Some 60,000 cell-phone users who had signed up to receive “promotional messages” from Nextones.com in order to get a free ringtone got just such a text message on January 18, 2006 advertising a cell-phone-related Stephen King book. This resulted in a class action that was thrown out on the grounds that plaintiffs had agreed to “terms and conditions” permitting such cell-phone advertising; moreover, the federal law prohibiting the use of an automatic telephone dialing system applied only to systems that dialed numbers randomly or sequentially, and the defendants were operating off ...

Unlike of many other concepts electric bicycle concept HMK 561 from Ralf Kittmann took home an iF Design Award for some seriously forward thinking. Cyclists HMK 561 is made of conductive carbon fiber, which is not only an excellent conductor of electricity, but also acts as a capacitor that can store energy. This energy is obtained by converting the mechanical energy into electrical energy in each mobile connection of mechanism. The resulting energy fed to the engine and lights. And there is already a working prototype! Via ...

Most Internet connections tend to be coarse ‘one size fits all’ in terms of bandwidth allocation, so you’ll be grabbing the same amount of throughput for downloading emails as for playing games or downloading a large file. The free NetBalancer program gives you the power to tune your broadband to deliver custom bandwidth depending on the application. So, for example, you can set your BitTorrent downloads at a lower priority, while giving your web browser maximum throughput and so on. Some ISPs already offer this kind of feature via their admin ...

Sony Ericsson’s Xperia brand has expanded to include several new models this year, so to keep you fully up-to-date, here is a rundown of the entire range and their key features, plus some speculation on the future: Xperia X1. The first of the series released in late 2008, the Xperia X1 had a side-sliding QWERTY keyboard and a distinctive X design for the softkeys below the 3″ touchscreen.  A 3.2 megapixel camera with autofocus and flash could be found on the rear of the handset, a 3.5mm headphone port was on ...

Bank Run is an intriguing mix of Hollywood action film, interactive first person game and then when you throw in an iPhone app, you’ve got the complete package. Start the story on your desktop, and then when (like the main character) your boss catches you playing games on work time, you can carry on the adventure on your iPhone. Addictive and good fun!   www.bankrungame.com Via pocket-lint

This guy is clearly obsessed with his PC set-up so decided to install everything on the sealing above his bed, is he the ultimate geek? Via mikelgan