Hasta La Gadget!

I’ve often wondered how a real life Batman might be unmasked (what can I say? I’m a nerd). I imagine it would unfold a bit like this story–someone would uncover the mystery and sell it to the highest bidder. On eBay.

British street artist Banksy has risen to prominence recently, thanks to the masterfully executed–and rather controversial–couch gag he created for The Simpsons, back in October. His 2010 film Exit Through the Gift Shop also generated a stir upon its release at Sundance, back in January.

Despite all of this newfound success, however, the graffiti artist has somehow managed to keep his identity a secret. Someone claims to have discovered Banksy’s identity, however–and it is offering to unmask him on the popular auction site, eBay.

“I have uncovered [Banksy’s] identity by matching up the prices of his sold pieces to corresponding tax records,” the seller stated on the auction page. “I will reveal no more details… I give you 100 percent assurance that it is most certainly the full name of the street artist known as ‘Banksy.'”

Bidding for Banksy’s identity started at $3,000. Thirty-eight bids later, it was at $999,999. The auction froze when it hit the later number. It has since been removed from the site altogether, simply carrying the note, “This listing (260720844294) has been removed, or this item is not available.”

This isn’t the first time the seller has tried and failed to offer up Banksy’s real name via the auction site. Last time eBay pulled the listing on the grounds that the seller wasn’t offer a tangible product. The new listing centered around a piece of paper with a name on it. No word on why that one has been pulled this time around. 

E-readers could use a little color in their lives — and getting a little cheaper wouldn’t hurt either. The NoteSlate has color, but not certainly not all colors. It’s a touchable slate with a 13-inch diagonal, 750 x 1080 display that’s said to be “eInk” — which may or may not mean “E Ink,” the company behind the displays used in the Kindle, Sony Reader, and others. When it’s produced, supposedly by June, you’ll be able to select from the traditional white background and black foreground or go with a black background with white. Other colors, including green, blue, or red text, or a “4 colour edition” that does all of them at once, are due sometime down the road. The tablet works with touch or pen input, will offer 180 hours of battery life, and is to be fully open-source, with the initial software release supporting simple drawing, storing of notes, and MP3 playback. Version 1.5 will add PDF and text viewing, while version 2.0 will be rocking OCR handwriting recognition. The best news? It’s said to be just $99, though surely the multi-color edition will cost more. Right now it exists only as renders but with, a release mere months away and a decidedly attractive price point, we’re intrigued. Skeptical, but intrigued.

$99 concept NoteSlate tablet does electronic ink in color, but only one at a time originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 18 Jan 2011 10:37:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Admit it, you were getting a bit sick of those little slingshotting fowl. Well, a new champion has arisen, taking the much-coveted top spot on the iTunes free apps list. The game Bubble Ball follows a pretty simple premise–the user place a series of simple machines in strategic spots on the screen, in order to roll a ball to the finish line.

But where many of the titles that have snagged the top spot have been the work of a team of experienced programmers and game designers (like, say, Rovio, the company behind Angry Birds), Bubble Ball is largely the product of a single designer–Robert Nay, a 14-year-old eighth grader from Utah.

Nay did most of the game development using a few tools like Corona DSK, a $349 program that lets the user create a game and publish it to the App Store. Nay also got a little design help from his mom.

The 14-year-old started work on Bubble Ball back in November, launching it on December 29th. Since then, the app has been downloaded 1.5 million times. Over the weekend, it beat out the free version of the incredibly popular Angry Birds.

Amid the doom and gloom of the economic… whatever it is we’re stuck in at the moment, it’s nice to look at a success story. Sonos is such a tale and GigaOm has taken the time to profile the upstart, which started in 2002 and has gone on to produce a series of high-end docks, networked audio players, and an iOS controller app that ties it all together. Sadly, users of non-Apple devices have been left out in the cold and, while Sonos VP of Sales Tom Cullen wouldn’t say when other versions are coming, he did at least say “We can see a handful of other potential platforms, and we want to see which one has the biggest concentration of music lovers.” We say why choose one? Plenty of music lovers exist on them all.

Moving back to hardware, Cullen indicated that a person’s music largely moves with them these days, and so the company is looking to moving into the car and personal audio areas, meaning we could see some Sonos-branded headphones and head units in the not too distant future. This could be in addition to what looked to be a potential move into proper home theater. These are crowded spaces compared to the world of wireless audio that the company currently plays, but another quality option is certainly not a bad thing.

Update: Just got a note from Sonos indicating that “at no point in the near future does Sonos plan on moving into cars.” So, it looks like you’re stuck with any of the dozens of other alternatives for now.

Sonos recounts its successes, dishes on future plans but not Android support originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 18 Jan 2011 10:13:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Hey, just in time for scary worldwide climate change, comes the wooly mammoth. Sounds familiar, right? A team of Japanese, Russian, and American scientists based out of Japan’s Kyoto University is working to clone a big hairy beast from the Earth’s last ice age. 

The scientists hope to clone a baby mammoth within the next six years by extracting DNA from the body of a preserved mammoth. The DNA will then be injected into the cells of an African elephant.

Scientist Akira Iritani, the head of the team is working with techniques used to clone a mouse from frozen cells. Once cloned, the scientists plan to study the mammoth to learn more about its species. Says Iritani,

If a cloned embryo can be created, we need to discuss, before transplanting it into the womb, how to breed [the mammoth] and whether to display it to the public. After the mammoth is born, we’ll examine its ecology and genes to study why the species became extinct and other factors.

No word on plans for an amusement park built around the cloned extinct animals.