Las Vegas

Cisco is making its move in the mobile-workspace world. Last week, at the Interop show in Las Vegas, the networking giant announced a new initiative called Collaboration in Motion, that draws from a number of its product lines to facilitate collaboration in the mobile workspace. Products and services tied to the initiative include Cisco WebEx, Cisco Unified Communications, Cisco Unified Wireless Network, and Cisco Advanced Services.

Cisco is making its move in the mobile work space world. Last week, at the Interop show in Las Vegas, the networking giant announced a new initiative called Collaboration in Motion, that draws from a number of its product lines to facilitate collaboration in the mobile work space. Products and services tied to the initiative include Cisco WebEx, Cisco Unified Communications, Cisco Unified Wireless Network, and Cisco Advanced Services.

Clearwire says it remains on track to launch its Clear-branded WiMAX 4G service in Atlanta next month, with Las Vegas slated for a late summer launch and Chicago, Philadelphia and Dallas/Fort Worth scheduled for rollouts later in the year.

Jonah Lehrer in Wired:

One of the first tricks in Penn and Teller's Las Vegas show begins when Teller—the short, quiet one—strolls onstage with a lit cigarette, inhales, drops it to the floor, and stamps it out. Then he takes another cigarette from his suit pocket and lights it.

Mobile-device owners in the Washington, D.C., area will soon have free mobile access to some of their favorite television shows, thanks to a new program slated for this summer.

People can tune in to American Idol and other shows under a pilot program being launched to bring free digital mobile television to devices, the Open Mobile Video Coalition announced Monday at the National Association of Broadcasters Show in Las Vegas. The OMVC is an alliance of U.S. broadcasters focused on the development of mobile digital television.

Samsung has confirmed plans to release Android phones, according to a recent story in Forbes. Dr. Won-Pyo Hong, executive vice president of global product strategy in the mobile communications division, told the magazine during the recent CTIA trade show in Las Vegas that the company will release several handsets using the Google-backed, open-source operating system.

The first of the devices will be launched in June outside the U.S. Hong confirmed that two other Android devices will be released in the U.S. during the second half of 2009.

Sprint and T-Mobile

Goodbye, numeric cell phone keypads. You're going the way of the rotary dial. Touch screens and QWERTY keyboards will take over from here, thank you.

At North America's largest cell phone trade show, running this week in Las Vegas, there were few new phones for the U.S. market that had a numerical keypad instead of an alphabetic keyboard. Touch screens also were out in force.

Amazon's Kindle might soon be getting new competitors in the market for electronic-book devices.

Tony Lewis, who heads an initiative within Verizon Wireless to provide access to non-phone devices, said Wednesday that five companies have approached Verizon about wireless connections for e-readers.

"You're going to see a lot of e-readers out there," Lewis said. "The interest level is tremendous."

AT&T Inc. is going to go beyond cell phones and test selling laptops in its stores in Atlanta and Philadelphia.

The move, announced Wednesday at a trade show in Las Vegas, comes as the cell phone market is starting to saturate, and wireless carriers are looking for ways to expand into other gadgets.

Motorola used its spotlight at CTIA 2009 to debut its broadband technology Thursday. The mobile-phone maker presented its next-generation wireless broadband technology at the Las Vegas event held each year by the International Association for the Wireless Telecommunication Industry.