over at CrunchGear, but thus far Inkling has predicted two Apple announcements and made a fairly good showing before Jobs’ September 12th announcement, as we see below.

Inkling’s real strategy, however, is to aid in decision-making. Say, for example, you’re making a widget. The widget should be under budget and on deadline, so you pose a question to a market of your co-workers “Will we complete our widget on time and under budget?” You offer four outcomes and have them anonymously by shares in each of these outcomes. The resulting graphs will plot the most likely outcome because everyone - from marketing to the tech guys - will have a say. The tech guys will say everything will be over and the marketing guys will say everything will be under and the programmers will say it will take quite a while but it will come in under budget. The mix will give you a fairly strong indicator of what you’re up against.

This general concept - creating unique markets out of various outcomes - is already in place over at Cantor Fitzgerald with their Hollywood Stock Exchange although Inkling’s mission to create white label markets for small and medium businesses is quite nice. It’s a great way to get everyone’s opinion by filtering out language, emotion, and human interaction which, we all know, poison the brain.

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New Generation of Hydrogen Fuel Cells Powers Up

A safer and more practical way of storing and releasing hydrogen, discovered by two Arizona State University researchers, could lead to a new type of fuel cell capable of packing 10 times more energy. The key is apparently using the alkaline compound borohydride — 'a 30% solution of borohydride in water actually contains one-third more hydrogen than the same volume of liquid hydrogen.

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Major Google/Intuit Partnership

Google and Intuit are announcing a partnership today at 1:15 pm California time. The meat of it seems to be that they are building Google services directly into Intuit’s QuickBooks, so small business users will be able to list themselves on Google Maps, create and manage advertsing campaign with Adwords and post listings on Google Base.

There is a conference call at 1:15 with Intuit President and CEO, Steve Bennett and Google CEO, Eric Schmidt that we’ll be on, which will have more details and at least some hints on the econcomics of the deal.

The Google services will be built into QuickBooks 2007, available this Fall, for U.S. customers only.

I sure hope there’s an easy way to turn this stuff off.

Update: Notes from Analyst call:

Eric Schmidt is talking about embracing the long tail of small businesses on the conference call. Less than half of Quickbooks businesses have an online presence. This will help them get online, he says. Businesses will be able to create an adwords account using pre-filled information from Quickbooks. If the business doesn’t have a website Google will create a notecard page for them. All businesses will be given a $50 credit to start. Google will also create a business listing for businesses for search on Google.com and Google Maps.

Intuit is also integrating Google Desktop (borderline Spyware) into Quickbooks. Thank God this is opt-in…but given that Quicken’s customers are not on average very web savvy, there is a very good chance that many small businesses will opt in without really understanding what they are doing (storing the contents of their hard drive on Google’s servers).

Financial terms: In response to a question on the financial terms, someone said “We have some shared revenue and cost things”. Basically a non answer, although it’s clear Google is making payments to Intuit pursuant to this deal. They also say they are working on things with Google to expand partnership beyone QuickBooks base.

Google will create a web page for businesses that don’t have one, since CPC advertising requires something to click to…So google will be charging these businesses to send them to a page served by Google. I wonder if those pages will have Google ads on them.

Google and Intuit are looking at integrating this into Quicken as well.

Google and Intuit are announcing a partnership today at 1:15 pm California time. The meat of it seems to be that they are building Google services directly into Intuit’s QuickBooks, so small business users will be able to list themselves on Google Maps, create and manage advertsing campaign with Adwords and post listings on Google Base.

There is a conference call at 1:15 with Intuit President and CEO, Steve Bennett and Google CEO, Eric Schmidt that we’ll be on, which will have more details and at least some hints on the econcomics of the deal.

The Google services will be built into QuickBooks 2007, available this Fall, for U.S. customers only.

I sure hope there’s an easy way to turn this stuff off.

Update: Notes from Analyst call:

Eric Schmidt is talking about embracing the long tail of small businesses on the conference call. Less than half of Quickbooks businesses have an online presence. This will help them get online, he says. Businesses will be able to create an adwords account using pre-filled information from Quickbooks. If the business doesn’t have a website Google will create a notecard page for them. All businesses will be given a $50 credit to start. Google will also create a business listing for businesses for search on Google.com and Google Maps.

Intuit is also integrating Google Desktop (borderline Spyware) into Quickbooks. Thank God this is opt-in…but given that Quicken’s customers are not on average very web savvy, there is a very good chance that many small businesses will opt in without really understanding what they are doing (storing the contents of their hard drive on Google’s servers).

Financial terms: In response to a question on the financial terms, someone said “We have some shared revenue and cost things”. Basically a non answer, although it’s clear Google is making payments to Intuit pursuant to this deal. They also say they are working on things with Google to expand partnership beyone QuickBooks base.

Google will create a web page for businesses that don’t have one, since CPC advertising requires something to click to…So google will be charging these businesses to send them to a page served by Google. I wonder if those pages will have Google ads on them.

Google and Intuit are looking at integrating this into Quicken as well.

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ULTIMATE Lego Chaingun -- not your parents' rubberband gun

Heck yes. We've been trying to utilize our Lego collection for the production of projectile apparatuses ever since the Pirate sets stopped coming with those flickable cannons. Now it seems our sad attempts have been eternally showed up by Sebastian's ULTIMATE Lego Chaingun, which has 8 barrels, a 64 shot capacity, and an eleven rounds per second firing rate. The rubberband chaingun took over a month to build, and is powered by an honest-to-goodness Lego motor. Sebastian has all sorts of ideas how to mod up his gun even more, including an ammo counter or even faster firing rate, but whatever he manages to do it's clear all we're going to be bringing to our next rubberband fight is a white flag. Keep reading for some hot embedded YouTube action of this thing blasting away.

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iBreath, your iPod-powered breathalyzer

You know that people are trying to jump on the iPod bandwagon when someone releases a breathalyzer that connects to the ubiquitous music player. Yes, David Steele Enterprises (no, not that David Steel) has just released an iBreath ($50, black or white color), a small device to plug into the dock connector of your iPod. Sticking out of the side of the device is the breathalyzer tube, and within five seconds it'll read out your blood alchohol content level, accurate to within 0.01 BAC -- oh and if that wasn't enough, it doubles as an FM transmitter for your car stereo.

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Samsung releases 32 and 64GB CompactFlash cards

It's been barely 10 days since we discussed 8 and 16GB SD cards, but today, Samsung announced today that it has developed the world's first 40-nanometer memory device, allowing for 32 and 64GB CompactFlash cards. According to the company's press release, the new design uses a Charge Trap Flash architecture, which "reduces inter-cell noise levels." Oh, and remember when we asked if anyone had figured out the Moore's Law for flash memory? Turns out Samsung has: "Introduction of a 40nm manufacturing process for 32Gb NAND flash marks the seventh generation of NAND flash that follows the New Memory Growth Theory of double-density growth every 12 months, which was first presented by Dr. Chang Gyu Hwang, president and CEO of Samsung Electronics' Semiconductor Business in a keynote address at ISSCC 2002." By those calculations, we should have laptops with flash memory within a year.

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Ben Heckendorn's Xbox 360 laptop: best mod ever?

Every so often a mod comes along that's so intricate, so amazing, so over the top, that words simply don't do it justice (but we'll try anyway). Ben Heckendorn's Xbox 360 laptop is one such mod. Having garnered no small amount of fame from previous portable projects like the nPod, PPS2, and N64p, Ben was commissioned by a generous benefactor to somehow make a 360 "good to go" a la the Crunchwrap Supreme -- and since this is the great Mr. Heckendorn we're talking about, slapping a hinged LCD onto an out-of-the-box console simply wouldn't do. Instead, Ben spent three months designing and building the so-called Xbox 360p, machining a custom aluminum laptop enclosure by hand into which he stuffed a keyboard, 1,280 x 720 Westinghouse LCD, and get this -- even a custom-built water cooling system to replace the 360's stock, bulky heat sinks. The end result is a polished, professional looking (albeit heavy -- this machine weighs in at about 14 pounds) laptop complete with WiFi, USB ports, obligatory glowing green ring, and converged power supply so that the monitor and gaming system only require a single cable snaking out the back. Well done, Ben, well done; but as you yourself note, there's no such thing as resting on one's laurels, so we can't wait to see what you have in store for the PS3 and, most especially, the swing-your-arms-like-a-maniac Nintendo Wii. Hit the jump to check out the 360p's guts, and then head over the Ben's site for a ton of photos and one of the more thorough build walkthroughs that we've come across...

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MD AirForce vacuum emails over powerlines

Admittedly, this vacuum from MD Manufacturing has a little less robot-action than we're accustomed to, but it makes up for it with some innovative Internet connectivity to accommodate our laziness in other ways. In addition to packing a pile of dirt-storing capacity, the AirForce central vacuum incorporates Universal Powerline Bus (UPB) technology to provide Internet access to the vacuum over your home's AC wiring. Which means that when it's not hooking up with other lonely vacuums on MySpace, it'll send an email to let you know when its bag needs replacing, or if it encounters other problems like a clog or overheating. Alas, the aforementioned lack of robotic abilities means you'll actually have to fix the problem yourself, but that'll no doubt change one day -- when an overstuffed bag will be the least of our robotic vacuum problems.

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Intel's Core 2 "Quadro" on the horizon

Just when we were getting excited about the Core 2 Duo chips that have become standard in everything from the 24-inch iMac to new Dell laptops, we've now got quad-core fever. Yes, Intel already has the shown them off before, but Tom's Hardware has a very thorough investigation into the nature of these four-headed beasts -- what Tom's is dubbing the Core 2 Quadro. (Of course if this really is the name, Intel may have to chat with NVIDIA first, as it already uses the name Quadro in a set of graphics cards.) So how'd it turn out? Not surprisingly, video editing and rendering are everyday tasks that took advantage of all four cores: "Test results with the software packages Main Concept with H.264 encoding and the WMV-HD conversion make this very clear. We noticed performance jumps of up to 80% when compared to the Core 2 Duo at the same clock speed (2.66 GHz). A Core 2 Quadro at 2.66 GHz and higher is the answer for HD video (editing and rendering) at full HD resolution (1920x1080)." However, Tom's also noted also that the Core 2 Quadro requires 167 W of power in idle mode, which is the same amount that a Core 2 Extreme demands at full capacity, and attributes this to an "incomplete implementation of Intel's SpeedStep technology at this stage." That said, maybe once Intel reaches 32 cores (as it's said previously would be possible), the new chip name will be Core 2^5 Insanely Awesome.

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