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We're not sure how wise it would be to entrust a $14.99 gadget with one's health, but that's the goal of the "Heart Rate Sanitarian Watch" from Giz Fever. To use the "Heart Frequency Check," according to the product description, one need only press a finger to one of the wristwatch's sensors; the same is true of the indelicately named "Fat Check" function. There's also an alarm to keep you from falling asleep on the treadmill.

Virgin Mobile USA will now offer a flat-rate, unlimited calling plan to compete with the big four cell phone operators in the U.S.

Starting July 1, the new prepaid service called "Totally Unlimited" will include free nationwide calling with no roaming charges for $79.99 a month. For $10 more a month, Virgin Mobile users can add unlimited text messaging, IM, e-mail and picture messaging.

Because it's a prepaid service, Virgin's customers won't need to sign a contract. And at $79.99--or $89.99 with the messaging plan--Virgin Mobile's plan is less expensive … Read more

Prodded by the aging Boomer population, wearable exercise monitors have themselves boomed in recent years. But the obvious discomfort of wearing a monitor against the chest has pushed manufacturers to devise other scenarios--sometimes as far away from the heart as possible in the body's extremities.

The "Mark of Fitness MF-180" exercise monitor is one such example, keeping track of the body's performance through a fingertip. Not only does it measure the heart rate, Red Ferret says, but its built-in LCD will also display goals, calories burned, and recovery rates. All this was integrating into a … Read more

Greener One, now in early beta, is a very interesting and timely idea. The CEO, Zoli Piroska, wants to build a "crowdsourced database of green attributes for consumer products." The benefit for consumers is that they'll be able to tell what the environmental impacts are of products they are considering, from TVs to laundry detergents--and users will be the ones to build the database of attributes.

On the input side, Greener One is a structured wiki. Consumers who want to add information to the database are directed to look up certain info on products, and there's … Read more

Updated April 21, 5:36 AM PDT to reflect the actual announcement by Skype.

Skype on Monday said it is now offering unlimited calls from the U.S. to phones in a wide range of international locations.

For $9.95 per month, callers will be able to ring folks abroad in 34 countries, including many in Europe, along with Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, China, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, Korea and Malaysia. (The details of the new flat-rate subscriptions were first published in an Associated Press story Sunday evening.) There is one limit--in most of those countries, the calls must be … Read more

Whether marking printers or produce, the increasing number of "green" claims on products can make it hard to separate sincere efforts at sustainability from marketing fluff.

Environmental watchdogs warn that corporate "greenwashing" will lead jaded consumers to abandon efforts to shop responsibly.

However, individuals can counteract the confusion and police the marketplace using online tools, according to Joel Makower, executive editor of GreenBiz.com.

"In this age of the Web, the blogosphere, and social media, I don't think greenwashers are going to get very far or that fraudulent, hugely misleading companies are going to … Read more

Update 1:33 p.m. PDT: Netflix has apparently fixed the site's recommendations and ratings.

Netflix customers saw only minor glitches a day after the movie rental service suffered an 11-hour Web site outage because of an undisclosed systems malfunction.

Customers were unable to access ratings and recommendations on Tuesday, according to Steve Swasey, a spokesman for the company. The company, however, appeared to have fixed the problems by the afternoon.

"This is part of the site that we haven't been able to get back online yet," Swasey said earlier in the day. "Otherwise the … Read more

Those watching for signs the overall economic woes are affecting the tech industry may not have to wait much longer.

Although many big tech names say they have yet to see a direct impact (beyond the dip in their stock prices), one analyst I talked to said that it's typically not until the end of the quarter that such warning signs crop up.

Well, in addition to being St. Patrick's Day, it's also two weeks before the end of the first quarter and the time to start watching for negative earnings pronouncements from companies that realize their … Read more

Apple has been throwing a lot of love at their iPod Touch MP3 player recently. A few weeks back at Macworld, Steve Jobs announced that the iPod Touch would now include the iPhone's e-mail, stocks, weather, notepad, improved maps, and Safari Web clip features, as well as support for Apple's new iTunes movie rentals. As of yesterday, there's even a new 32GB model to lust over. With all these new developments, Apple's iPod Touch seems less and less like the iPhone's feature-deprived sibling, and more like the touch screen, high-capacity convergence player we all wanted … Read more