Dogs aren’t called “man’s best friend” for no reason. Most pet owners would put their own life and limb at risk to keep their pet safe. The feeling that your dog is lost somewhere in the wild is one of the scariest thoughts a pet owner can experience. Retrieva is a system which keeps tabs on your dog with a GPS-enabled collar.

The sat-nav collars allows users to sign into a website to pinpoint the location of their dog, whenever the loved pet goes missing. Retrieva uses three different tracking waves; satellite, telecom and radio transmitters. So if you’re out walking your dog and you get pugged, a special panic button notifies your friend that you might be dead. But any good dog that isn’t a little puss should protect you from that in the first place. — Andrew Dobrow

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This new pedometer from Maplin Electronics is coming out at the perfect time of year for all of you who “vow� to start exercising this year. The pedometer not only acts as a pedometer, but also as a panic alarm and an FM radio. First off, the FM radio is a nice little add-on to the pedometer, so you don’t have to carry another device when you’re running. Now the panic alarm, on the other hand, is a little strange; they say you can use it when you feel threatened while you’re running; if it’s so scary out there in the big world, why don’t you just run home? Just a thought.

Anyways, the part that you care about most, the pedometer part (go figure), has many features to keep you running (no pun intended) with your New Year’s Resolution. These features include a step counter, distance traveled display, a calories-burnt indicator, a stopwatch, and a lap counter. At $20, this might be the perfect after-Christmas gift to remind you of your New Year’s resolution in a week when you get it; oh yeah, and once you start using too of course. Too bad it doesn’t have an annoying voice that yells “you need to run!â€? when you haven’t run for a few days. — Nick Rice

Maplin Electronics Pedometer [via TechDigest]