It has already been known how a magnet hovering close to a person’s head can affect speech, learning patterns and behavior. According to one researcher, you can become better at video games just by hooking up a 9-volt battery to your brain.

Neuroscientistsat the University of New Mexico asked volunteers to play a video game called “DARWARS Ambush!”, developed to help train American military personnel. Half of the players received 2 milliamps of electricity to the scalp, using a device powered by a simple 9-volt battery, and they played twice as well as those receiving a much tinier jolt. The DARPA-funded study suggests direct current applied to the brain could improve learning.

Although controversial, this type of brain simulation, called transcranial direct stimulation (tDCS), could promise for treatment of various neurological disorders and cognitive impairments.

It’s different from transcranial magnetic stimulation, in which a magnetic coil running at high voltage is positioned close to the head. The magnets stimulate electrical responses in the brain. Transcranial direct current stimulation is just what it sounds, applying the current directly to the brain.

We’ve been hearing quite a lot about these methods lately, and the scientific literature indicates the fields — tDCS in particular — are experiencing a revival, Nature News points out. Scientists hope the methods could be used to treat depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, stroke and autism, as well as to improve learning by increasing the brain’s plasticity.
Researchers are beginning to understand how an external electrical current affects brain function, including by inducing changes to the flow of electricity across neurons and increasing the expression of certain synapse proteins.

Apparently, it takes very little electricity to do all this. But please, don’t start hooking up 9-volt batteries to your brain — leave that to the scientific studies.

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The video below will explain how you can convert iTunes music into ringtones for iPhone on a PC.

Click here for the Mac guide.

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The two videos below will explain how you can convert iTunes music into ringtones for iPhone on a Mac. Hope they help!!

Click here for the windows guide.

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Flash an exotic prototype, then—Presto!—get people to buy your more boring stuff. That kind of thinking still rules at most electronics companies. Apple under Steve Jobs only shows off actual products. The difference? Apple’s arcane secret to success.

A specter harrows the consumer electronics industry: malaise. Like washed-up Catskill magicians unable to let go of old routines while a brash upstart steals their audience, nearly every maker of consumer electronics in the world clings to a quaint song-and-dance about prototypes.

“Here is your possible future,” they bark, flourishing the latest conceptual product from the lab. “Now watch us make it disappear!”

Apple’s chief magician knows better, pulling solid objects out of the aether; products you can actually buy.

If this sounds like a minor complaint about most of the industry’s lack of imagination in marketing, you’re misunderstanding the whole act. The fact that Apple does not reveal prototypes but shipping products is the fundamental difference between their entire business strategy and that of the rest of the industry. It evokes a feeling of trust between Apple and consumers—that when Apple actually reveals a product, it’s something that they’re confident enough to support for years to come.

For the better part of the last century—starting arbitrarily with the 1934 Chicago World’s Fair and its stark, Randian slogan: “Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms”—the producers of consumer goods have stuck to a basic formula: Show off a prototype; gauge public response; then release a commercial product that is less ambitious, if released at all.

It worked in part because it told a compelling story. “Here is what the future looks like; and here’s an intermediate step towards that future that you can buy today.” Electronics’ sister industries followed the same tack. Car shows were populated with prismatic concept cars hewn with non-Euclidean angles rotating on raised daises. Videogame tech demos showed graphics too impossible to believe, but entrancing enough to betray our better judgment.

But in Jobs’ encore performance, Apple has changed the routine.

Outwardly Apple’s showmanship is competent, workmanlike. Jobs-as-performer wears an understated uniform that does not distract from the act. His humor, when it exists, is subtle. The closest an Apple keynote gets to pomp are pie charts that look like wooden logs.

Yet when Jobs reveals the company’s next product, there’s a critical difference: It exists. When possible, it is available for retail purchase the same day. There are few maybes or eventuallys tempering the presentation: “Here is the tiny miracle we’ve created. We want to sell it to you today.”

As a counter-example, let me pick on Lenovo for a moment: At CES this year, they showed off the Ideapad U1 prototype, a netbook with a screen that could be decoupled from the keyboard to operate as a multitouch tablet. Clever idea, seemingly well considered and brain-bendingly not available for purchase today.

Do you see the story that Lenovo is spoiling for themselves? First, they’ve deprecated the imagined utility of every other laptop they sell without the flashy removable tablet screen. Yet they’ve also whispered a nervous apology to potential customers: “We could make something this cool, but we’re not so confident in our plans to fully commit to them. Maybe you could tell us if you think you’d like this trick?”

Lenovo might make the U1. They might sell a few units. But simply by revealing it before it was a living, breathing SKU on retail shelves, they’ve relegated it to a quirky sideshow.

See also: The Chevy Volt, announced so long ago that GM has gone through a bankruptcy and shotgun CEO transition without actually being available for sale. Bet those will be flying off the lots.

Some of Apple’s peers understand the need to manage expectations. Have you ever seen RIM show off a BlackBerry prototype? What about Nintendo? They don’t pull a Microsoft-like move of showing very early-stage products to reporters and potential customers. They simply pull out a Wii or a DS and say, “This is it. Give it a try.”

Everybody loves a prototype. Engineers get a chance to strut their stuff. If you’ve got a 40-inch OLED TV in a lab somewhere, bring it to your trade show. Executives take pride in their company’s technical prowess. Marketers get an excuse to throw an even fancier party. And customers and press get idyll fodder for a daydream.

None of those things equal units sold. None of those things turn a customer into an ardent fan.

That an industry exists around rumors and leaks for unreleased products may be useful to Apple, but it is a side-effect of their product strategy, not the basis of their marketing. Consider that when Apple finally does release a product, the marketing tends to showcase the device itself in clear, comprehensible ways. Apple isn’t shy to make claims about the grandiose, epiphanal nature of its products because—whether they pull it off or not—they have built a culture in which every product they make is designed to be world class.

Instead of prototypes, Apple makes patents. Although I’m certain Apple would keep these patents behind the curtain if they legally could, their existence proves something amazingly pedestrian: Behind the scenes, Apple is essentially the same sort of company as every other electronics star in the world.

They’re developing prototypes. They’re trying new tricks, seeing what works. They know experimentation is the lifeblood of innovation.

But like the consummate showmen they are, they temper the wooly process of building the future with something missing from nearly every other technology company: restraint. Apple may come off at times as a bit soulless, but at least they’ve got class. And when that class allows them to sell more products that make happier customers, I’ll take class over flash every time.

That the Consumer Electronics Show is held in Vegas is no accident. It’s a derelict spectacle meant to cater to mid-level buyers, gilt with the threadbare trappings of Innovation and Progress, but sending most of its audience home with nothing but a hangover and a t-shirt.

When Apple pulls a tablet out of its hat next week, it’s likely that we won’t be able to purchase it for a couple of months, but rest assured that’s only because of regulatory pitfalls. And besides, there will be no doubt that when Jobs shows us his vision of the future, Apple will be doing everything they can do to get them into our hands.

That’s the trick of it. Consumer audiences have grown wary of nearly a century of predictable sleight-of-hand. We’ve seen too many companies promise us the future, then fail to deliver it.

I believe that there are dozens of companies out there with the talent to pull the future toward us along some retail tesseract. But until they conquer their stage fright, leave aside the vaudevillian antics that savvy, jaded audiences no longer find compelling, and embrace a more honest and practical sort of conjuration, Apple will continue to be the defining technology performance of our age.

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James Cameron is stubborn. He decided nearly a decade ago to film his humans-versus-aliens sci-fi adventure Avatar in 3-D, but he refused to start production until technology could convince the viewer that he or she could step through the screen and pick up a bow alongside the Na’vi, the film’s 10-foot-tall, blue, cat-faced alien protagonists.

To give scenes realistic depth, Cameron, who brought a computer-generated liquid-metal T-1000 to life in Terminator 2, and camera whizzes Vince Pace and Patrick Campbell built the Pace/Cameron Fusion Camera System to capture images the same way as a human eye does. Cameron then used a virtual camera to walk—or fly—around in the virtual world to record any shot of the Na’vi that he wanted and combined that with the real-life footage. Here, a guide to making the most convincing 3-D film yet.

Build The Stage: Courtesy Mark Fellman/Twentieth Century Fox

How James Camerson Made a Truly Lifelike 3-D Movie

1. Build the Stage
An array of 72 to 96 cameras, depending on the size of the set, hang around the perimeter of a sound stage and are configured in a grid. Later, a computer replaces the studio walls, floor and ceiling with digitally rendered three-dimensional environments and structures. The grid is also marked on the floor to provide reference within this virtual world.

2. Capture Motion
Actors, weapons and props marked with reflective dots move around the stage while the camera grid tracks only the dots. A computer records the dots’ movement, triangulates their location, and assembles these data points into wire-frame skeletons that in Avatar will be “dressed” with computer-generated Na’vi bodies.

3. Shoot in 3-D

Capture Motion: Courtesy Mark Fellman/Twentieth Century Fox

Next Cameron films the flesh-and-blood characters in 3-D so that they will look at home alongside the Na’vi in the virtual 3-D world. Older 3-D tech used two cameras mounted side by side to create a left eye/right eye effect. Because of their bulk, those cameras were placed far apart and could shoot only straight ahead. The Fusion Camera System has two cameras, but by using small high-definition digital image sensors, the lenses can sit closer together than your pupils. The line of sight of the lenses is adjustable so that, during a shot, they can be angled closer together to focus on nearby objects, or farther apart for those in the distance, just as your eyes do. The system combines the images into a single image with realistic depth.

4. Climb into the Movie
After a computer inserts the motion-capture performances into the digital environment, Cameron carries a virtual camera—an LCD display with buttons and grips similar to a videogame controller—onto the set. As he moves, radio and optical detectors track the camera’s location and relay it to computers offstage, which render the virtual world as viewed from that vantage and send it to the tablet. This allows Cameron to walk through the virtual action to record any shot he wants—he can even set the vantage point to take shots that would require a crane or helicopter. Later, the 3-D footage of human characters can be added to these scenes.

5. Watch It
At RealD 3-D shows, a projector alternately displays the left-eye and right-eye images, each in an oppositely circular polarized direction, 144 times per second. Polarized glasses ensure that each eye sees only the image meant for it.

Climb Into the Movie: Courtesy Mark Fellman/Twentieth Century Fox

PopSci Interview: James Cameron

Behind the 3-D magic is a director who won’t let even the laws of physics get in the way of an epic story

Science Advisers are Annoying:
I have just enough of a science background to get me in trouble. When I’m writing, I’m thinking: What can cause a mountain to float? Well, if it was made out of an almost-pure room-temperature superconductor material, and it was in a powerful magnetic field, it would self-levitate. This has actually been demonstrated on a very small scale with very strong magnetic fields. Then my scientists said, “You’ll need magnetic fields that are so powerful that they would rip the hemoglobin out of your blood.” So I said, “Well, we’re not showing that, so we may just have to diverge a little bit from what’s possible in the physical universe to tell our story.”

But Sometimes Scientists are Useful:
I wanted to put Pandora in the Alpha Centauri star system, but we haven’t found any large planets there. One of my astrophysicists said, “Well, if a planet’s ecliptic was inclined at 60 degrees to our line of sight, then the Doppler method would not work because the planet would perturb [the star] Alpha Centauri A or B on a different axis, and so we wouldn’t be able to see it. You wouldn’t be able to see it using the transit method, either.” So there might be planets there. But you can only have stable orbits out to about 230 million miles from Alpha Centauri A, so your planets have to be close in, blah blah blah. So we went through the steps of creating two possible solar systems there, because it’s a binary star, and gussied it up with technical research.

Audiences Will Like it Anyway:
My goal was to tell an epic story with visual power and to impress the crap out of the audience, like my goal is every time I make a movie. When it comes to the science behind the camera, what it took to produce the images—I think the viewer likes the idea that they’re being shown something new, but I don’t think they really care how you did it. I mean, I’m happy to talk about it, but I don’t think it sells the damn ticket.

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No, I haven’t turned into the Mad Hatter, though the device I’m wearing may make me look like one. I’m trying out the Epoc headset, made by a company called Emotiv.

Earlier I calibrated the Epoc by thinking of commands for the orange box when the program asked for them: move left, move right, rise, drop, stop. For disappear, I thought of Lewis Carroll’s vanishing kitty. The Epoc just proved it can remember which areas of my brain lit up while I did that.

“Electric information from the brain is broadcast on the inside of the skull, which is how the headset picks it up,” says Tan Lee, president of Emotiv, via a videoconferencing system. (Like the company’s 10 research scientists, she is in Sydney; 20 employees work in San Francisco.) “By the time it gets to the skull, that information looks very different from the way it does on an MRI scan. So we basically had to unfold the cortex to learn how to read it.”

The $299 Epoc headset launches in early 2010, along with the Windows software that calibrates it. Emotiv’s four scientist-founders hope to make it the basis of a whole new system of computer game playing: “Pressing a button to cast a magic spell doesn’t give you a fulfilling experience,” Lee explains. “But thinking that spell does.”

The Epoc’s tendrils are set to stretch far beyond games. Emotiv has received requests for developer kits from 10,000 software engineers around the world. Applications have been suggested in industries such as aerospace, education and healthcare. Some people with disabilities are already using the Epoc to control their wheelchairs.

The most fascinating — and disturbing — thing about the Epoc is that its software can read emotional states like anxiety, frustration, excitement and engagement. In the calibration software, they are shown rising and falling on a graph in real time, like seismic readings. The idea is that game designers will be able to adjust the difficulty of a given level if you’re frustrated, or change musical tempos depending on your excitement.

As with all transformative technology, the Epoc’s mind-reading abilities are bound to have unintended consequences. I couldn’t ask a question in my interviews at Emotiv without my anxiety level rising on the graph. The days when journalists can smile through dull pitches while keeping their real feelings hidden may be numbered.

Play-it-safe startups, you have been warned.

Courtesy CNN.

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On the surface, much about the Que seems familiar. Like Amazon (AMZN, Fortune 500)’s Kindle — a $350 e-reader that has sold more than 500,000 units since its launch in 2007 — the Que displays pages in grayscale E-Ink, designed to be easier on the eyes than conventional screen displays. Like the Kindle, the Que will allow users to download books and magazines wirelessly (via AT&T (T, Fortune 500); the Kindle uses Sprint (S, Fortune 500)). To counter Amazon’s giant library of downloadable books, Plastic Logic has inked a deal with Barnes & Noble. It will also fetch digital versions of publications such as USA Today, for a subscription fee.

Like the iPhone, the Que features a single physical button that takes you to the home page. Instead of the Kindle’s awkward keyboard and page forward/back buttons, it has a pop-up touch-screen keyboard and navigates pages with the flick of a finger.

But that’s where the similarity to current e-readers ends. To see what’s new about the Que, look under the hood: There’s no silicon in the screen. All its transistors are made of plastic. This is the result of years of research by professors at the Cavendish Labs in Cambridge, England. Five years later this research yielded an e-reader that is fundamentally flexible, unlike the Kindle, with its breakable glass screen.

Soon after the company launched in 2007, CEO Richard Archuleta built an international organization. The research arm stayed in Cambridge, but every other business function was sent abroad: manufacturing moved to Dresden, Germany; assembly, to Taiwan; and headquarters, where most of the employees work, to Silicon Valley, the better to poach local talent.

“It’s very easy to get engineers excited about joining this company,” grins Archuleta, the former head of Hewlett-Packard (HPQ, Fortune 500)’s notebook business.

Disappointingly, Plastic Logic has played it safe by encasing the flexible screen in a more rigid plastic case. “We did prototypes that were rigid on one end and floppy on another,” says Anusha Nirmalananthan, Plastic Logic’s product manager. “We found users had trouble getting used to that.”

Still, the Que retains a significant “wow” factor. It is legal-paper size but weighs a mere pound, three ounces less than the comparable Kindle DX. Plastic Logic regularly drops the Que on concrete, and it survives. The battery will last for days on a single charge. Plug it into your computer and you can download any PDF or text file. The device can hold thousands of PDFs and tens of thousands of books.

Archuleta is pitching the Que squarely at business users. It will offer the ability to annotate documents. You can type on virtual sticky notes or draw on the screen. (The Kindle can do none of these things.) The Que’s price point hadn’t been announced at press time but will likely fall between $400 and $800.

That’s too rich for some analysts. “The magic number for an e-reader is $199,” insists Allen Weiner of Gartner Research.

Win or lose with the Que, Plastic Logic’s research continues. It is developing color e-reader technology with a grant from the U.K. government. It hopes to launch a color Que in 2011. Archuleta has proposed a military application: a foldout map that could be wirelessly updated in the field.

“You will see bendable, foldable, rollable readers,” he says. “Whatever the marketplace wants.

Courtesy CNN.

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Instead of taking a hammer to the phone, Soljacic marveled at the fact that this device, and billions of others like it, was sitting a few feet away from all the electricity it could ever need. Why couldn’t it receive power wirelessly, just as laptops get Wi-Fi?

Being a physics professor, not an electrical engineer, Soljacic didn’t know the history of failed attempts to produce wireless electricity. (Thomas Edison and his rival Nikola Tesla were among the first to envision long-distance power-beaming.) Soljacic also didn’t pause to consider conduction, the kind of close-range charging used in electric toothbrushes, which is about as far as wireless electricity got before him.

Soljacic learned that if you could get two magnetic fields to resonate — to sing the same note, in effect — they could transfer an electric current. With two large magnetic coils, he found in an experiment described in Science magazine in 2007, you can throw 60 watts across a room, powering a lightbulb. (Keeping the two resonators in perfect harmony over a distance is not simple; Soljacic spent several years running lab experiments before he built a system that worked reliably.)

MIT, his employer, quickly patented the technology (Soljacic’s name is on the patent) and encouraged Soljacic to start a company. He would sit on the board but find executives to run it full time. The result can be found on the second floor of a brick building in Cambridge, Mass. leased to the company by the big-and-tall tailor on the ground level.

WiTricity’s 15 employees are hard at work proving that Soljacic’s magnetic coils can power almost any electrical device. David Schatz, director of business development, shows me a TV, a DVD player and a computer, all of them wireless.

“This was our No. 1 request from business users,” Schatz says, switching on a projector. “Look: no batteries, no wires, nothing up my sleeve.” The coil sending out the power is hidden behind an abstract painting that the CEO’s wife rescued from their basement.

Schatz is the first to admit that the housing they’ve hurriedly built for the receiving coils is too bulky. “No one would want to buy this,” he says, pointing to the pack that juts out from the back of the laptop, a pregnant plastic bulge that’s about a third as large as the device itself.

Given sufficient cooperation from equipment manufacturers, WiTricity is confident that it can incorporate its coil into the guts of any device. (Think of how computermakers like Apple (AAPL,Fortune 500) turned bulky Webcams into fingernail-size lenses that fit in a thin laptop case.) CEO Eric Giler, a veteran tech executive who ran a telecom company for 22 years, understands the importance of letting potential partners play with patented technology.

So far about a dozen companies — including Intel (INTC, Fortune 500) and Sony (SNE) — have tried replicating Soljacic’s groundbreaking MIT experiment in their own research facilities, just to make sure it’s the real deal. That might make other CEOs nervous, but not Giler.

“Our best customers are going to be the guys who try to do this,” he says, “because it is really hard.” The company is also talking to furniture manufacturers about fitting coils into desks and cubicle walls. The first announcement of a WiTricity partner product is expected toward the end of 2010.

Most of Giler’s potential customers have one major question: safety. “There’s a real perceptual problem,” he says. “People think we’re putting electricity in the air, and that’s called lightning, and they know to stay away from that.”

In fact, the coils turn electricity into magnetic fields, then back into electricity. And as any physicist will tell you, magnetic fields interact weakly with humans; as far as the fields are concerned, we are no different from air. (The Earth itself exudes a magnetic field.)

Initially, Giler was skeptical. Magnetism from MRI machines can disable pacemakers. Wouldn’t wireless electricity pose similar risks? Soljacic replied that MRI magnetism is about 10,000 times stronger than his version. The Institute of Physics in London concurs: WiTricity’s magnetic field “has no detrimental effects on the human body.”

Giler makes a point of standing between the coils whenever he demonstrates the technology. At the Nikkei electronics conference in Tokyo in October, he was able to power a 1,000-watt klieg light from across the room — a far cry from that 60-watt lightbulb in Soljacic’s first experiment. “We’re going up the power curve,” he says.

WiTricity’s record so far is 3,000 watts — enough to fully charge an electric car, so long as it’s in the same room (or garage). How big could WiTricity get? “Every single person in the world can relate to the problem of running out of batteries or having wires everywhere,” Giler says. “The market is so potentially huge that numbers become meaningless.”

A wireless electric world could free up designers to create entirely new kinds of products, no longer hemmed in by the need for boxy batteries or power supplies. As one of Giler’s VC investors says, “I bet you that’s your bestseller in five years’ time. You don’t even know what it is yet.”

Courtesy CNN.

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CEO Jason Carlson points out the testing chamber that his team built by hand from foam and wood. Then he stops and taps at what looks like an ordinary photo frame on a desk.

“Imagine you’re in your office and you need to make a conference call,” he says. “You can connect your cell phone to this frame using Bluetooth, and suddenly your call is coming from it, clear as a bell. Wouldn’t that be cool?”

For the past 80 years, all loudspeakers have been based on roughly the same idea: A magnet creates force that causes a diaphragm to vibrate, producing sound. The quality of the sound varies with speaker size, but modern TV and computer-monitor design has forced speakers to get smaller and smaller. As a result, many tube TVs from the 1970s sound better than modern flat-screen TVs.

In 2001, Lewis Athenas, a loudspeaker designer working for Boston Acoustics, saw that consumers were increasingly playing music on their computers. He was nonplussed by the weedy sound from most desktop speaker systems. Then he discovered that by replacing the speaker magnet with a kind of ceramic known as a piezo actuator, he could make a computer screen act as the diaphragm. Put a thin strip of ceramic down each side of a see-through plastic membrane, and you’ve got stereo sound.

Athenas went to work in his garage. In 2005 he finished his first working prototype, a wooden frame around a 15-inch monitor. That same year he founded Emo Labs (Emo stands for “edge motion”) and raised $15 million from local venture capital firms.

Now just about any electronic device with a screen — a laptop, a cell phone, the latest and thinnest LED TV — can also be a speaker. Want better audio in your car? Wait till you hear it coming from your windshield. Like watching movies at home? You’ll love it even more when the dialogue actually comes out of the actors’ mouths.

At Emo Labs, Carlson played me a DVD of jazz singer Diana Krall performing live in Paris. The music came through loud and clear, with rich bass tones. “Touch it,” Carlson urged. “Feel the vibration of the screen. That’s what the sound is.”

Carlson left the CEO job at Semtech, a semiconductor manufacturer in Camarillo, Calif., and joined Emo Labs in 2006. He wanted to adapt the semiconductor-industry model of producing standardized components and selling them to equipment manufacturers. So Emo spent the next few years testing equipment, getting a toehold in China and Taiwan, and persuading naysayers at the equipment firms.

“I can’t tell you how many times we’ve sat in front of engineers, and they keep asking, ‘Where’s the sound coming from again?’” says Carlson. “It’s like their minds don’t want them to believe it.”

The company is tight-lipped on pricing and on which electronics giants it has struck deals with. Those companies should make their own announcements in the first half of 2010. (The products will not carry Emo Labs branding.) Carlson says the technology will add about a 10% price premium, so consumers should pay $100 more for a $1,000 TV equipped with Emo’s speaker.

Electronics firms have been deep-discounting their products for some time now, and even Carlson admits they are wary of any technology that could drive up the price of their products. Still, given that 160 million flat-panel TVs and 150 million laptops were sold in 2009, even a tiny slice of that market would be lucrative for Emo.

And that’s not counting the global loudspeaker business, set to hit $4.2 billion in 2010, according to research firm Electronics.ca. Carlson recently installed conventional speakers throughout his house. Wiring and tearing into walls cost more than the sound equipment, he says. “It would be beautiful if you could just use picture frames in each room,” he sighs. “Especially if they were wireless.”

To that end, Emo Labs has met with a company 20 miles down the road, near MIT. Its name is WiTricity.

Courtesy CNN.

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Then Jason Carlson of Emo Labs, a last-minute addition to the schedule, wheels a TV and a set of giant speakers onto the stage. They’re playing the Beach Boys. Carlson whips the speaker box off to expose a sheet of clear plastic, which is producing the sound.

Suddenly no caffeine is required, no jargon necessary. Emo has invented invisible speakers. There are audible gasps. Dozens of digital cameras flash at once. Those same jaded observers start cheering.

“I didn’t think I could give a good presentation that wasn’t one-on-one,” Carlson tells me later. “I was worried I was going to be a failure.” Emo goes on to win $500,000 and the conference’s DEMOgod title.

By some measures, these are lean years for commercial innovation. In a recent Fortune Small Business/Zogby International poll, just 19% of small business owners said they aimed to introduce a new product or service in 2010; that’s an 8% decline from a year earlier. Among those looking to launch, a sizable majority — 77% — described their product as an “incremental improvement” rather than “game changing.” Like those scripted startups at DEMO, most entrepreneurs seem to be playing it safe.

But look closely at the few who are innovating — and at the products that make you go ooh — and another narrative emerges.

Hardware is back with a vengeance. Most successful products coming out of small tech companies in the early 2000s were Internet plays, like Google (GOOG, Fortune 500), Facebook or Salesforce.com (CRM). That territory has now been thoroughly mined. The most exciting products of 2010 will look a lot more like … well, like the breathtaking science-fiction stuff we always expected from the 21st century.

This, our sixth annual Next Little Thing feature, examines four companies whose products have the potential to revolutionize how we work and play. Apart from Emo Labs, there’s WiTricity, which is making electricity as wireless as Wi-Fi; Plastic Logic, whose flexible electronic reader is a generation beyond Amazon’s Kindle; and Emotiv, whose headset reads your brain, letting you control a computer without touching it.

Despite the diversity of their products, these companies have much in common. All were founded by scientists who did groundbreaking research during the 2000s. In all four cases, the founders recruited business leaders with the chops to commercialize their ideas. All are ambitious, yet modest enough to know they can’t grow without hundreds of developers and equipmentmakers. And all have one major hurdle to overcome: mass skepticism.

As Eric Giler, CEO of WiTricity, says of being headhunted by the company: “I thought, ‘Well, this is impossible. But if it’s true, the world will change.’”

Invisible Sound
Invisible Power
Flexible Reader
Reading Brain Signals

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It’s also available from other retailers, some of whom are offering lower prices. For example, new Sprint customers can get this model from Amazon.com or LetsTalk.com for $50.

An Overview of the Palm Pixi

The Pixi can be thought of as the successor to Palm’s popular Centro series. Like those earlier consumer-friendly models, it has an easily pocketable design with a touchscreen, keyboard, and an affordable price.

This device has a tablet shape, with a 2.6-inch, 320-by-400-pixel, capacitive touchscreen. This display is smaller and has a lower resolution screen than its predecessor, the Palm Pre, but the Pixi itself is smaller and lighter, and sells for a lower price.

As mentioned earlier, this smartphone runs Palm’s webOS, a multi-tasking operating system able to wirelessly synchronize a wide variety of data with online services like Google, Facebook, Yahoo, and Microsoft Exchange.

It comes with a highly-capable web browser, email software, and multimedia player. Additional third-party applications are also available.

Sprint’s version of the Pixi includes the 3G mobile broadband standard EV-DO. It also has a GPS receiver and Bluetooth, but not Wi-Fi.

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Dell unveiled the Android-based Mini 3 smartphone today and announced that it will be available soon in China and Brazil. Venturing away from the familiar server and desktop foundation that Dell is built on may seem risky, but there is a method to Dell’s madness that may just pay off.

The Dell Mini 3 may not impress on paper, but if it can capture the China market Dell will emerge victorious.Ever since rumors began to circulate earlier this year that Dell was planning a move into smartphones there have been naysayers. The market is crowded. Competition is rough. Dell is already losing ground in its core business. If your device isn’t from Apple and doesn’t say ‘iPhone’ it can’t succeed in the smartphone market.

Dell has tried to expand its portfolio of hardware over the years, distributing printers, cameras, PDA’s, televisions, and other Dell-branded peripherals. Those efforts have been met with mixed success, and even the best of them has been received moderately at best. The message to Dell for the most part has been ‘don’t quit your day job.’

The move by Dell into smartphones is not a desperate hail-mary, though, but a calculated strategy. A mobile phone is no longer just a mobile phone, it is a mobile computing device. The Mini 3 is not so much a branch into a new direction as it is a natural evolution of Dell’s core market.

The flip side this evolution is Nokia. Nokia has built its reputation as a provider of mobile devices. However, it too sees the writing on the wall in terms of the future of mobile computing which is why it has developed the Booklet 3G netbook. Dell and Nokia are coming at the problem from two different sides and meeting somewhere in the middle.

Why China then? If Dell wants to get into the smartphone market, why not launch the Mini 3 in the United States? With devices like the Motorola Droid, HTC Droid Eris, and Samsung Behold II the Android platform is taking the industry by storm and Dell could ride that wave of Android popularity.

Perhaps the better question to ask though is “why not China?” In the United States the total mobile phone market is around 270 million and Dell would have to engage in an exclusive distribution arrangement that would limit the market to less than 90 million.

Verizon and AT&T may dominate the mobile provider market in the United States, but from a global perspective they are the big fish in a small pond. China Mobile alone has a subscriber base nearly double the entire United States market. América Móvil, the parent of the provider Dell will be distributed through in Brazil, has more subscribers than Verizon and AT&T combined.

Some, like my PC World peer Jared Newman, have suggested that perhaps Dell is avoiding the United States market because the Mini 3 is underwhelming and Dell knows it would flop. The Mini 3 may not compare well on paper with other whiz bang smartphones in the United States, like the iPhone or the Droid, but Asia uses its mobile devices differently. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the iPhone hasn’t exactly been flying off the shelves since it launched in China.

As much as we like our gadgets, users in Europe and Asia are actually more demanding when it comes to mobile devices. Users in China expect to be able to order food from vending machines and pay for parking from their mobile phones.

It does seem risky for Dell, a brand established on servers and desktops, to dive into a highly competitive market like smartphones. At face value it may seem questionable to avoid launching in the United States. But, if Dell can carve a niche for the Mini 3 in a market like China it doesn’t need to try to be the next iPhone killer in the United States.

Dell’s Mini 3 strategy seems a little crazy. But, if it works Dell will be crazy like a fox and laughing all the way to the bank.

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The result, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, won numerous awards as 2007′s best game and has sold more than 14 million units worldwide.

With the sequel, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (out today, Xbox 360, PS3 and PC, rated M for ages 17-up, prices start at $60), Infinity Ward looks to test the boundaries of what is considered acceptable in video games. Players can choose to take part in a terrorist attack against civilians, and they defend a bombed-out nation’s capital.

“The coolest thing is you don’t exactly know who is going to win,” says creative director Jason West. “It’s actually scary. (A near-future setting) allows it to be more real and, I hope, resonate with people more than the rah-rah good vs. evil stuff of the past.”

In the first Modern Warfare, players hunted down power-hungry ultranationalist Russian leader Imran Zakhaev. Five years later, a new leader named Vladimir Makarov has risen to power, and an elite international task force (the player included) must pursue him.

Think 24 with terrorists threatening the USA and Jack Bauer forced to use any means necessary. Or Tom Clancy’s 1994 book Debt of Honor, in which the U.S. Capitol is destroyed during a joint session of Congress, killing the president and other officials.

To help pull off its thriller, Infinity Ward enlisted Hollywood hands including film composer Hans Zimmer and NCIS writer/executive producer Jesse Stern, both of whom were impressed. The game, Zimmer says, “takes you to lots of exotic locales and … has an emotional darkness to it, where sometimes you go, ‘I just can’t believe they are going to do this now,’ and then they do it. It’s full of those sort of moments where it just takes things further than anyone would expect. I think it is less a geographic journey than an emotional one.”

Click here for Discounts on COD.

In recent days, the game’s envelope-pushing campaign has had some hiccups. A viral video promoting the game was pulled off the Net because it used a homosexual slur (not from the game) as an acronym. And leaked video showing the player participating in the terrorist attack on civilians raised alarms.

Modern Warfare 2 is “not a play-it-safe game,” says Geoff Keighley, host of Spike’s GameTrailers TV. “The pace is really well-scripted and, like 24, you never know where it is going to go next. … I think they want to push buttons with this game.”

The controversy is probably not over, says Adam Sessler, co-host of cable channel G4 TV series X-Play. He expects the terrorist scene to ignite another wave of public furor. “But at least the game will be out, and that element can be addressed in the context of the game itself.”

In designing the game, the developers spent a lot of time figuring out how to best present that scene. (Note that players can skip it if they prefer.) “We knew it was going to be upsetting,” Stern says. “Particularly where it falls in the game, it gets you pretty twisted up. I hope it makes some people a little upset.”

An argument can be made that portraying terrorism in games is less appropriate because of the medium’s interactive nature. But that’s not fair to game creators, Sessler says.

“There is a helplessness for the player in that sequence and games, somehow, are not being allowed to go into that creative territory. It’s always somehow supposed to be typified as ‘fun.’ This will elicit a reaction and create a motivation for the successive events that happen in the rest of the game,” he says. “I’m not going to go so far as to say it is right or wrong. I feel that is really in the eyes of the beholder. What I do feel is defensible is it is within Infinity Ward’s right to be creative and move into kind of a taboo area for video games.”

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