ups

Let Bill Gates have his TouchWall. You can still be the envy of your friends with the "Heads-Up Challenge" digital poker table.

Unlike the "iDealer" or its mahjong counterpart, this one truly brings the game of champions into the Digital Age by using a large touch screen to shuffle, deal, calculate odds, and pay the winner. And get this: It will even let you peel up the cards, according to Chip Chick.

Unfortunately it can handle only two players--hence the name, which refers to a one-on-one game. But it certainly beats that other wireless poker game, … Read more

Confronting a pop-up is one of those times when your gut reaction might lead you down the path of frustration and tears. If the "X" is spring-loaded with malware, anywhere you click on the pop-up could trigger that virus.

This is the path less traveled--the majority of pop-ups truly are the ads they appear to be--but when a pop-up does deliver malware, undoing the damage could be a tense, jittery journey. We get enough panicky Spyware Horror Story submissions to know that so-called button flips and booby-trapped Close buttons continue to deliver malicious payloads.

So what is the … Read more

No matter how good your pop-up blocker is, every so often one of these suckers slips through. No big deal, right? You just click on the 'X' to close it, right? WRONG!

Here's a quick tip for how to close pop-ups safely.

You don't want to click on that 'X' because some nasty pop-ups may deliver malicious software to your computer no matter where you click, even clicking the 'X' to close the pop-up window.

We know this because of the horror stories sent by users to Jessica Dolcourt at … Read more

Have you founded a tech company?

Chances are, if you're a U.S. entrepreneur, you're about 39 years old and hold a bachelor's degree, and there's a good chance your company was started in the same state where you received your education, according to a study released Thursday by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and researchers from Duke and Harvard universities.

Based on a study of U.S. entrepreneurs who started their companies between 1995 and 2005, the findings show the median age of U.S.-born founders was 39 years old, with only 1 percent … Read more

Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers is forming a "Green Growth" fund for green-tech start-ups looking to scale up their operations.

PEWeek reported on Thursday that the fund will be over $400 million and have input from Kleiner Perkins partner Al Gore.

The idea behind a late-stage funds such as this is to give up-and-coming companies the money to ramp up, rather than develop their core technology.

This late-stage funding is particularly important in the energy business because companies require a large amount of capital to test their technology at commercial scale.

Google.org, the philanthropic arm of Google, … Read more

Our favorite Seinfeld character, Newman, was a U.S. postal worker who had a simple solution when he got behind in his deliveries: He'd just stow the mailbags in the basement. If you suspect your own mailman saw that episode and got the same idea, read on.

The "Micro GPS Mail Logger" is designed to be tucked in with the mail and, after delivery, the recipient can track where it's been between origin and destination by examining the data on its microSD card. Bendable and a half-inch thick, it's small enough to fit into packages … Read more

Intel wants to make the whole Web editable, just like a single Wikipedia page.

The chip giant on Tuesday will make a beta available of Intel Mash Maker, a free browser extension that allows users to modify Web pages and combine information from different sources. Its first beta works with Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 7, though at this point the features are far more mature in Firefox, Intel said.

The product, which originated in Intel's research labs, is similar to existing mash-up tools like Yahoo Pipes and Microsoft Popfly in that it has a graphical design tool.

What's different is that the actual mashing up of information on Intel Mash Maker happens on the client, rather than the server. So instead of making a different Web application to, say, plot real estate listings on Google Maps, Intel Mash Maker lets people add a widget that adds visualization to the real estate listing site.

… Read more

Here's a cool little collectible vinyl toy we saw this weekend, in the form of a quirky anthropomorphic video game cabinet. Apparently, there's an entire subculture of fans who collect these limited edition vinyl toys (although they're not really very toy-like, with no moving parts and limited production runs).

Designer Erick Scarecrow created the $30 Soopa Coin-Up Bros. as an homage to classic arcade machines, and its blank surface (available in white, black, green, orange, and a few other colors) can be customized with paint, markers, or stickers--giving a new twist to the old games-as-art debate.

Solar power start-up eSolar has raised $130 million in funding, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal (subscription required).

The Journal says one of eSolar's investors is Google, which announced last November that it would begin investing in alternative energy companies in an effort called RE

Pasadena, Calif.-based eSolar has plans to build large solar-thermal plants using the heliostat design, which utilizes an array of flat mirrors that direct sunlight onto a water tower, turning the water inside to steam, which then turns a turbine to make electricity.

Now, the company says, it has come up … Read more