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Another day, another great set of judges for this year’s Hardware Battlefield set to coincide with CES 2014. We are pleased to announce that Indiegogo’s Slava Rubin, Brady Forrest of Highway 1, and investor Trae Vassallo have all agreed to be judges for the competition. Each will bring their years of experience to bear on what should be an amazing event.

Like Startup Battlefield, this new competition will pit 20 hardware startups against each other. The winner will be chosen by VCs, makers and TechCrunch Editors.

The best thing? The Hardware Battlefield is taking place at CES 2014 in Las Vegas but is open to all comers and you don’t need a conference badge to enter, attend the battlefield events, or simply spectate. Our goal is to find the diamond in the CE rough. We don’t care about Samsung, Sony, and Philips -– we care about you.

It’s free to enter. The competition is open to all hardware companies who are planning to launch (crowdfund or ship) product in a two-week window before or after January 10. You can still be in prototyping stage but you must have a working, usable product by January 7 and be ready to offer pre-orders on that day or soon thereafter. We recommend launching your crowdsourcing page during the event, however, as it will have maximum impact.

We will have more details shortly but for now we invite you to submit your product. The rules are simple:

1. You must launch your product or crowdfunding campaign before January 7.
2. You must be a single proprietor or small company.
3. This must not be a feature update to an existing product.
4. You must be able to attend rehearsals and sessions in Las Vegas prior to CES and during the show.
5. You must launch first with TechCrunch and approach other media after you appear on our stage.

We will pick 15 entrants on October 30 and announce the location, time, and judges closer to the event. The grand prize winner will get $50,000 to go towards research, development, or whatever else your team needs to get by. All projects will be kept confidential until January 7.

We are very excited about this new event and we want to make it the best one ever. Remember to email sponsors@techcrunch.com if you’d like to sponsor the festivities and if you have any questions email john@techcrunch.com. We look forward to seeing what you’re working on and we hope to see you in Vegas!

Asus has been busy rolling out audiophile grade headphone amplifiers this month. Back on October 17 Asus unveiled the Essence III featuring an audiophile grade USB DAC. Asus has now unveiled another audiophile grade headphone amplifier called the Xonar Essence STU. The Essence STU features a USB DAC. The amplifier also supports asynchronous USB audio […]

We’re sure many of you guys have come across Wikipedia entries which sound as though someone paid the author of the page to write something nice about a particular product, brand, or company. Given that Wikipedia is expected to be a neutral source of information, this is a little disturbing, and probably the reason why many schools discourage or disallow Wikipedia to be used as source material for reports. In any case it seems that the Wikimedia Foundation has had enough of these deceptive practices and have since announced that they will be cracking down on sockpuppeting, which is where Wikipedia users create fake identities to help companies or brands edit Wikipedia pages that will put them in a positive light.

According to Sue Gardner, the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, “Unlike a university professor editing Wikipedia articles in their area of expertise, paid editing for promotional purposes, or paid advocacy editing as we call it, is extremely problematic […] We consider it a ‘black hat’ practice. Paid advocacy editing violates the core principles that have made Wikipedia so valuable for so many people.” Given that creating new or fake accounts is pretty easy, we can only imagine that the Wikimedia Foundation’s efforts would be more reactionary as opposed to precautionary, since fake accounts and glorified Wikipedia entries are only noticed after they have been edited, but still kudos to their efforts nonetheless.

Wikimedia Foundation To Crackdown On “Sockpuppeting” On Wikipedia original content from Ubergizmo.

In a few hours’ time, Apple is expected to kick off their event which many believe will see the official launch of the fifth-gen iPad, iPad mini 2 with a Retina display, as well as the possible release of OS X Mavericks, updated MacBook Pros with Intel’s Haswell chipset, a Mac Pro launch, and also the possibility of an Apple TV refresh, along with new iPod announcements to top things off. It sounds like a pretty happening event and while there will be multiple live blogs covering the event, if you’re looking for a live video stream, it has been reported by some that the “Apple Events” channel has made its way onto Apple TV devices, suggesting that Apple could offer up a live video stream of  today’s event.

Apple is also expected to make the stream available through its website although as it stands, the announcement page and page for the stream itself has yet to go live, but perhaps it will in the next few hours. Previously Apple has made live streams available only through Apple devices, like the Apple TV for example, which is what they did last year for the first iPad mini event, so it won’t be a complete surprise if they did something similar again this year. In any case the event will kick off at 10AM Pacific Time on the 22nd of October, so if you’re looking forward to the event, you’ll want to keep an eye out for the event, or check back with us for more coverage.

Apple To Live Stream Today’s Event original content from Ubergizmo.