No, seriously, if you find yourself in an emergency, Hello Kitty will be there with hand-crank USB cell phone charger, AM/FM radio, LED flashlight, siren, and compass. She’ll also make you feel warm and cuddly, because that’s what Hello Kitty does. No word on pricing or availability.

If there’s anything more annoying in that…er…business videoconferencing session than low lighting, I don’t know what it is. The Net Cowboy from Japan’s Digital Cowboy solves that problem by adding in some LEDs to shed some light on the problem. Now, you can interact with your "business associates" with full clarity.

I have thing for Tablet PCs (although my wife stole mine and won’t give it back), and the HP 2710p looks like a good’n. Oh, sure, it has all the usual stuff, 12.1 inch screen, less than four pounds, ultra-low voltage Core 2 Duo processor choices, etc., etc. But that 12.1 inch screen is no ordinary LCD. No, it has LED-backlighting along with its digitzer, promising to overcome one of the biggest weaknesses of Tablet PCs: dim screens. Pricing ranges from a bare-bones unit at $1,649 up to $2,478 for a fully-loaded monster. But, nobody knows when it’ll be released, so all this goodness is moot at the moment.

As posted right here, Taiwan is allocating $7 million to convert 420,000 traffic lights to the LED standard. Not to be outdone, Seville (Spain) is planning to replace its halogen and incandescent traffic lights with LEDs. The price tag is estimated to be €2.3 million, but it will conserve 85% of the energy used now.

After reports of a man dying in China as a cause of his cellphone batteries exploding, China has been cracking down on safety regulations, starting at the core of the problem: Motorola and Nokia.

Motorola and Nokia phone batteries were shown to have failed any safety tests administered on them and were prone to explosion on certain conditions. Funnily enough, both companies denied the batteries were theirs, hinting that the batteries ere counterfeit.

Cao Wenzhuang, a high-ranking official, was given the death penalty for accepting over $300,000 in bribes and approving counterfeit items. Counterfeit products have been distributed in China since the 1980’s, but have become increasingly more dangerous and erratic. This includes the lithium-based batteries found in cellphones computers. Even certain brands of Chinese toothpaste could be dangerous, which has shown to contain traces of diethylene glycol, a chemical responsible for 200 deaths in Haiti and Panama.

Over 30,000 inspectors were sent nationwide to find substandard foods, drugs and consumer products. As of this week, the reports shown that nearly 20 percent of the nation’s food and consumer products were found to be substandard or tainted. Nokia insists that its products are still appropriate for recreational use and there will be efforts to crack down on counterfeiting.

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