LG Electronics Inc.

In one of the funnier moments of Sunday's Academy Awards, Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin thought they spotted Avatar director James Cameron in the audience. The hosts whipped out 3-D glasses to scan the audience for the man whose top-grossing film has fueled more interest in 3-D viewing.

Common Sight

While the gag got some laughs, it may not be unusual for more people to carry around 3-D glasses this year. All the top manufacturers are planning 3-D television models.

Mobile-phone sales worldwide headed up at the end of last year, according to a new report from industry research firm Gartner. Sales in the fourth quarter posted a 8.3 percent increase compared to a year ago, although overall 2009 sales dropped 0.9 percent.

Gartner said the drivers pushing up sales are smartphones and low-end devices. Smartphone sales, said Gartner Research Director Carolina Milanesi, "continued their strong growth in the fourth quarter of 2009," up 41.1 percent over 2008 to 53.8 million units. For all of 2009, smartphone sales were up 23.8 percent.

The world's biggest retailer has long struggled to dominate the streaming video market against competitors like Netflix, Apple and Blockbuster. Now Wal-Mart is taking a new tack, The New York Times reports.

Sources told the Times that Wal-Mart has agreed to buy VUDU, a three-year-old company that embeds its streaming technology into high-definition TVs and Blu-Ray DVD players. Wal-Mart and VUDU began briefing movie studios and TV makers about the deal on Monday.

Control the User Experience

With key mobile platforms and their application communities rapidly moving forward, a group of wireless carriers and device makers have decided to simplify. On Monday, two dozen of the largest telecom companies announced plans to create an open platform called the Wholesale Applications Community (WAC).

The world's largest wireless carriers, including the four largest in the U.S., announced Monday that they are combining forces to make it easier for software developers to write applications that will run on as many phones as possible.

The "Wholesale Applications Community" is an attempt to retake the initiative from phone makers like Apple Inc., Nokia Corp. and Research in Motion Ltd., which have applications stores of their own. Google Inc. is also building a significant store for its Android software.

Among the 234 million cell-phone users over age 13 in the U.S. in the fourth quarter, Motorola-manufactured hardware dominated the market of all mobile users, according to a comScore survey released Monday. Among operating systems, Research In Motion had the largest smartphone market share.

The survey showed only a slight loss by the two industry leaders from the period ending in September, a 1.4 percent drop for Motorola to 23.4 percent, and a one percent slip by RIM to 41.6 percent.

While the technology world continues to focus on Apple's yet-to-be-launched iPad, it seems iPhone sales may be slowing. Apple lost market share in the global smartphone market in the fourth quarter, ABI Research reports.

Apple's share fell from 18.1 percent in the third quarter to 16.6 percent in the fourth quarter, according to ABI's data. This comes despite the fact that Apple posted record iPhone sales for the quarter of 8.7 million units, up 100 percent from the year-ago quarter and up 18 percent from the third quarter.

High-quality video calling, once available only to well-heeled businesses, could be coming to a computer or TV near you. On Tuesday, Skype announced support for video calls using 720p high-definition video. In addition, the company said its software will be embedded into various Net-connected HDTVs from several manufacturers.

Apple will soon begin offering its iPhones through carriers in South Korea. On Wednesday, Apple jumped its last hurdle in getting the iPhone into the hands of mobile-phone users in South Korea.

Wouldn't you love to get rid of the rat's nest of cables connecting the pieces of your home entertainment system -- and cut the hassle of hooking up new audio-video components? Engineers and consumers alike have dreamed of that possibility for years, but a handful of serious efforts up until now to devise wireless consumer electronics schemes have foundered on technical shortcomings and divisive standards battles.