The NYT reports on the potential environmental benefits and cost savings that could be generated, as a result of these initiatives.

Green and clean.

To the rubbish pile that the Internet is creating, alongside the road maps, newspapers and music CDs, add one more artifact of consumer life, the paper receipt.

Major retailers, including Whole Foods Market, Nordstrom, Gap Inc. (which owns Old Navy and Banana Republic), Anthropologie, Patagonia, Sears and Kmart, have begun offering electronic versions of receipts, either e-mailed or uploaded to password-protected Web sites. And more and more customers, the retailers report, are opting for paperless.

The Guardian reports on a pattern that seems to be ever more evident and replicating, across emerging markets.

A new day beckons, a day of empowerment.

In Africa, where a billion people use only 4% of the world’s electricity, many cannot afford to charge a computer, let alone buy one. This has led phone users and developers to be more resourceful, and African mobiles are being used to do things that the developed world is only now beginning to pick up on.

The most dramatic example of this is mobile banking. Four years ago, in neighbouring Kenya, the mobile network Safaricom introduced a service called M-Pesa which allows users to store money on their mobiles. If you want to pay a utilities bill or send money to a friend, you simply dispatch the amount by text and the recipient converts it into cash at their local M-Pesa office.

According to California-based mobile-banking innovator Carol Realini, executive chairman of Obopay: “Africa is the Silicon Valley of banking. The future of banking is being defined here… It’s going to change the world.”

Also, industry insiders like Eldar Murtazin have indicated that the new WP7 design guidelines do not mandate hardware buttons.

Coupled with a strong discovery aspect for apps and a novel interface, it could well be a game changer.

The Guardian reports that researchers at Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul, have developed an approach that aims to harness sound energy from speech, music or noise and turn it into electrical power.

For sure, this ain’t a silent revolution.

Electrical engineers have developed a new technique for turning sound into electricity, allowing a mobile to be powered up while its user holds a conversation.

The technology would also be able to harness background noise and even music to charge a phone while it is not in use.

However, there could be a downside to the innovation, if it gives people a new reason to shout into their phones as they attempt to squeeze in every extra bit of power they can.

In a move that could potentially spread panic (and rightly so) among stamp collectors, The Local reports the Swedish postal service is toying with the idea of allowing customers to pay for postage through texts, rather than stamps.

An innovative application of mobile payments, but a setback to collectors everywhere.

The system under consideration in Sweden would allow users to use codes retrieved via text message for sending letters and parcels weighing up to two kilogrammes.

The postal services in both Sweden and Denmark are convinced that people will continue to send letters, despite the rise in other forms of communication, and paying postage by mobile phone is seen as a way of making the process easier.

While  immersing ourselves in worlds where avatars and emoticons rule, there seems to be no room for intimate forms of expression. 

Can we break out of this adult dollhouse? It’s going to be tough, but not impossible.

She takes a considerably darker view, arguing that our new technologies — including e-mail messages, Facebook postings, Skype exchanges, role-playing games, Internet bulletin boards and robots — have made convenience and control a priority while diminishing the expectations we have of other human beings.

Instead of real friends, we “friend” strangers on Facebook. Instead of talking on the phone (never mind face to face), we text and tweet. Technology, she writes, “makes it easy to communicate when we wish and to disengage at will.”

Of an interview subject she calls Brad, Ms. Turkle writes: “Brad says, only half jokingly, that he worries about getting ‘confused’ between what he ‘composes’ for his online life and who he ‘really’ is. Not yet confirmed in his identity, it makes him anxious to post things about himself that he doesn’t really know are true. It burdens him that the things he says online affect how people treat him in the real.

The NYT reports that such incidences are becoming a growing hazard, so much as to prompt efforts at legislation.

The consequences of cutting ourselves off completely from the real world could have even more deeper emotional implications. Many of which we would not be able to even contemplate today.

“The big thing has been distracted driving, but now it’s moving into other ways technology can distract you, into everyday things,” said Anne Teigen, a policy specialist for the National Conference of State Legislatures, which tracks legislative developments.

Exercising in Central Park on Tuesday, Marie Wickham, 56, said she understood what all the fuss was about: “They’re zigging, they’re zagging, they don’t know what’s around them. It can definitely be dangerous.”

PC Mag reports that the ‘Project Steeper’ initiative aims to reduce operating voltage to less than 0.5 volt, by reducing the power consumption of the basic building blocks of integrated circuits.

It aims at a ten-fold increase in energy efficiency when devices are active, and close to zero consumption in passive mode.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that electronic devices account for 15 percent of household electricity consumption, and that this may double by 2022 and triple by 2030. The IEA also claims that in the EU, devices using standby power accounts for about 10 percent of electricity used in homes, and is expected to rise to 49 terawatt hours per year by 2020.

“Power dissipation has become one of the major challenges for today’s electronics, particularly as the number of devices used by businesses and consumers multiplies globally,” said Dr. Heike Riel, head of the nanoscale electronics group at IBM Research—Zurich, in a statement.

“By applying our collective research in TFETs with semiconducting nanowires we aim to significantly reduce the power consumption of the basic building blocks of integrated circuits affecting the smallest consumer electronics to massive, supercomputers.”

USA Today reports that Holiday Inn has piloted MobileKey, a unique check-in program (watch demo), where guests can directly go to their rooms, and unlock them with their mobilephones.

Your phone battery ran out? No worries, the locks can be opened with a traditional keycard as well.

On the day of your arrival, you’ll receive a text message that contains both your room number and a secured link that will be used to unlock the door. You won’t need to stop at the front desk to retrieve a plastic keycard.

IHG has been wanting to test the “MobileKey” program because of the enormous growth in the use of mobile technology, and because many customers – mainly business travelers – like the ease of bypassing the front desk.

CNET reports the waiting period for an iPhone 4 is around three weeks, while that of the HTC Incredible is around a month.

With the launch of Motorola’s Droid X just around the corner, it promises to be a blockbuster summer for smartphone manufacturers.

A rare, bright spot of news in the midst of uncertainties surrounding the recovery.

“Smartphones are what people want,” said Roger Entner, a senior vice president at Nielsen. “And they want the best and the hottest devices. That’s creating a lot more demand in the market.”

First-quarter sales of smartphones worldwide jumped 48.7 percent compared to a year earlier, according to market research firm Gartner. Highly subsidized price tags are attracting customers as well as a growing portfolio of new devices.