Panasonic Corp will tie up with the top U.S. electronics chain Best Buy Co to market and boost the sales of its 3D TVs in the United States, the Nikkei business daily reported on Sunday.

The report comes ahead of the world’s fourth-largest flat TV maker’s launch of its 3D TV in the United States this month amid rivalry with TV makers such as Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, LG Electronics Inc and Sony Corp.

Best Buy will set up special exhibition corners where its customers can view 3D videos in its 300 stores in major U.S. cities. This will expand to 1,000 stores by the end of the year, the Nikkei reported.

Internet telephony firm Skype took a second major leap into the wireless market in just a few weeks, unveiling software from top phone maker Nokia Oyj which could run on more than 200 million smartphones around the world.

The new Skype for Symbian software is available for free download from Nokia’s Ovi Store to consumers globally.

Samsung has joined LG and Panasonic in embedding Skype into its high-end TVs, putting video calling firmly into living rooms.

LG and Panasonic announced plans for Skype-enabled TVs in January, but Samsung is a bigger brand; and while the company has only announced two models to feature Skype functionality, it’s clearly part of a bigger plan to bring internet connectivity to everything Samsung sells.

A celebrated Android hacker has released software that greatly enhances Google’s Nexus One smartphone, endowing it for the first time with the same coveted multitouch features that grace Apple’s iPhone.

Operating under the moniker Cyanogen, the hacker released the updates on Wednesday. The hack came as Google formally made the Nexus One operating system, Android version 2.1, open source, paving the way for much more advanced modifications of the phone.

Introduced and trademarked by Apple, multitouch gives users the ability to use two or more fingers directly on a device screen to enlarge images and carry out similar actions. While it’s been on the iPhone since day one, certain aspects of the technology were noticeably absent from official releases of Android devices. Google axed the feature at the request of Apple, an unnamed person has told Venture Beat.

Google Inc’s new Nexus One smartphone, which retails for $529 without a service plan, is built from components that cost about $174, according to a research report.

But analysts said the big gap between the components’ costs and the phone’s price tag did not necessarily mean the Internet giant was making a hefty profit, since the retail price includes expenses such as licensing fees and marketing costs.

Panasonic is the world’s biggest maker of plasma TVs, which has been beaten out by LCD TVs in market share, and it hopes an added dimension will help it reverse brutal price falls and dwindling margins.

“Now, so many other major brands have announced 3D products,” Yoshi Yamada, CEO of Panasonic North America, said at a news conference attended by 3D movie “Avatar” producer Jon Landau at the Consumer Electronics Show on Wednesday.

“But we will be the only end-to-end 3D provider, from the cameras to the TVs to the editing.”

The exclusive agreement includes 3D broadcasts of Major League Baseball’s All-Star Games. DirecTV will further work on additional broadcasts by networks including Viacom Inc’s MTV, CBS Corp’s CBS, and General Electric Co’s NBC, the two companies said.

The service, which includes free video calls between Skype members, will compete with consumer video conference services being developed by bigger companies such as networking giant Cisco Systems Inc and Polycom Inc, which plans to develop consumer video services with International Business Machines Corp.

Skype, a former eBay unit, said both LG and Panasonic will have high-definition TVs supporting its service around mid-year.

Both television makers will embed the Skype technology in television models with Internet connections and will sell separate Web cameras that have built in microphones for television viewers who want to use Skype.

Skype said Panasonic will support Skype in its VT and G series televisions in the United States, with screen sizes up to 65 inches. LG will embed Skype in 26 new LCD and plasma screen TVs, which will also come in a range of sizes.

Both LG and Panasonic are expected to demonstrate the service this week at the Consumer Electronics Show, the annual gadget showcase in Las Vegas.

The clever folks at MIT have developed a smart wheel that could give bicycle riders a 21st century boost.

Unveiled Tuesday at the Copenhagen Conference on Climate Change, MIT’s new Copenhagen wheel is trying to do its part to help the environment by making bike riding easier and more enjoyable.

The wheel’s battery can store energy as you step on the brakes and then return that power back to help you climb a hill or boost your speed. A sensor inside the hub measures your effort when you ride. As you pedal forward, the sensor tells the wheel’s electric motor to give you a boost. When you hit the brakes, the motor regenerates, slowing you down and recharging the batteries. The goal behind this design is to encourage people to bike farther distances, relying less on gas-guzzling transportation.

“Over the past few years we have seen a kind of biking renaissance, which started in Copenhagen and has spread from Paris to Barcelona to Montreal,” said Carlo Ratti, director of the MIT Senseable City Laboratory and the Copenhagen Wheel project, in a statement. “It’s sort of like ‘Biking 2.0′–whereby cheap electronics allow us to augment bikes and convert them into a more flexible, on-demand system.”

Beyond giving you an energy boost, the wheel has other secrets in its bright red hub. Using sensors and a Bluetooth connection, the wheel can talk to an iPhone mounted on the handlebars. Through an iPhone app, you can check your speed, direction, and distance traveled. The wheel can also monitor traffic conditions and smog and even keep track of your bicycling buddies.

The Copenhagen wheel embeds all the required electronics inside the hub, so no other gadgets need to be added to the bike frame. A special spoking method devised by the team also lets you install the hub on any rim.

Any existing bike can be retrofitted with the wheel. In fact, the MIT team sees it as a plug-and play-device, one that any bike owner should be able to easily install as a back wheel.

The Copenhagen wheel is targeted to hit the market within a year and will be sold by online retailers, consumer electronics vendors, and possibly bike stores. The wheel will cost as much as a standard electronic bike–somewhere between $500 and $1000.

Two titans of the tech world, Google and Apple, may soon be engaged in hand-to-hand combat. Or, more precisely, handset-to-handset combat.

Google plans to begin selling its own smartphone early next year, company employees say, a move that could challenge Apple’s leadership in one of the fastest-growing and most important technologies in decades.

Google’s new touch-screen Android phone, which it began giving to many employees to test last week, could also shake up the fundamentals of the cellphone market in the United States, where most phones work only on the networks of the wireless carriers that sold them.

The company, using the power of its brand, plans to market and sell the new phone directly to consumers over the Internet, and buyers would be able to sign up for service from any compatible provider, the employees say.

Remember Nissan’s Scratch Shield paint technology? According to a release straight out of Yokohama, the automaker has agreed to license that very tech to Japan’s own NTT DoCoMo for “mobile phone application.” In theory, at least, the flexible clearcoat will enable certain light scratches to actually heal themselves over time, and the paint itself is tougher to scratch to begin with.

California regulators adopted the nation’s first energy-efficiency standards for televisions Wednesday in hopes of reducing electricity use at a time when millions of American households are switching to power-hungry, wide-view, flat-screen, high-definition sets.

The 5-0 vote by the California Energy Commission is just the latest effort by the state to secure its place in the forefront of the environmental movement.

California represents such a big consumer market that environmental groups hope the new standards will lead manufacturers to make energy-saving TVs for the rest of the nation, just as California’s stringent fuel standards for cars and trucks forced automakers to produce more efficient models for all of the U.S.

“Once again, California is leading the way, and we hope others will follow,” said Noah Horowitz, senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

A new technology to prevent lithium-ion batteries from catching fire or exploding in laptops and mobile phones may be on the market as soon as the first quarter of 2010, its inventor said on Wednesday.

The invention, called Stoba, was developed at the Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), Taiwan’s national research organization.

When lithium-ion batteries develop internal shorts they can quickly heat up to as much as 500 degrees centigrade (932 degrees Fahrenheit) and catch fire or explode.

Stoba sits between the positive and negative sides of the battery and when the battery hits 130 degrees centigrade (266 degrees Fahrenheit), Stoba transforms from a porous material to a film and shuts down the reaction.