Gearfuse

Look at you over there. Thinking you’re part of the geek elite because you downloaded some polyphonic bullshit ringtone, probably either the Star Trek or Battlestar theme. That’s for posers, dood. The real cool geeks are flocking to a new source for their ringtone fix. If you’ve never heard of the TED conference, it’s pretty much an annual event where the most elite geeks get together and listen to presentations from the upper echelon of geek speakers. For example, this year featured presentations from such alpha geeks as Bill Gates of Microsoft fame and Twitter’s Evan Williams.

The real news though, lies in the newly featured TED ringtones. Featured so far are tones for both the “TEDTalks Phase II” and “TEDTalks Classic” jingles, available in both MP3 and M4R formats. And more are planned for release soon. If you want to be on top of your geek game, you’ve got to be down with the TED. You down with TED? Yeah, you know me.

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muPass is not a company that’s new to the tech media. They have been covered for their interesting service of sending ringtones from your mobile to other devices such as alarm clocks, baby mobiles, and cookers. But now they have something up their sleeves that may pose a more productive use. In conjunction with the Japanese Ringing Tone Laboratory, which is a real institution despite the crazy name, are releasing new muPass ringtones specially made to be soothing rather then the classic shrill cell phone sound.

Starting tomorrow, customers will be able to download ringtones titled “dolphin therapy”, “stop the baby from crying”, and “wake up feeling great”, which are supposedly all scientifically proven to do what they are labeled to do. In March, a few more will be released, titled “get motivated” and “supress anger”. We want them to create a ringtone which will stop the flood of Britney Spears stories everywhere we turn. It’s just hair!!! — Andrew Dobrow

Soothing, stimulating and suppressing ringtones for muPass [Wireless World Japan]

Everyone knows how annoying it is to be woken up by that stupid repetitive beeping you alarm clock makes at 5:30 in the morning. All this does is start off your day wrong; a sure sign that your day is going to go down hill fast. Now if you woke up to some of your favorite tunes, then you’d probably wake up a lot happier, making your day a lot better. The Seiko MuPass alarm clock seems like a normal clock from the outside, but look deeper and you will find your dream come true: this alarm clock can download polyphonic ringtones for your morning listening pleasure. All you have to do is bring your cellphone and transfer the songs to the MuPass via the infrared port. If you know that you’ll get sick of one song after about one day, then go big and fill up the memory of the clock: 4000 tunes. That’s over 12 years of glorious tunes for you; that should be enough to make you happy. The only problem is that this is only for sale in Japan at a price of $75, so for now just wake up to the radio, at least its music. — Nick Rice

Seiko muPass [via New launches]