But many people who have spent as much as US$2.50 for a ringtone balk at the notion of paying the same price to download the entire song.
A contradiction? Not necessarily, Gartenberg recently said in a blog. "One's for personalization, and one is about entertainment," he wrote. "Different things with different value propositions."
The melding of tech and fashion also has spawned plenty of geek-chic retailers, such as X-TremeGeek.com. The company peddles slippers embedded with small lights to illuminate dark hallways and blue lights for faucets that "turn water into something cool, like an ionized plasma stream!"
A whirl around the Web also turns up boxer shorts emblazoned with computer error messages and doormats stating that there's no place like a specific IP address.
"We're used to seeing all of this stuff for hunters and gearheads, and it's just the computer guys' turn," Swanston said. "We laughed at them in high school, but not anymore. They're the epitome of cool."
Leah Buechley, a doctoral candidate in computer science at the University of Colorado at Boulder, will take that as a compliment.
Her research focuses in part on wearable computing -- and her Web site provides step-by-step instructions on how to sew a tank top embedded with LED lights that change colors.
She also has embedded circuitry into jewelry and, with help from other scholars, devised an electronic form of quilting that allows fabric squares to be "snapped together to generate a variety of ... flows of light."
She envisions the day when people will be able to change the color of their shirts or bedspreads to reflect their moods.
"All of this leads to the greater personalization that people are so hungry for," she said. "Artistic and scientific engineering concerns have never seemed that far apart to me. It takes similar creativity to innovate in design and technology."
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