The UpStream

You never know what you might get from Germany. Sometimes it is Anti-Simpsons fighting and sometimes it is creativity. Today I would like to focus on the latter.

Volkswagon, the company that forever changed terrible cars, ran a contest called Fun Theory, in which the winner designed what they call the Speed Camera Lottery. How does this work? Well, if you are caught speeding, they send you a ticket. Very creative, right? If you are NOT speeding, however, you are entered into a lottery to win the money the speeders pay with their tickets.

Want to see this thing in action and hear the creator talk about his creation? Hit the break.

CES (Consumer Electronics Show) 2011 is coming up quickly, January 5, and we are starting to see a lot of cool new devices that we may or may not see on the show floor. This week's exploration into the new is called OneMoreFace. It is an adapter you add to the top of your smartphone to add a forward-facing camera.

Right now the device is only a prototype and only designed for the HTC Google Nexus One, but the designer has promised commercial viability in the near future. I also expect to see this start showing up for other smartphones that are missing the popular Qik-enabling feature.

Want to know how this works? Hit the break.

Coming off the heels of Operation: Payback where the "hacker" group Anonymous set its sights on taking down Aiplex Software with coordinated DDoS (denial-of-service) attacks. Now, Anonymous has set their sights on four major players involved in the recent WikiLeaks scandals.

To find out who and how, hit the break.

While the Apache Foundation may be taking over responsibility of Google Wave, they will be resigning their responsibilities on the Java SE/EE Executive Committee. They do so after 10 years on the board responsible for maintaining standards for Java across the software industry.

Before we get into the reasons they left, let's talk about their tenure. In the 10 years with the organization, Apache has been "Member of the Year" 4 times. They also were voted for another term by 95%, far more than needed. Obviously everyone liked them.

So, why are they leaving? Hit the break to find out.

Hi, I'm an Intel. And I'm an AMD. We don't really get along, nor will we ever agree on nanoprocessors or being hardcore with hexacore. But one thing is for certain: we are sick of analog video display outputs; specifically, VGA!

This week Intel and AMD announced that they are teaming up with the help of Dell, Lenovo, Samsung and LG to completely remove VGA by 2015 and to focus only on HDMI and DisplayPort.

Want more news on the obsoletion? Click the break.

It may seem impossible to steal Blizzard's title as Titan of the MMO world. It is however easy to steal their confidential documents revealing a new game titled Titan. Blizzard's plans for the next 5 years were leaked onto the Internet this week revealing lots of expansions, a movie and a new game.

The leaks seem to originate in the Activision Blizzard offices and China and shortly after general manager Ye Weilun left the company. There is no telling if he was the direct source of the leak or if he was the unfortunate director of someone who did but suffice it to say, this really solidifies the Chinese theory.

For details from the leaks, hit the break.