Intel and other industry leaders have formed the USB 3.0 Promoter Group to create a superspeed personal USB interconnect that can deliver over 10 times the speed of today’s connection. The technology, also developed by HP, Microsoft, NEC, NXP Semiconductors and Texas Instruments, will target fast sync-and-go transfer applications in the PC, consumer and mobile segments that are necessary as digital media become ubiquitous and file sizes increase up to and beyond 25 gigabytes.

USB (Universal Serial Bus) 3.0 will create a backward-compatible standard with the same ease-of-use and plug and play capabilities of previous USB technologies. Targeting over 10x performance increase, the technology will draw from the same architecture of wired USB. In addition, the USB 3.0 specification will be optimized for low power and improved protocol efficiency. USB 3.0 ports and cabling will be designed to enable backward compatibility as well as future-proofing for optical capabilities.

AccuWeather.com announced the launch of the new 15-Day Forecast gadget for iGoogle, Google’s customizable homepage. The new AccuWeather.com 15-Day Forecast gadget offers the widest available range of weather information including detailed radar, current conditions, and Hour-By-Hour, 5-day, and 15-day forecasts.

The AccuWeather.com 15-Day Forecast iGoogle Gadget offers more information than any other iGoogle weather gadget, through a slick interface that can be expanded and collapsed to show as much or as little as consumers want on their homepages. The gadget supports over 2.7 million locations worldwide and is compatible with all popular, iGoogle-supported browsers including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Safari, and Netscape.

U.S. Senators Jay Rockefeller and Amy Klobuchar want wireless carriers to change the way they do business, including offering consumers prorated early termination fees for switching carriers.

In legislation introduced Sept. 7, the two lawmakers called for a wide range of new policies calling for wireless carriers to provide “simple, clear information” on their services and charges, a 30-day window in which to exit a contract without early termination fees and greater flexibility to exit contracts with services that don’t meet a consumer’s needs.

Texas Instruments’s Pico Projector is small enough to fit in a cell phone (albeit a chunky one, if the prototype is any indication) but ##bright enough to shine a 15-inch-wide image even in a well-lit room.## TI first showed the device at last year’s Consumer Electronics Show, and it’s made only one public appearance since then, said TI representatives who busted it out a small reception in New York last night.

Seeing really is believing with this tech. Point the Pico at any even vaguely flat surface — a wall, someone’s back, the palm of your hand

After canceling its controversial Foleo product and continuing to struggle with a shift away from the personal digital assistant market, Palm warned that its upcoming earnings report could be weaker than expected.

For the quarter ending Aug. 31, Palm will lose $0.01 per share or break even, the company said. Earlier, the company had said it expected a loss of $0.01 or a gain of $0.01 in the period. That compares with a gain of $0.35 per share in the same quarter last year.

It was a serious contribution to the electronic lexicon. 🙂 Twenty-five years ago, Carnegie Mellon University professor Scott E. Fahlman says, he was the first to use three keystrokes–a colon followed by a hyphen and a parenthesis–as a horizontal “smiley face” in a computer message.

To mark the anniversary Wednesday, Fahlman and his colleagues are starting an annual student contest for innovation in technology-assisted, person-to-person communication. The Smiley Award, sponsored by Yahoo Inc., carries a $500 cash prize.

Language experts say the smiley face and other emotional icons, known as emoticons, have given people a concise way in email and other electronic messages of expressing sentiments that otherwise would be difficult to detect.

Apple’s iPhone will go on sale in Britain on November 9 exclusively through mobile operator O2, marking the first time the combination cell phone-iPod media player will be available outside the United States.

The 8GB model will be offered for 269-pounds, or $536–or $139 more expensive than what Apple now charges in the U.S. The British iPhone has the same technical specifications as the U.S. model, but the price includes the U.K.’s value-added tax.

Wi-Fi is coming to AT&T’s BlackBerry handset customers. AT&T and Research In Motion have announced their first cellular and Wi-Fi BlackBerry handset–the BlackBerry 8820–will be available beginning Sept. 20 through AT&T wireless.

The global Wi-Fi capabilities of the BlackBerry 8820 from AT&T complement AT&T’s domestic and international wide area wireless data coverage. AT&T enterprise customers can use the BlackBerry 8820 with their corporate campus Wi-Fi networks for additional data coverage. Individual customers can use it in their homes and, for an additional charge, at thousands of Wi-Fi locations throughout the U.S., including any of the 10,000 AT&T-owned or branded hotspot locations in the U.S. Users can also take advantage of tens of thousands of hotspots around the globe through such services as AT&T Wi-Fi roaming.

Palm Canada announced the availability of the Treo 750 smartphone, the first Treo to run on the Rogers’ High-Speed Packet Access (HSPA) network. Powered by the new Windows Mobile 6 Professional software, the Treo 750 provides Canadian mobile professionals with an exceptional world-phone experience. It offers broadbandlike download speeds and global roaming capabilities on a color touch-screen that replicates desktop applications to make navigating online and through multiple applications quick and easy while on the go.

Aiko Solutions has released SecuBox 1.3, a powerful solution for encrypting sensitive information carried on Windows Mobile smartphones and PDAs. SecuBox 1.3 offers full smartphone compatibility, secure deletion methods and industry class encryption that effectively guard against data theft and unauthorized access. SecuBox provides a secure and convenient storage for all important and business critical files, including Pocket Word, Excel documents and all other types of files. Data written to this storage are transparently encrypted with strong AES 256-bit encryption. In case Windows Mobile device or SD card is lost or stolen, SecuBox users can be sure no one reads their sensitive information.

SecuBox encryption technology will not only secure sensitive data, but will also prolong the life of PDA flash memory cards. When a Windows Mobile application intensively writes data to the encrypted storage volume, SecuBox optimizes the write process, thus reducing wear and tear on the memory card. Now users can completely erase sensitive files they no longer need. Traditional deletion only removes the file name from the file system directory leaving the data in place. SecuBox makes sure that the removed file cannot be restored by any means. The wiping methods used in SecuBox to permanently erase data on the storage media are implemented in compliance with the US Department of Defense DoD5220.22-M specification.