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The new Sanyo Xacti E2 replaces the older Sanyo Xacti E1 camcorder. The new E2 doubles the frame rate to 60 FPS and adds about an ounce of weight as well as some new features. It also brings live face detection and a specialized underwater mode that adjusts the colors to avoid some of the tinting that occurs in pool or shallow dives. The E2 should be available as of today in blue and white color options If you decide to take the “plunge” for the E2 remember that Gazelle is currently offering $165 for the Xacti E1 in good condition.

Given that Gazelle’s own Dan Smith cites his E1 as his favorite gadget, the E2 might make a fine upgrade for him…

If you are ever unfortunate enough to be upwind of the Agbobloshie dump in Accra, capital of the West African country of Ghana, you might want to wear a gas mask.  Will Ross, a BBC correspondent wrote a great piece earlier this month that shines a light on the practice of shipping e-waste to other countries. The BBC reports that Great clouds of acrid black smoke corrupt the air.  People are burning off the plastic coatings on computer cable to capture the copper.  Children maneuver through the dump looking to smash computer monitors to sell the metal inside them. It’s illegal, but unwanted computers from industrial countries arriving in Third World Countries are dumped, turning the water and earth into toxic swamps. Environmental journalist Mike Anane has been keeping tabs on this phenomenon.  Although the computers arriving in the Ghanese port of Tema are marked “usable second-hand goods,” Anane has found that only about 10 percent are functional.   “The rest go straight to Agbobloshie dump site and other dumps around the country where they contaminate ground water, surface water, the rivers and the streams.   And they all end up in the sea, and that’s where we get all the fish.” The United Nations estimates that 20 to 50 million tons of e-waste are produced yearly. And you know what – those e-dump mountains start one iPod, one computer, one cell phone at a time.  It starts with that Blackberry of yours that you don’t want anymore.  You might think, “I’m busy. If I throw the Blackberry into the trash, what difference will it make?” Multiply that one by hundreds and thousands of others, and the effect on the environment is tremendous. But now you have an alternative that’s just as easy as tossing your device into the trash.  You can send it to Gazelle.  We’ll promote the cycle of reuse by paying you for that gadget and reselling  it.  If your item is too old or in too poor condition for resale, we will make sure it is recycled responsibly—for free!

What does “responsible” mean?  Our recycling partners are based in the United States, and the items we send them to be broken down into parts do not leave the country.  And they do not end up in the Agbobloshie dump. You can make a difference and end what the environmental group Greenpeace calls “poisoning the poor.” And you might even make money doing it.  Be Green.  Get Green.  That’s Gazelle.

Nokia has officially announced two new handsets as part of their N-Series multimedia line. The new N79 and N85 are expected to be released in the 4th quarter of 2008. Both handset feature HSDPA, GPS, 5 megapixel camera, and TV OUT. The N79 is the successor to the N78 and N73 music phones. It’s stand-out feature is the interchangeable back panel. It will be boxed with three panels, which also interact with the on-screen themes when switched. The N85 follows up the N81 and N80 in a much slimmer package. It has a 2.6-inch OLED display will come boxed with an 8GB microSD card, but supports cards up to 16GB. Get ready to trade in those old N-Series models at Gazelle to make room for these two power packed handsets.

The new Mio Knight Rider GPS is now on pre-order at RadioShack and Amazon. This GPS device brings back the voice of K.I.T.T (Knight Industries Two Thousand), the ultimate crime fighting machine from the 1980s TV Series Knight Rider, directly to your car. The new Knight Rider GPS features a 4.3 lcd display and more than four million points of interest. It also features red LED’s that sync with K.I.T.T’s voice commands for a true Knight Rider experience.

You don’t need a dry-witted super car with artificial intelligence to tell you to get ready to trade in your old Mio GPS units at Gazelle. This new unit will be flying off the shelves in no time.

South by Southwest Interactive is an amazing event. In their own words:

The SXSW Interactive Festival features five days of exciting panel content and amazing parties. Attracting digital creatives as well as visionary technology entrepreneurs, the event celebrates the best minds and the brightest personalities of emerging technology. Whether you are a hard-core geek, a dedicated content creator, a new media entrepreneur, or just someone who likes being around an extremely creative community, SXSW Interactive is for you!

We’ve thrown our hat in the ring to host a couple of panel sessions this year, but we need your help. Please take a moment to cast a vote for us on the SXSW Panel Picker site.

The first session is called Being Green on Your Own Terms. Reversing the trend of our deteriorating environment will take a sea change, but how much are people willing to sacrifice? This panel will explore and promote emerging services that make a positive contribution towards “going green” without asking consumers to radically change their lifestyle. Providing a practical way for individuals to each do their part towards a collectively huge outcome is what Gazelle is all about, so we’d be thrilled to have the opportunity to lead this discussion.

The second proposed session is a bit more business focused. It’s called Challenges and Solutions Surrounding Dynamic Pricing Structures. For anyone who asks “so, what happens to all the stuff I sell to you?”, this session will provide some tactical details about how we promote reuse with the best of the gadgets we buy.

Sound like something you’d be interested in? Then let the folks at SXSW know by voting today!

AT&T is now selling Apple’s handset on its business Web site for customers as part of its Premier Enterprise program. A customer can purchase an 8-GB iPhone 3G for $199 and a 16-GB version for $299. Either handset will require a two-year contract. The store estimates delivery time will take seven to 10 business days. Remember to cash in your first generation iPhones at Gazelle.com so you can save some serious cash on your new 3G wonder.

Despite what some people believe, recycling is not a new idea. No, recycling, in one form or another, has been around forever.

Centuries before the fall of Rome, bronze items were being retooled for different uses. The residue from fires was used to make bricks in pre-industrial Britain.

As early as 1690, the Rittenhouse Paper Co. of Philadelphia had a paper-recycling mill up and running. New York City’s sanitation commissioner, George Waring, mandated recycling – in 1895. Care to guess who enforced it? Teddy Roosevelt, then New York’s police commissioner.

Henry Ford, a man who believed in efficiency and thriftiness, set up a “disassembly line” so that old Model Ts could be used in the manufacture of new vehicles. (This was a guy who had the wood from shipping carts reused as floorboards.)

And there are a lot of other examples of conservation efforts. The public conscious, however, really got raised by the first Earth Day in 1970. This timing also probably also gave that hippie, tree-hugging perception to the movement. And in that same year, the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was formed.

From 1970 to today, enormous progress has been made in recycling as municipality after municipality handed out bins and ordered paper, cans and other materials be placed in them. In the mid-’80s, there was only one curbside recycling program as compared to more than 8,600 in 2006. That’s according to the EPA.

In 1980, recycling kept 15 million tons out of landfills. A couple of years ago, that figure had risen to 82 million. Curbside pickups, drop-off sites and buy-back centers have stopped 32 percent of our solid waste from ending up in landfills.

Okay, this is great, but stop all your clapping and whistling. Sixty-eight percent of our trash and garbage is still being dumped.

The massive Fresh Kill landfill, opened on Staten Island in 1948, closed 2001, was one of three man-made things that could be seen from outer space. The other two being the Great Wall of China and the American Interstate system (maybe spotting Fresh Kill dissuaded alien invaders from attacking.)

The discarding of electronics is, certainly, part of the problem. The Computer Takeback Campaign estimates that e-waste produces 20 to 50 metric tons worldwide and is the fastest growing solid waste. It has also found that 130 million cell phones get trashed a year. Now when you consider that there are some 2 billion people with cell phones now, the problem is only going to get worse.

Add in the 130,000 computers that ended up in the dumpster every day of 2005, of which almost 2 million tons were sent packing to landfills, we have a huge problem.

All of this has been to drive home the importance of recycling – and the purpose of Gazelle. We’re here to make it easy, practical, and rewarding for you to contribute to the solution.

reCommerce: it’s recycling for the 21st Century.

Samsung has announced a new environmentally friendly version of the E200 handset at the Samsung Olympic event in Beijing. The new 9.9mm slim E200 ECO features a 1.3 megapixel camera with media playback capabilities. The external case of the phone, in appropriate green color, is made of bioplastic (extracted from plant material like corn) instead of polycarbonate plastic, which reduces the CO2 burden of producing the phone. It’s also packaged in a uncoated recycled paper box. Samsung is showing great effort in going green, while producing stylish and functional handsets.

This is fantastic. With manufacturers like Samsung concentrate on eco-friendly innovation like this, and Gazelle providing a practical, rewarding way for people to dispose of the gadgets they are no longer using, we can make a dent in e-waste.

After much anticipation, the new Nokia 5610 XpressMusic slider phone is finally available from T-Mobile. Announced earlier this year, the 5610 replaces the popular Nokia 5300 XpressMusic slider.

The 5610 joins the 5310 as part of the continuing Nokia XpressMusic collection available from T-Mobile. The 5610 features a 3.2 megapixel camera, dedicated music player rocker key, included 1GB memory card, and stereo Bluetooth connectivity.

The 5610 is available now for 99.99 with a 2 year service agreement exclusively from T-Mobile. We’re offering $45 for a 5300 in average condition right now. Why not sell yours and upgrade for half price?

This week, the development team here that created Gazelle.com received a new mascot, sent to us by a fellow Boston area developer to congratulate us on our successful launch. We’d like to thank Wyatt Greene of MakeMeSustainable.com, another cool “green” company who is helping people realize an environmentally responsible and economically rewarding future. Their site also uses our current platform of choice, Ruby on Rails.

We had another exciting week, with a huge spike in traffic due to a Yahoo/US News and World Report link and a nice mention on the Today Show. We’d like to thank our hosting provider, EngineYard who helped us ramp up our capacity on short notice.

Finally, I’d like to give a well deserved shout out to our development team. They worked their butts off for the site launch and continue to keep gazelle.com running smoothly. Thanks to: Jason Wadsworth, our software architect, Kevin Kardian, our data architect, Graham Babbit, our front-end web developer, Dan Pickett, our director of engineering, Catherine Headen, our graphic designer, and Thos Niles, our product manager. We also had help from Brian Kaney and Eastern Suns with code development and Robin Dratch led QA efforts and managed a world-wide fleet of testers via our testing partner, uTest.  The team worked hard and smart and saw the sunrise on several marathon coding sessions that allowed us to launch on time with minimal downtime. What a team!

Gazelle.com also brought to you by: Lemmy, Radio Paradise, Red Bull, Moxie, the Upper Crust, and habenero hot sauce from Casa de Pedro.