NEW YORK, N.Y. - The CEA, producers of the long running CES show in Las Vegas, also plans to host two conferences in New York City next year: Greener Gadgets and the second edition of Digital Downtown.

From June 10 to June 12, 2009, the industry group will reprise Digital Downtown, a show that made its first appearance last year, said CEA President and CEO Gary Shapiro, speaking to journalists at a pre-CES event in Manhattan yesterday.

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Starbucks' wretched earnings report this week may unnerve fans of coffee and out-of-office Wi-Fi, but now there's evidence that keeping customers hooked for free is smart business practice that could get them over this little depression.

Take Seattle. Seattle knows coffee. Seattle knows Starbucks -- they've got hundreds, not to mention corporate HQ sitting just south of downtown. And Seattle knows no limits on its Wi-Fi craving.

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A wealth of new handsets, netbooks, and high-volume CE devices could be enabled in the coming year by a key innovation IBM announced yesterday: a service in which it builds low-power composite design chips using ready-made IP libraries.

With the handset and small device space being opened up by new platforms such as Android, mobile Linux, and the royalty-free Symbian, opportunities are arising for more vendors -- some of them major players, some of them newer ones -- to come to market with fairly high-performance hardware. But up until recently, the possibility of making a high-performance handset was out of reach for many vendors, including the smaller ones that can't yet even afford completely custom design.

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Regional telco-and-wireless provider Centennial Communications could, if things come together as AT&T hopes, be absorbed into the body of the larger company by next July.

Though based in New Jersey, Centennial Communications serves mainly rural populations in the South and certain of the the Lake States (Ohio, Indiana, Michigan), where it offers GSM access; and Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, where it offers CDMA. It claims about 1.1 million wireless subscribers, about 660,000 of those in the continental US.

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NEW YORK, NY -- At a press event this evening, officials promised that, despite the gloomy economy, CES 2009 will continue to mix business with pleasure, with events ranging from a new green computing area to a live performance by Diana Ross.

Recent research by the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) shows that 64% of the public is now interested in recyclable products, 62% want energy efficiency, and 47% are on the lookout for recycled materials.

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Google today announced an enhancement to Gmail that allows voice and video chat to take place directly within the client.

In Gmail chat, the tag under the conversation window normally titled "options," is replaced by the "video and more" tag. Clicking on this expands a menu that can allow voice or video chats to take place alongside email and text chats at any time.

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From the two furthest-flung television markets in America come updates on their respective transitions to DTV. One is being expedited for environmental reasons, and the other will remain on schedule with monthly shutdown tests.

Today, it was announced that Hawaii's mandatory transition to digital broadcast will be completed a month ahead of the scheduled February 17 deadline to accommodate the nesting season of the Hawaiian Petrel, an endangered sea bird.

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Plans to open up the 700 MHz band of the electromagnetic spectrum include a serious swath of bandwidth for public-safety concerns. So why were some public-security officials saying Saturday that they hesitate to get on board?

If that old saying about investing in land ("Good investment, since they ain't making any more of it") is sort of true for physical real estate, it's even more on-point for the electromagnetic spectrum. So when the 700 MHz band is released from its UHF-channel duty after the switch in 2009 to digital-only TV broadcasting...well, you expect a bidding frenzy.

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NEW YORK, N.Y. - Although consumer sentiment about the economy is at its lowest in 15 years, a number of consumer electronics products will actually pick up momentum over last year's spending during the 2008 holiday season, CEA analysts contended, at a press conference today.

In CEA surveys in September and October, consumers said their overall holiday spending -- beyond just the consumer electronics category -- will drop 14 percent compared to 2007. But fourth quarter spending on consumer electronics goods will actually climb 3 percent this year, said Tim Herbert, one of the analysts, during a day of pre-CES press activities.

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The fact that Apple's only phone is the iPhone may not be in Apple's favor when it comes to being able to purchase component parts in bulk. HTC, which makes a lot more than the G1, can produce T-Mobile's Android phone cheaply.

If we assume for a moment that the software and touch-screen controls offer exactly the same value to each of the three most prominent offerings among this year's smartphones -- Apple's iPhone 3G, Research in Motion's BlackBerry Bold, and HTC and T-Mobile's G1 -- which manufacturer gives you the most hardware value? The teardown artists at hardware analysis firm iSuppli have just torn apart a G1, and the surprise is that the one that does not have a touchscreen is actually more expensive than one that does, according to its estimates.

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Despite the looming potential for a permanent injunction on its DVR products from a litigant TiVo, Dish Network announced today new DVRs, including some that are also DTV converter boxes, and some that can be added to existing equipment.

In October, Echostar announced that it would pay $104 million to TiVo as a part of the two companies' nearly four year legal battle over DVR technology patents. This settled the 2006 jury decision in favor of TiVo, however, the "legal workaround" in Dish's DVR technology is still disputable, and TiVo continues to seek a permanent injunction.

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In a week where all electronics manufacturers are considering how to tailor their value propositions for the demands of the new economy, Hitachi GST is not one to be left behind.

Just one day after Seagate's announcement that it will be introducing self-encrypting half-terabyte hard drives to the notebook market, Hitachi's Global Storage Technologies division is announcing its own entry in that category. For the past four years, Hitachi has been answering Seagate's Momentus series with its own Travelstar; and in this particular case, Hitachi has chosen to merge its low-power "green" focus with its secure and trusted campaign.

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Motorola has unveiled a solution that leverages a business' existing Wireless LAN and PBX setups and merges their voice and data functions into a single platform, accessible through Windows Mobile 6.1 devices.

BT North America conducted an online survey of 226 businesses in October and found that 39% have controller-based WLAN architectures, and 22% are actively migrating or have plans to migrate. Though some $20 billion is still spent annually on Ethernet switching equipment, Motorola says its surveys show that 56% of enterprises plan to increase their spending on WLAN equipment next year.

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The Phoenix spacecraft appears to have finally passed away, although not before accomplishing its main NASA missions around exploring the terrain and weather conditions of the so-called "Red Planet."

On Monday, managers of the NASA spacecraft announced they are suspending any operations related to the vehicle until next spring, given that they haven't received any transmissions from it for a week.

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Today, Seagate announced it's rolling out two new self-encrypted laptop drives, designed to guard against information theft. Dell will be an initial OEM customer.

Seagate on Monday announced new full disk encryption (FDE) Momentus self-encrypted drives with capabilities of up to a half-terabyte, along with software from McAfee for encryption management. Although standalone editions of the 5,400 RPM and 7,200 RPM drives are available to consumers and organizations of all sizes, Seagate is also selling the FDEs to OEMs, starting with Dell.

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