Cisco Systems is flipping the off-switch on the Flip camcorder.

On Tuesday the computer networking giant said it was shutting down its Flip Video unit as a step toward narrowing its business -- a reversal after years of looking to diversify its product offerings.

About a week ago, John Chambers, Cisco's chief executive, promised "bold steps" to refocus the company, declaring that missteps were "unacceptable." Analysts then criticized Cisco for being too dependent on state and local governments for its revenue.

The shuttering of Flip cam operations will mean the loss of about 550 jobs and about $300 million spent across the first half of Cisco's fiscal year, the company said in a statement.

Cisco bought Pure Digital Technologies, the maker of the Flip cam, for $590 million in 2009.

The Flip camera line had been a popular seller among consumers for its easy-to-use controls and its swift ability to get video on the Web as well. Pocket-sized camcorders from Sony, Kodak and Polaroid hit the market over the last couple years, due in part to the Flip's success.

Though Cisco will stop producing the Flip camera, it will still support its FlipShare video-sharing services "with a transition plan," Cisco said, not offering further details.

The San Jose-based company said it was preparing to making further moves to focus on four "key company priorities": core routing, switching and services; collaboration; data center architectures; and video for business customers.

"We are making key, targeted moves as we align operations in support of our network-centric platform strategy," Chambers said in a statement Tuesday. "As we move forward, our consumer efforts will focus on how we help our enterprise and service provider customers optimize and expand their offerings for consumers, and help ensure the network's ability to deliver on those offerings."

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Photo: A lineup of Flip Mino cameras. Credit: Cisco Systems via Flickr

Forget texting and driving or talking on the phone and driving: Those extremely dangerous habits are old hat.  The new worry, says a survey released by State Farm this week, is what the insurance company cleverly calls "webbing while driving."

That means looking up Web pages, following driving directions, reading and composing e-mails, checking Facebook, and twiddling with smart-phone apps -- activities that require sustained concentration and multiple key presses.

Among the 912 smart-phone users State Farm surveyed, more than 19% of them "webbed" while driving, the company said. For those who prefer fractions, that's one smart-phone-equipped driver out of every five.

"We are working to prevent crashes and save lives," Cindy Garretson, State Farm's director of auto technology research, said in a statement. "This research takes us one step closer to understanding the driver distractions that affect everyone on our roadways."

As an insurance company, State Farm has an interest in minimizing accidents and damage payouts, but who can argue with minimizing hazardous driving?

If it makes a difference, the survey respondents said they tend to "web" while in heavy traffic, stopped at a red light, during daylight hours, or on long drives on the open road. Which covers just about everything, thanks.

As a caveat, the survey does not necessarily reflect trends in the greater population: Because it was conducted online, it is more likely to include tech-savvy individuals and younger people. And surveys without random samples are not generally scientific.

However, anyone driving in a busy city such as Los Angeles knows that every month, more people can be seen looking at their phones while on the road. What used to be the familiar sight of people holding handsets up to their ears has been replaced by the sight of people gazing down at their screens while stopped at lights. When a red light turns green, people often sit until they're honked at.

As the State Farm study points out, close to 40% of Americans have smart phones now, and that number is growing fast.  And though we are frequently reminded not to text and drive, the safety message may not have caught up to the current technology. 

What about "don't e-mail and drive," or "don't Google and drive," or "don't play Angry Birds and drive"?

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Philipp Humm, the new CEO of T-Mobile USA, has come from sister company T-Mobile Germany to try to boost the carrier's fortunes in the U.S.  Humm is visiting dozens of cities around the nation, holding grassroots town halls with employees to get a sense of where they feel the company should be heading.

Humm sat down with The Times recently to talk up his plans to make smart phones affordable, to get everyone a tablet, and how he'll face off against his bigger rivals in Verizon and AT&T.  He also has a few words about the iPhone (which T-Mobile doesn't yet have) and Apple's Steve Jobs. 

What is one of the more important lessons you learned from operating in the European market?

The best way of being a good challenger is by having played defense for a while.  Now you know how the defenders play the challenger game.  Back at the time in Germany we had very good challengers attacking us.  Looking at how other people attacked you is a very good way to determine how you’ll make your next attack.

The HP TouchPad, running WebOS, could be slick enough to attract more consumers than any individual Android tablets or the BlackBerry PlayBook -- but it has no shot at dethroning the Apple iPad, an analyst said Wednesday.

"Collectively, Android tablets are huge; the market is already flooded with them. But if you're looking not at the whole platform, but rather a one-to-one comparison, the TouchPad could make a good case for the No. 2 spot behind the iPad," said Sarah Rotman Epps, a tech analyst at Forrester Research. "The TouchPad could outsell the Motorola Xoom or the Samsung Galaxy Tab or the BlackBerry PlayBook."

A major advantage that Hewlett-Packard's TouchPad could have over tablets running Google's Android operating system is its screen size, Rotman Epps said.

"Every Android tablet is slightly different, and Honeycomb, the first version of Android optimized for tablets, isn't out yet," she said. "So what you've had so far is a smart-phone operating system on a bunch of tablets and not many Android apps actually built for tablet use."

The mix of inconsistent specs for Android tablets has made it tougher for developers looking to make tablet apps on Android, Rotman Epps said.

"What HP has to overcome is that the only apps out there built for tablets right now are really built for the iPad," she said. "If your tablet is going to succeed, it needs apps, and making the screen on the TouchPad the same size as the iPad should make it easier for developers to port apps over. If developers start doing that, then HP can build an app ecosystem which will attract consumers."

The screen size isn't the only specification that matches the iPad, she noted. Both the iPad and the TouchPad run on Wi-Fi and 3G Internet service, weigh 1.6 pounds and have processors running at about 1 GHz.

The TouchPad features a front-facing camera for video chat, and the next-generation iPad, which should hit retail sometime this year, is widely expected to also feature a camera on the front to utilize Apple's FaceTime video-chat standard.

"It is not at all a mistake on HP's part that the TouchPad and the iPad are so similar," Rotman Epps said. "HP is explicitly trying to compete with Apple in having its own hardware and having its own operating system. So far, Apple has been by far the most successful in the tablet space, and HP is looking to replicate that success on its own. Not with Android and not with Windows."

It's noteworthy, she said, that HP isn't offering its first consumer tablet with Microsoft's Windows 7 -- the same operating system that runs on its HP 500 Slate tablet aimed at business users.

"If you're making boxes that run Android or Windows, you have the problem of competing with all the other boxes that run Android of Windows," Rotman Epps said."But it does say something about the failure of Microsoft to position Windows 7 as a winning operating system for tablets that HP is willing to go out on its own with WebOS. This is really another missed opportunity for Microsoft in tablets."

Nothing HP announced on Wednesday puts it ahead of Apple, but the TouchPad running WebOS is a bet that its brand strength and retail channels are strong enough to compete with Apple, she said.

With HP attempting to build WebOS up as a major operating system for tablets and smart phones, the trimming of the Palm brand from the name and marketing of the new WebOS devices isn't a mistake either, the analyst said.

"People love Windows, and HP now has the challenge of convincing consumers to want HP devices that don't run Windows," Rotman Epps said. "HP is trying to differentiate itself and unbundle itself from Microsoft, and that means they're losing a bit of the Microsoft brand and marketing power that could have helped their tablets, but keeping the Palm name around wouldn't help them."

HP is a high-ranking brand and a name consumers trust, she said.

"Palm is not," Rottman Epps said. "In our studies, HP ranks pretty high and Palm always ranks pretty low. HP recognizes that in the U.S. and globally, it has a much stronger brand than Palm to try and build a tablet ecosystem on."

HP made a big deal of getting apps for Netflix and Amazon's Kindle on its WebOS phones and on the TouchPad when it announced the new devices on Wednesday during a news conference in San Francisco. Having an app for Netflix does put WebOS ahead of Android -- which still doesn't have an app that can stream video from the popular movie-and-TV-show subscription service.

But such apps are expected by consumers at this point, she said.

"Kindle and Netflix is not a differentiator, but it's necessary, and having them on board is what HP needs to do to gain serious consideration from consumers," Rottman Epps said.

And if HP can do that, then spending $1.2 billion to buy Palm last April could pay off.

Forrester has forecast that more than 24 million tablets will be sold in the U.S. in 2011, with the lion's share of them being the iPad. Apple sold more than 14 million iPad's last year, with 7.33 million units sold last quarter.

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Photo: HP Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein, shows off the new HP TouchPad tablet during a Hewlett Packard WebOS press conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, Feb. 9. Credit: Associated Press

Images: (Middle) The front of the HP TouchPad tablet and (bottom) the back of the device. Credit: Hewlett-Packard

The air is almost as thick with data as it once was with the smoke of the Industrial Revolution, with increasingly dense billows of bits traveling between the world's billions of mobile devices.

In 2010 alone, the amount of mobile data sent was 2.6 times what it was in 2009. And by 2015, people will send 26 times more mobile data than they do now, according to Cisco's annual Global Mobile Traffic Forecast.

That will mean 6.3 exabytes per month, said Suraj Shetty, Cisco's vice president of worldwide service provider marketing. "That's the equivalent of every man, woman and child on Earth sending 1,000 text messages every second," he said.

Yipes, better upgrade my plan!

Cisco says two-thirds of that data traffic will come from mobile video, as more people begin making video calls, sending each other clips they've recorded, and watching longer-form television and movies on their cellphones and tablets.

For a little perspective: Mobile traffic in 2010 was three times as large as all the world's combined Internet traffic in 2000. In short, mobile broadband is getting big -- everywhere.

"There are regions in the world where they have mobile Internet connectivity but are not on the electrical grid," said Doug Webster, Cisco's senior director of service provider marketing. "The Internet is breaking the electrical barrier."

The growth of mobile networks will come with an increase in wireless speeds too. The global average is about 200 kilobits per second now, but as more so-called 4G networks are erected around the world, the average will increase by a factor of 10, to about 2.2 megabits per second. That's on the low end of what home broadband brings today -- pretty astonishing, considering it includes mobile networks in all of the world's developing countries.

But not all of the data explosion is going to come from the rise in smart phones and tablets. In 2015, Cisco predicts, most of the mobile traffic will still come from laptops and netbooks (56%), while smart phones will account for about 27%, and tablets only about 3.5% of the traffic growth.

Cisco makes its predictions by pooling various sources, including data compiled by research firms, polling its own infrastructure of Internet servers, and sampling the data habits of more than 390,000 users who run Cisco's Global Internet Speed Test smart-phone application.

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The next Apple iPhone might include features that could enable users not just to make phone calls but also to make purchases with their phones.

Buying a pair of jeans with an iPhone, a cup of coffee with an iPad or maybe movie tickets on a Droid could be an option in the near future.

And all it may require is pulling out a smart phone, or tablet, and waving it above a receiver or scanner -- as opposed to sliding a debit or credit card, or trading good ol' cash and coin.

Multiple reports have come out today citing various sources on Apple Inc.'s supposed plans to include "near-field communication" features in the iPhone 5, which is expected to hit stores this summer.

Apple, for its part, is declining to comment.

Speaking to Bloomberg, analyst Richard Doherty of Envisioneering Group said the next iPhone and future iPads could be used to make purchases by transmitting financial information to receivers in stores over a distance of as much as 4 inches. Doherty cited Apple engineers working on such hardware for his information.

The iOS-device features could access a user's iTunes gift card info or credit-card and bank data, Bloomberg reported.

If Apple were to add such abilities to its mobile products, it could not only help the Cupertino company tap into a $6.2-trillion pool of money that U.S. consumers spend each year but could also enable the company to cut out credit-card processing fees on every purchase currently made through iTunes, the report said.

The Financial Times ran a similar report today about pay-by-phone features coming to the iPhone, citing "Asian suppliers and others who have been in talks with Apple."

The report also noted that BlackBerry maker Research in Motion, as well as smart-phone and tablet competitors that use Google's Android operating system, are also adding near-field features into upcoming devices.

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Nintendo of America unveiled the game lineup for its new 3DS gaming system Wednesday, allowing users to play 3-dimensional games with the option of linking wirelessly to other players nearby.

The system goes on sale March 27 for $249.99, featuring games such as Super Street Fighter 4, The Legend of Zelda, Madden NFL and Lego Star Wars, with at least 30 games set to be released before the summer.

The device opens up to reveal two screens -– one with 3-D video that doesn’t require special glasses and can be adjusted or turned off, and a touch screen with an adjustable stylus. A motion sensor and a gyro sensor can adjust the screens as players tilt the device.

There’s also a 3-D camera built in.

The 3DS, which will be available in aqua blue or cosmo black, can also sense other systems nearby and launch games with them using the StreetPass function.

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The Motorola Xoom tablet, unveiled last week at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, has a few features not seen on many other tablets -- no buttons, 4G capabilities and even a barometer.

The barometer, which measures atmospheric pressure and can help forecast the weather, is a unique inclusion and might make the Xoom the tablet of choice for meteorologists.

The Xoom, set to release in the first quarter of the year through Verizon stores, will also be the first tablet to ship with Google's Android 3.0 Honeycomb operating system, Motorola Mobility said. A price hasn't yet been announced.

Honeycomb is the first build of Android tailored for tablets, in contrast to previous versions that were built for smart phones and ported over to the larger slate devices.

Motorola is expecting the Xoom to be a big hit, according to reports. Taiwan-based suppliers Catcher Technology and Foxconn Technology have said that orders placed with them and other vendors indicate that Motorola plans to have between 700,000 and 1 million of the tablets built by March 31, Information Week reported.

Morotola has found success with its Droid and Droid X smart phones running Google's Android and is pitching the Xoom as the first dual-core processor tablet and "the first official tablet from Google."

The Xoom will feature a 10.1-inch screen which can play back high-definition 1080p video, a camera on the front with Google Talk chatting, a 5-megapixel camera on the back for photos and 720p HD video. And an HDMI output will allow connection to an HDTV.

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Image: Motorola Xoom tablet. Credit: Motorola Mobility

The Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas is filled with nearly all of the big names in the tech industry, but there are also thousands of start-ups looking for attention, funding, a chance to break out. For most, success never comes.

But if success were measured simply by the number of people who stop by a booth, Tremont Electric and its nPower Peg might be on their way. The nPower Peg is a hand-held battery rod that charges up using kinetic energy.

When thrown in a backpack or purse, the nPower Peg juices up as a user moves around, walks, hikes or runs.

This year's CES was the first for Tremont, a company founded in Cleveland in 2007, and the nPower Peg seemed to attract a crowd of onlookers without a problem.

Company founder and Chief Executive Aaron Lemieux said he hoped some of those who stopped by to  check out the firm's only product so far would be willing to help get his invention out to consumers.

As of now, that's a bit tough for the small firm of about six employees to do on its own. Tremont began taking orders for its nPower Peg in September of last year and so far has sold "a couple hundred," Lemieux said.

But the company also has had "a couple thousand" orders, resulting in an ever-growing backlog of waiting  customers. The nPower Peg isn't yet sold in any stores.

"We'd like to get it to be where you can order and we can ship the same day -- we just aren't there yet," he said. So, at CES, Tremont was -- along with a sea of other entrepreneurs -- looking for a little help.

"We're looking for people that can write checks, companies to partner with," Lemieux said. "I think we're demonstrating that there is a market for this product, we just need to get this product out there."

The nPower Peg is a scalable device, which means it can be made larger for longer charges, such as a larger unit attached to a buoy in the ocean and generating power with the movement of the sea, he said.

The $149 gadget, when fully charged, can power an Apple iPod Nano or about 20 minutes of iPhone life, to send off an urgent text message or e-mail, Lemieux said. A USB input allows the nPower Peg to output energy to a variety of cellphones, cameras and GPS devices.

Tremont is currently building all of its nPower Pegs by hand in Cleveland, with 90% of the parts coming from other companies in Ohio, he said.

"We're located in a revitalized part of Cleveland that has recently had new restaurants and businesses move into the area, but in order to sustain this revitalization, we need more jobs to come to Cleveland, and hopefully we can a part of that too," Lemieux said.

The idea for the nPower Peg came in 1996 when Lemieux, who says he's a long-distance backpacker, was hiking the Appalachian Trail.

"In 1996, we weren't even dependent on cellphones, so it took awhile for me to be able to even get ahold of the technology needed to make this thing," he said. "But once we had it figured out, I told my wife I needed to quit my full-time job, I filed a patent, I emptied our bank account, and now we're fully in this.

"Basically, I have a beautiful, loving and wonderful wife that has allowed me to do this."

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Video: Tremont's nPower Peg at CES. Credit: Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times

The one thing "Despicable Me" really proved last year was that having minions can be fun. There were several robot and personal assistant devices being shown at the Consumer Electronics Show.

Among them was Karotz, a tall-eared eager-to-serve Wi-Fi device from Mindscape.It can fetch from Twitter and Facebook and can report the weather as well. You can listen to MP3s and make phone calls over the Internet through Karotz.

It will cost $179 and should be available in the spring.

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