Sony Ericsson pioneers green phone

Sony Ericsson's eco-friendly brand, GreenHeart, has as its pioneer model the C901. The mobile phone is produced with recycled water bottles and CDs, and waterborne paint, which uses locally-sourced water and contains less volatile organic compounds, all features that reduced its production carbon emissions by 15%, says Business World.

The C901 comes with an in-phone electronic manual instead of the standard print version, and has an energy-efficient display.

The Swedish company, which ranked second in Greenpeace's 15th Guide to Greener Electronics, performed best in the toxic chemicals criteria. Save for a few components that are still being phased-out, all Sony Ericsson products have been PVC-free since 2007 and BFR-free since 2008, says the report.

Since the beginning of Twitter time, the company has used sequential IDs for tweets, and this has helped some third-party services come up with rough estimates as to the total number of tweets on Twitter, writes TechCrunch.

This was always a bit inaccurate, since it has done huge jumps a few times. However, this will change as Twitter's new status ID system, Snowflake, is in the process of rolling live.

The Snowflake is an ID system based on timestamps rather than sequential numbering.

ESRI is demonstrating a Silverlight-powered widget that renders terrain data in 3D with full interactivity, which supports 2D and 3D views, with full manipulation controls, reports VizWorld.

The imagery, street and topography base maps are sourced directly from ESRI's ArcGIS Online portal for geospatial services, data, applications and communities.

Elevation data is sourced from SRTM, GTOPO30 and GEBCO bathymetry via a new service, developed as a custom Server Object Extension for ArcGIS Server.

A woman in Cambridge is suing two companies that make implantable radio tracking chips for pets, claiming her cat developed cancer after receiving one of the implants, reveals Boston.com.

Andrea Rutherford filed her lawsuit in Cambridge District Court earlier this month, naming Merck & Company of New Jersey, distributor of the HomeAgain pet-tracking product, and chipmaker Digital Angel.

She claims the companies violated an implied warranty that the HomeAgain product was safe, and Rutherford seeks “reasonable compensatory damages and interest”.