United States

Cree, one of the world's largest LED makers has just ended a test-period of lighting some Pentagon offices with a deal for outfitting the one-fifth of the building.
The contract is for 4,200 recessed lighting units, which sell retail for $380 a piece. So this is definitely a seven-figure deal for Cree. The lighting units showed a 22% efficiency increase over the Pentagon's old fluorescent lighting fixtures.

Clearwire has switched on its WiMAX service in the greater metropolitan area of Portland, Ore. -- the company's second WiMAX coverage zone in the United States. Early last month, Clearwire completed its transaction to acquire and operate Sprint-Nextel's Xohm-branded WiMAX service in Baltimore, which Clearwire expects to rebrand with the name "Clear."

A mysterious team of hackers has managed to hijack the Twitter account of US president-elect Barack Obama along with celebrities like Britney Spears, CNN anchor Rick Sanchez and Fox News commentator Bill O'Reilly, Twitter confirmed Monday.

The security snafu on the trendy micro-blogging site came days after a successful "phishing" scheme tricked many users into providing their usernames and logons.

It is unclear whether the hacked accounts were a result of that scheme, but the results were undeniably embarrassing.

Many observers of this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas are waiting to see what kind of presence the open-source Android mobile-phone platform will have among new smartphones. Some have speculated that HTC, which makes the pioneering T-Mobile G1 Android handset, might release its own Android model.

Jennifer Wunder, an associate English professor at Georgia Gwinnett College in Lawrenceville, Ga., says she likes to keep her college-provided cell phone handy to send text messages and e-mails to students.

Wunder, 38, says her interaction with students is way up because she's reaching students on the same device they use.

"It's an incredible educational opportunity," she said.

On Jan. 7, she'll join about 75 fellow employees who will unplug their office phone and go wireless for good, said Lonnie Harvel, the school's chief information officer.

Two words apply well for the year just ended: Whoa, Nelly! With the financial markets in chaos, the jobs landscape littered with layoffs, and the most audacious outpouring of federal funds since the Great Depression, most of us are ready to look forward to cheerier times in 2009.

An important National Football League game on a recent Saturday night was dark on millions of television screens, but it lighted up an untold number of laptops.

Millions of U.S. fans could not watch the game between the Baltimore Ravens and Dallas Cowboys on television. Yet they could watch any number of illicit live streams on the Internet.

The major U.S. professional sports leagues are finding that pirated feeds of live games are now common and that they could soon become a menace to their businesses, which are themselves ever more reliant on Internet subscriptions services.

Anthony Celestine was a latecomer to the Internet Age. The 40-year-old Harlem resident has owned a small Jani-King commercial cleaning franchise since 2004, but until recently, the New Yorker hadn't owned a computer or even surfed the Web or had an e-mail address. "I didn't know what none of that stuff was," he says.