As Facebook floats on the Nasdaq, cynicism remains over the third largest initial public offering (IPO) in United States history, after Visa and General Motors. The social network offered over 400 million shares at €38 (£31) each in its IPO on 17 May before the main flotation on 18 May. Mark Zuckerberg's social network will raise $16 billio
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On the show this week we discuss Facebook's record-breaking IPO, a socially-networked beehive, astronauts preparing for asteroid missions and Diablo III's ridiculous DRM. Plus, the rest of the week in Wired news. By: Nate Lanxon, Continue reading...
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Micro-blogging site Twitter is to start recommending users for you to follow, based on your recent web browsing history. The site calls these " tailored suggestions," and it will track your footsteps across the web by using integrated Twitter buttons and widgets as surveillance outposts. So, every website with a "Tweet this" button will log yo
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Today's photography from the Wired Aperture -- beautiful daily images of the Wired world around us, curated every day by Wired.co.uk. Subscribe to the Wired Aperture RSS feed or follow the @WiredAperture Twitter account to make sure you never miss a picture. View at high-resolution and full-screen in our gallery. By: Nate Lanxon
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Can a cooperative social networking site that allocates shares between users take on Facebook? Zurker's founder Nick Oba thinks so. Earlier this month, Wired.co.uk posted a guest post warning people to be wary of cooperative social network Zurker, which presents itself as an alternative to Facebook. Zurker's USP is that users are "c
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The sleepy wetland area of Romney Marsh could become the UK's nuclear dumping ground, with a multi-billion pound disposal facility buried up to a kilometre deep underground. The UK government's Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) has asked counties and communities around Britain to "express an interest" in having nucl
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French brand Alcatel went a bit quiet in terms of mobile phones for a while, but now it's coming back with a wide range of budget Android handsets -- the 990 is one of the fancier models with a 5-megapixel camera and Android 2.2 Froyo. Its all-plastic body is solidly built and feels sturdy and reliable in the hand. It c
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A research paper from North Carolina State University has found that pre-release album leaks on BitTorrent can actually lead to a boost in sales. If an album leaks a month in advance of its release date, it can sell 60 additional units. Economist Robert Hammond compared data from a private BitTorrent tracker to official album sales number
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Gaming PCs tend to follow the maxim that bigger is better when it comes to brute processing power, but the Alienware X51 punches well above its weight, packing a full-strength gaming machine into a relatively small form factor. One thing about Alienware kit, it's never been known to hide itself away. But though the distinctive styl
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People used to convince royalty that they could turn base materials into "gold". Now it's your turn to impress your boss. By: Ken Denmead, Edited by: Ian SteadmanContinue reading...
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Apple is cleaning up its energy act. The computer company says that by early next year, the energy used to power its worldwide data centers will all come from renewable sources, such as solar, wind power, or hydro-electric dams. It announced the news 17 May in a post to its website. That's a victory for the environmental activists at Greenpea
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Planning a startup and wondering how much of your limited budget to allocate to traditional advertising? We have no doubt of the answer: nothing. Though they shouldn't, traditional advertising and mass media still dominate many marketing budgets. That made sense when the networks open to companies -- billboards, cinemas, newspapers, TV -- were owne
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Most medical equipment used in the developed world is too expensive or energy-intensive to be useful in rural clinics. The smart answer, according to Matthew Callaghan, codeveloper of the OneBreath ventilator, is "reverse innovation". Here are some examples. By: David Baker, Edited by: Ian SteadmanContinue reading...
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The average episode of Top Gear runs around $1 million (£635,000) to produce. But those high-style, high-flying -- and incredibly expensive -- aerial shots just got slightly more affordable with the introduction of a new quadrocopter specifically developed for shooting automotive action. Christopher Kippenberger and his Berlin, Germany-b
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For the first few years after Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook in 2004, he'd end his Friday all-hands meetings by leading the company in a one-word chant. In unison the company would shout: Domination! Some of the older Facebook employees -- those over 30 -- thought the battle cry was sophomoric and undignified. It was. Most college kids are sophom
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With the E3 express train steaming down the tracks it's easy to get caught in the searing glare of the bright lights and AAA titles. I'll return again to LA this year with the aim of picking through the headlines to find the games that matter to families. The ideal solution to this would be to take the kids with me, although I suspect they wouldn't
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Sonic artist and programmer Daniel Jones and composer Peter Gregson have joined forces with Britten Sinfonia orchestra to create The Listening Machine, a tool that listens to the social networking activity of 500 people in the UK and uses algorithms to translate that into music. The machine is a piece of softwa
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Sometime in early 2004, as Mark Zuckerberg was furiously coding the first iterations of The Facebook in his Harvard dorm room, the internet passed what then seemed to be an impressive milestone: 750 million people worldwide had become connected. The exact birthdate of the internet is difficult to pin down, but it's fair to say that it took at l
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Forget about The Terminator, the real problem with AI (artificial intelligence) is what to do when it meets your boss or even your friends. This is not the pitch for some kind of sci-fi rom-com, but rather the genuine concern of Stuart Armstrong, a research fellow at Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute. His job is to thi
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Today's photography from the Wired Aperture -- beautiful daily images of the Wired world around us, curated every day by Wired.co.uk. Subscribe to the Wired Aperture RSS feed or follow the @WiredAperture Twitter account to make sure you never miss a picture. View at high-resolution and full-screen in our gallery. By: Nate Lanxon
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A student at the University of Abertay has come up with a clever way to assess the size of natural disasters, by using home broadband routers to check whether buildings are still standing. David Kane's prototype program pings (an echo-like call to a network node, to check if its available) thousands of routers in the area. Then, the algorithm can m
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Roughly 4,700 asteroids in the solar system could prove dangerous to life on Earth. That number comes from Nasa astronomers, who used the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (Wise) to figure out the number of potentially hazardous asteroids in our cosmic neighbourhood. Potentially hazardous asteroids (PHAs) are near-Earth asteroids that will come w
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The Swiss canton of Graubünden has created a website that allows people to experience a hike in the Alps without having to leave their sofa. WebWandern.ch, which translates as Web Hike, lets you follow 10 different hiking routes at different heights above sea level. Each represent a different part of the route be
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Google has introduced a new sidebar on its results page, which will deliver relevant facts and figures on the places, people and things you search for. It's called Knowledge Graph, and it currently holds 3.5 billion facts about 500 million objects. So search for French-Polish physicist Marie Curie, and the Knowledge Graph will have a blurb from Wik
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A Soyuz TMA-04M spacecraft launched successfully on 15 May carrying three crew bound for the space station. The Soyuz craft will dock with the space station in the coming days. Aboard the spacecraft are Nasa astronaut Joe Acaba and Russian cosmonauts Gennady Padalka and Sergei Revin. By: Amanda Doyle, SEN.com, Edited by: Duncan GeereContinue readin
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We attached each lens to an iPhone 4S (and a Sony Xperia S when needed) and shot distortion and resolution charts to test for light fall-off (vignetting), distortion and softness. Then we snapped a variety of outdoors photos to gauge ease of use, design and practicality. By: Michael Lowe, Edited by: Ian SteadmanContinue
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Graham Obree wants to ride his bicycle -- at a speedy 160kph, or 100mph in old money. "It's a question of working out what the laws of physics allow, given the power you can produce," says Obree, based in Ayrhshire, near Glasgow. "If everything was perfect, with the power output and aerodynamic drag, then [160kph] might well be possible." This
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After decades of urban evolution, the world's major subway systems appear to be converging on an ideal form. On the surface, these core-and-branch systems -- evident in New York City, Tokyo, London or most any large metropolitan subway -- may seem intuitively optimal. But in the absence of top-down central planning, their movement over decade
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The Sahara Forest Project has a simple yet ambitious goal: to grow vegetation in the desert. As a pilot, a one-hectare plant is now being built outside Dogha, Qatar, by Michael Pawlyn of Exploration Architecture, engineer Bill Watts of London design firm Max Fordham, and the Norwegian nonprofit Bellona Foundation. By:
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Whether you want it or not, phone calls are coming to commercial aeroplane flights. But like any new service, there are technical limitations, a premium price point, and a chance someone is going to be upset sitting next to a Chatty Kathy. Virgin Atlantic has announced that customers would be able to make cellphone calls and send text messages whil
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It's been just a little over a day since Blizzard performed one of the old rituals, releasing Diablo upon the world for the third time, and I've been doing my best to play all the hell out of it. There's a lot of hell in there, though. Wired will have a full review of Blizzard's long-anticipated action role-playin
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Design is finally having its day. For the past few decades, design was seen as an afterthought, lumped together with marketing. Yet this is about to change. Just as the 1970s brought on the advent of the role of Chief Marketing Officer, the Chief Design Officer is an emerging role that is gaining quick entry into the C-Suite. The Chief Market
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As much as my fingers want to fire up Steam on my Mac and buy Diablo III, my brain has so far responded with, "Fingers, don't you dare." Activision Blizzard's just-released action RPG is selling like butter-laden hotcakes, but not to me. I'm fed up of games that demand I keep a permanent connection to the internet open so it can talk to a deve
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James Spectrum and Paul Malmström are Pepe Deluxé, the Finnish electronic musicians responsible for 2001's "Before You Leave", which was featured in a Levi's ad. But their latest album has taken an altogether weirder direction. "Queen of the Wave is a concept album, a three part pop opera based loosely on the legendary esoteric book 'A Dweller on
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Digital services provider Yell -- best known as a yellow pages directory -- has acquired DIY website and shop builder Moonfruit for $29 million (£18 million). Within the acquisition announcement, Yell has made it clear that Moonfruit senior management team have a golden handcuffs deal that will see retention bonuses of £5.2 million paid
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Today's photography from the Wired Aperture -- beautiful daily images of the Wired world around us, curated every day by Wired.co.uk. Subscribe to the Wired Aperture RSS feed or follow the @WiredAperture Twitter account to make sure you never miss a picture. View at high-resolution and full-screen in our gallery. By: Nate Lanxon
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Technologist Nik Sargent has rigged up a nest of bumblebees with a system of sensors to monitor their behavioral patterns. The system sends out automated tweets with certain data triggers. Sargent -- who has a day job as a strategic consultant in IT -- first launched the Bumblebee Project in early 2011 as a hobby
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The first test of an ambitious balloon-based geoengineering project has been cancelled. The organisers cite a lack of government regulations, and a prickly patent dispute, as the leading reasons for abandoning the trial. Geoengineering projects deliberately manipulate the Earth's natural systems to offset the impacts of climate change. The governme
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LG's Optimus series continues apace with the L3, a budget smart phone with a distinctive look and a full suite of Android features. Part of the "L" series of budget smartphones, the L3 looks a little, well, squarer than most mobile phones. Not as all-out square asMotorola's Flipout, but certainly not as long as your average
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Dan Siroker helps companies discover tiny truths, but his story begins with a lie. It was november 2007 and Barack Obama, then a Democratic candidate for president of the US, was at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California, to speak. Siroker -- who today is CEO of the web-testing firm Optimizely, but then was a product mana
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