By RYAN KIM, San Francisco Chronicle

Hyun Gu Lee, a 26-year-old software engineer from Belmont, Calif., discontinued his cable TV service after doing a little math and exploring his options.

One of the cooler and yet oddly scary things exhibited at the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was Gracenote's new CarStars stereo system.
It's cool because you can choose to have a music celebrity recommend songs as you drive.

While the Internet age has our virtual lives up to warp speed, there remains a nagging speed bump We're talking about the time it takes to get your computer operating system up and running. It can be a couple of minutes or more, depending on the age of your computer and the applications it has.

Tony Key, senior vice president of marketing for video game maker Ubisoft, points to the Title IX anti-discrimination law when talking about new opportunities in gaming.Before the 1972 passage of the measure, which eliminated sex discrimination in schools, only 1 out of 27 girls played high school sports. Thirty-six years later, that figure is 1 out of every 2 girls.

SAN FRANCISCO -- The iPhone was not the first touch-screen smart phone when it was introduced last year, but it might as well have been.The exclusive AT&T device and its successor, the iPhone 3G, set the pace in this trend-setting category with their ease of use, Internet capabilities and multimedia functions.

I gushed about the iPhone when it appeared last year, waxing about its ease of use and its ability to draw people in with its intuitive and beguiling touch-screen interface.

Nintendo's new fitness game that utilizes an innovative wireless balance board might be yet another gimmick, but after playing with "Wii Fit" and using the accompanying Wii Balance Board for the past couple weeks, I'd say Nintendo has a winner.

Nintendo is releasing what might be the first big-budget console game that they hope will pull in that ever-elusive segment: mothers.

Claudiu Stoenescu, a database manager from San Ramon, Calif., never thought of himself as a wireless headset kind of guy. But his wife insisted he buy the wireless earpiece for his cell phone last month.She wants him on the right side of the law when he makes future calls in the car.

With visions of a Nintendo Wii-like market, game developers are lining up to create titles for Apple's iPhone and its cousin, the iPod Touch. The anticipation began last week, when Apple unveiled a kit that allows third-party software to be written for the popular devices.