The world’s leading electronics makers have teamed up to develop a wireless technology to carry high-definition video and eliminate some of the cable spaghetti that links televisions with set-top boxes and other equipment.

Seven companies were to announce Tuesday that they formed the WirelessHD Consortium to free high-definition TVs from the tangle of cables connected to cable or satellite boxes, gaming consoles, DVD players, or even camcorders and other portable multimedia gadgets.

The companies are LG Electronics Inc., Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., known for its Panasonic brand, NEC Corp., Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Sony

Hartford, Conn., spends $1m on pilot program to start gapping massive digital divide: I write these words, oddly enough, in West Hartford, an affluent suburb not far from the house in which Mark Twain spent a good chunk of his later years, and an example of the massive inequality in income, quality of life, and public schools between Hartford’s border towns and the city proper. The announcement of the launch of a pilot Wi-Fi network in downtown Hartford and in a Blue Hills neighborhood was above-the-fold, front-page news in The Hartford Courant this morning. (I’m not here chasing a story, but rather visiting my in-laws.)

The GNER rail line in Britain has Internet access on all its trains: The East Coast rail operator announced that it would expand service ahead of schedule, based on positive feedback. I spoke this summer to the head of the joint venture between GNER and Icomera, the Swedish developer of this particular technology, and he spoke glowingly of the uptake by their customers; once service was running on some trains, it became a drumbeat to get it running on all trains. One factor in adding service earlier was the boost to cellular uplink capacity via UMTS/HSDPA that was rolled out across parts of the service area in recent months.

Esme Vos of MuniWireless.com expects a massive growth in spending on metro-scale networks: Vos estimated $177m in 2006 spending, but that’s mushroomed to an anticipated $235m. With larger county-wide projects in the works, so, too, will capital and operational costs expand. The latest report from MuniWireless.com expects $3b to be sepnt across four years, including operational expense.

Despite security and privacy concerns, all but three of the countries required by the US to issue passports with radio tags are now doing so, the Department of Homeland Security said on Thursday.Except for Andorra, Brunei and Liechtenstein, all of the 27 countries whose citizens can travel to the US without a visa are now issuing “e-Passports”, the department said in a statement. The passports include a radio frequency identification, or RFID, chip with the holder’s information and a biometric identifier, such as a digital …