United Airlines cancels plans to increase charge for second bag.

On Friday, United Airlines announced that it is abandoning its plans to double the price of a second checked bag to $50. Also announced was a holiday promotion during which, the fees to check a first bag will be discounted by 20% if paid online between now and January 31 .

For more, see WSJ.com

Junk mail lists removal services.

According to the United States Postal Service, American households receive 100.5 billion pieces of junk mail, or 868 pieces for each household each year. If you are among the many tired of receiving junk mail, help is available from some services offering to remove you from unwanted mailers' lists.
At first there is the Direct Marketing Association which last month started a tool called DMA Choice that let you choose between four categories (magazines, catalogs, credit cards, other) or individual business to allow or disallow to receive junk mail from. If you choose to opt out of a particular category or individual business mailing list, that will be good for three years.
Another opt-out service is OptOutPrescreen.com .What makes this service particular is that it removes your name only from lists that are used to send preapproved or prescreened offers of credit or insurance. It is run by the three majors credit reporting agencies (Equifax, Experian and Transunion) and Innovis. It lets you opt out for five years or permanently either online or by phone at 1-888-5 OPT OUT.

For more, see NYTimes.com

Smart phones bar code scanners.

If you were among the many hesitating to make the jump to smart phones, maybe this bit of information will give you a reason to take another look at them. The news here is that most of the smart phones like Google's G1, Apple's iphone or Samsung' s Instinct, are outfitted with third parties applications that can turn them into virtual shopping assistants. Take the case of the G1 for instance, it is loaded with an application from ShopSavvy which turns the phone into a bar code scanner. Here how it works: You go to a store and point the phone lens to a product bar code and it scans it and send the data to ShopSavvy's database for a quick price comparison online and at local stores and product reviews.
Another cool feature of this application is an email alert. For that to work, you submit your e-mail address and your preferred price for a particular product; ShopSavvy will then send you an alert when the price drops to your likening.

For more, see NYTimes.com

NFL games to be broadcast on Sprint cell phones.

Starting this Thursday with the game between Cleveland Brown and Denver Bronco, and for the next seven weeks, NFL games broadcast in the NFL Network television will be simultaneously shown on Sprint Nextel mobile phones as part of the wireless company exclusive partnership with the league.
The phone-casts as they are called, will be available in two packages. In the first one, the games will be available as part of the company's Everything plans priced at $69.99 a month; the second package can be purchased separately at $15 a month.

For more, see WSJ.com

Picasa offers face recognition feature

Picasa, Google's photo organizing, editing and sharing software has a new version out that offers a nice face recognition feature. The new feature in Picasa 3 will take the manual work of identifying peoples in your shared pictures by automatically isolating the faces in them and prompt you to identify them by name. It then goes to work by recognizing those faces every time they appear in future pictures so they can be tagged with one click without any taping.

For more, see WSJournal.com

AT&T is testing Internet broadband cap.

The days of all you can eat Internet broadband usage are closer to an end that you may realize. Slowly but surely, Internet service providers are rolling in Internet broadband usage caps. The latest in that string of companies putting in place cap limits, is AT&T who is following the footsteps of Comcast who has started a similar system at the beginning of last month in Texas. AT&T just confirmed that it is testing a new system for users in Reno Nevada. In that test, new users will be subject to two different caps depending on either they are using slow or high speed DSL service. Members of the first group will see their limit caped at 20GB of bandwidth per month while users of the fastest DSL service will see their limit set at 150GB per month.
Users in both groups who exceed their monthly limits will be billed $1 per gigabyte of data transfer following a one month grace period after their initial sign up.
In the meantime, all existing subscribers are not affected , but when they will as the company plans, they will all receive the 150GB limit. To help its subscribers monitor their bandwidth usage, AT&T is planning to provide them with a measuring tool; other third parties like Shaplus.com are already offering some types of measuring tools.
Anticipating no major setback, AT&T is planning to expand the new system to other markets soon.

For more see pcworld.com

WildChargemat allows charging multiple gadgets.

Ever dreamed of a single device that allow you to charge multiple mobile gadgets all at once ? Well now that dream is reality with a new device called WildCharge mat by a company of the same name.
The device is the size of a typical mouse pad with a surface covered by 12 shiny chrome stripes. It plugs in to one wall outlet and can accommodate five electronic gadgets. It costs $60 and each gadget that you want to charge using the WildCharge mat has to be fitted underneath with a contact dots panel to assure the electricity passage from the charger to the gadget. Some gadgets like the BlackBerry Pearl come already outfitted with the "underneath skin" that provides the necessary contact points. Otherwise, you will have to buy a contact dots panel for $35.
The WildCharge mat does not emit radiation or produce magnetic fields and shuts off automatically when a foreign object comes in contact with it, preventing any possibility for electrocution.

For more see NYTimes.com