It must be tough trying to get noticed in the crowded MP3 player market.
Most small concerns haven’t got a hope in hell of competing with the grace or design finesse of Apple, neither have they the resources to dream up the compelling feature sets served up by the likes of Creative and iRiver.
So squeezed on both sides, smaller MP3 manufacturers often serve up designs “inspired” by their successful rivals, try to get noticed by playing the wacky design card or claim some kind of world record for their product.
So, no prizes for guessing what route MobiBlu have taken with their DAH-1500 player, billed as the “world’s smallest MP3 player”.
The new teensy-weensy MobiBlu DAH-1500 player apparently offers MP3 and WMA support, a FM tuner and a claimed 15- 20 hours battery life (we say ‘apparently’ because our Japanese translation skills aren’t too good).
But it certainly is a wee little fellow, measuring a Tom Thumb-esque 24x24x24mm and weighing in at just 18 grams.
The unit features an attractive OLED display taking up one side, adjacent to a iPod-style circular control wheel.
In an interesting twist, MobiBlu’s press agency seem to think that showing someone about to drop their sugarcube-shaped player into a cup of tea forms a winning marketing strategy.
If users manage to avoid dunking the player, their publicity photos also suggest they can wear the device as a head tilting earring or lug it around the neck as a clunky necklace. Cool, or err, what?
There’s some remote hope that the unit may see the light of day sometime this month – we spotted this rebranded JNC Digital version on the web.
A study by Nielsen Entertainment has revealed that men spend more money on video games than they do on music, adding weight to a growing belief that video games are displacing other forms of media for the notoriously fickle attentions of young men.
Naturally, advertisers are keen to cash in on the rising popularity of games, and are looking at ever more persuasive ways to bombard bedroom-bound, bunglesome boys with beguiling adverts (branded billboards in race games are already commonplace, as we’ve 
Overall, Nielsen reported that active gamers tend to spend just over 5 hours a week playing alone and 3 hours a week playing with people or online.
UK Online is hoping to bring broadband to the masses by smashing the price point for “entry-level” home broadband down to a wallet-untroubling £10 a month.
Surfers not used to this level of generosity may be wondering where the catch is, but we haven’t found it yet: we wrote to UK Online and they confirmed that both the Broadband 500 and Broadband 2000 are unlimited services with the Broadband 8000 offering an enormous 500GB monthly download allowance.
Canary Wireless have released their Digital Hotspotter device, which, as the name suggests, is a WiFi detection and analysis tool.
To scan for more networks, bash the button again.
And while we can’t disagree with Ben’s summary, we wonder how long it will be before laptop makers start fitting WiFi sniffers into machine cases to let users seek out accessible networks without going through all the palaver of booting up.
Google has started dishing out factual answers for some queries at the top of its results page, thus sparing click-weary users the hassle of navigating to other sites to look up the information.
Norvig went on to explain that Google feeds the service with information from Web sites they considers to be reliable, but it’s yet to establish formal relationships with any of the sites providing the content.
A hard drive, containing confidential data belonging to the Brandenburg police in Germany, was auctioned over eBay and bought by a student from the city of Potsdam for €20 (us$25/£14) according to a report by Spiegel, a leading weekly German newspaper.
Last year, mobile security specialists Pointsec bought a load of hard drives off Internet auctions like eBay to find out how much sensitive company information they could unearth (and publicise their expertise in the bargain, natch).
Yahoo’s search engine division has announced that it will be dishing out hardware galore, resources and “critical material aid” to support the non-profit Wikipedia online encyclopedia.
“Their popularity is growing very fast and, accordingly, their bandwidth and hardware needs have increased substantially.”
Skype is a Voice over IP (VoIP) service that allows you to make phone calls via a broadband connection to other users for free. And we like it.
Despite all the benefits of VoIP telephony, the perceived ‘fiddlyness’ of the technology makes it look like an uber-geeky toy for weird, gadget-loving, parameter tweaking folks (cough!).
Once installed, picking up the Cyberphone causes the Skype interface to immediately pop up on your PC’s desktop (sadly, this amused us for some time) and you can then scroll through your contacts via the ‘+’ and ‘-‘ buttons on the phone’s keypad.
Naturally, fellow Skype users can ring you for free too, and you can elect to use your PC’s ring tones or use the one built into the phone.
VERDICT
Comcast Corp. is working with TiVo on an advertising system that will slap new, updated commercials into already-recorded programs.
The new technology could help make DVRs more palatable to advertisers and the television networks because it should increase the chances of someone watching an ad rather than fast-forwarding through it.
Under the pact, both companies are free to sell ads on the service, and each retains its respective revenue from any sales.