cell phones

Using your cell phone during checkout at Target could soon earn you discounts.

Starting Wednesday, the giant retailer will allow customers to take advantage of special mobile-coupon offers on their handsets.

The coupon is redeemed when the bar code on the phone is scanned at checkout. Offers are good only once and expire on the dates listed. "We believe it's a competitive advantage for us," says Target.com President Steve Eastman.

Target says it will be the first major nationwide retailer to exploit the bar-code technology in all its stores. It almost certainly won't be the last.

Ignoring the health risks of heavy cell phone use invites a cancer epidemic, supporters of a bill requiring manufacturers to put labels on mobile phones and packaging said Tuesday.

"We can do nothing and wait for the body count. That's what happened with smoking" before warnings on cigarette packs were mandated, David Carpenter, director of the Institute for Health and Environment at the University of Albany, told Maine lawmakers.

Jeremy Lesniak owns a small Web design firm in Randolph, Vt. He has 10 employees and hundreds of clients. Sick isn't an option.

"I have two cell phones and a pager" he said. "I have taken partial sick days or just worked from home, but I haven't had a real one in over six years."

The old-school practice of American graffiti may have met its match in some high-tech prevention programs designed to spot, report and remove the blight from city and private property.

The latest weapon comes in the form of an iPhone application, developed by a Los Angeles company, that will allow cities to catalog graffiti, dispatch cleanup crews and provide key evidence to police.

As more people reveal their whereabouts on social networks, a new site has sprung up to remind you that letting everyone know where you are -- and, by extension, where you're not -- could leave you vulnerable to those with less-than-friendly intentions. The site's name says it all: Please Rob Me.

Launched last week, Please Rob Me is exceptionally straightforward. Pretty much all it does is show posts that appear on Twitter from a location-sharing service, Foursquare. Please Rob Me puts these posts into a long, chronological list it refers to as "Recent Empty Homes."

A sharp rise in the sale of consumer gadgets around the globe will pose serious environmental and public-health risks over the next 10 years unless action is taken to properly collect and recycle their materials, according to a report from the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP). The products range from computers, printers and mobile phones to music devices, electronic toys, and televisions.

The clean tech news of the week is going to be dominated by Bloom Energy's emergence from stealth. I can hardly believe that it was almost four years ago that I first wrote about Bloom. Reading that 2006 EcoGeek article, I'm proud to say that we got the broad picture right, but the details are still tantalizing.

If you've got a car and a bicycle, do you need a motorcycle too? Wireless carriers are betting that you do. They're making a big push this year for the motorcycles of the gadget world: devices that are bigger than a phone but smaller than a laptop.

The most famous entrant in the category is Apple Inc.'s iPad, which comes out next month. But many other manufacturers are crowding into the niche, and were planning to do so even before Apple's announcement in January.

The world's largest wireless carriers, including the four largest in the U.S., announced Monday that they are combining forces to make it easier for software developers to write applications that will run on as many phones as possible.

The "Wholesale Applications Community" is an attempt to retake the initiative from phone makers like Apple Inc., Nokia Corp. and Research in Motion Ltd., which have applications stores of their own. Google Inc. is also building a significant store for its Android software.

Users of AOL's main instant-messaging service can now chat directly with friends on Facebook.

AOL Inc. said Wednesday that a new version of the AIM software connects with the chat function on Facebook's Web site, letting AIM users communicate with friends who are logged on to the social network.

The AIM user still needs a Facebook account, however, and it's the Facebook persona rather than AIM's that appears to the friend on Facebook.