A new startup is trying to cash in on the pervasive belief that gas prices are on an inexorable upward climb. The company, PriceLock, will allow consumers to buy gasoline in advance, locking in today's gas prices for up to two months. In other words, the company will let drivers hedge their fuel prices the way airlines do with jet fuel -- sort of. The difference is that airlines don't lock in prices by buying up fuel way in advance. Instead they buy contracts that allow them the option to purchase fuel at a given prices at some date in the future. If the price of jet fuel has actually dipped, they're not compelled to buy it at the price they locked it in at. In this case, drivers are only protected against an upswing; if the price of gas falls over the next two months, then they'd appear to be out of luck, having already bought gas in advance at a higher price. Really, this kind of business only works during periods of time when gasoline prices are moving relentlessly higher (as they are now). Under normal conditions, nobody is going to buy gas in advance or attempt to anticipate market swings. Offering consumers a way to hedge their exposure to higher gas prices isn't a bad idea (though this could probably be accomplished satisfactorily simply by buying the stocks of oil companies), but this system isn't likely to work.

A new design and a number of under-the-hood improvements move the site away from the niche blog market and into the wider world of online searching.

Hasan Elahi whips out his Samsung Pocket PC phone and shows me how he's keeping himself out of Guantanamo.

Blog: Motorola gets a patent for a solar-powered cell phone.

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

While we know for sure that Steve is going to show off a "feature-complete" version of Leopard at this year's WWDC, and we wouldn't be surprised if the iPhone got some quality time on stage as well, we haven't really heard anything solid about any hardware revisions taking place next month. Well, Gene Munster, Piper Jaffray's resident Apple fanboy analyst, crunched some numbers recently and speculated during a recent conference call that he expects to see new MacBook Pros released at WWDC. Seeing as Apple is basically the only big company that hasn't announced a Santa Rosa laptop, an announcement at WWDC wouldn't exactly shock us, but Munster decided to get a little wackier with his predictions, saying that by his calculations, Apple releases new pro lappies every 182 days, and that the current MBP has been on the market for 209 days. Similarly, Munster used the vast resources of the multinational investment bank that employs him to determine that Apple releases new iMacs around every 168 days, and that the current generation has been on the market for 257 days. Quelle horreur! We're not sure how these numbers led Gene to determine that we'll see new MBPs for sure and maybe new iMacs (seems like the other way around to us), but there it is. Analysts are often prone to over-speculating about Apple launches, but at this point it's almost anyone's guess -- trying to call Apple's next move is a cruel, cruel mistress.

[Thanks, Kiwi]

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Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

A new study suggests that while spam continues to increase, people are less likely to complain about it. Of course, plenty of people are still complaining. The study shows that only 28% of people say spam doesn't bother them, up from 16%. However, that still means that there are 72% of people out there who aren't at all happy about the spam in their inbox. What isn't clear from the article, though, is how many of the people who have come to terms with spam are actually clicking and buying from it -- because that's where it becomes a nuisance for the rest of us. If people actually learned to ignore spam, then spam wouldn't be such a profitable enterprise and would hopefully start to decrease.