Vizio

William Wang likes being disruptive, and television shoppers are paying the price -- a lower price. In 2002, when plasma TVs were selling for $10,000, the Taiwanese-born entrepreneur set out to sell one for $2,999. He fulfilled his ambition a year later, shipping a 46-inch model with a $2,799 price tag, about half what other brands then charged. Now his Irvine-based company, Vizio Inc., is the No.

The future of television could be sitting in an Irvine laboratory. To illuminate images, these sets use light-emitting diodes behind the screen, resulting in TVs that can be far thinner, brighter and more eco-friendly than other flat-panel models. LED-backlit TVs -- an evolution of the standard LCD set -- have been on the market since 2004. But the sets in this lab have something that could catapult the technology into the mainstream. A far lower price.

M-Go, a Burbank-based online entertainment service founded by DreamWorks Animation and Technicolor, has signed licensing deals with five of the six major Hollywood studios, the company is expected to announce Wednesday. The deals with NBCUniversal, Paramount, Sony Pictures, Twentieth Century Fox and Warner Bros. help fill out the library of movie and television titles M-Go will offer when it launches in the fourth quarter. Unlike Netflix, M-Go doesn't plan to offer unlimited video for a flat monthly fee. Nor does it plan to offer free television reruns, unlike Hulu or the networks' sites.

This week at the 2013 International Consumer Electronics Show, we have reported on personal computer makers' attempts to reinvent the laptop . The wild popularity of tablets has stymied sales of laptops. As a result, PC makers are trying to create machines that combine the best of tablets and laptops.  But there's another piece of that trend that didn't make it into our earlier report. That same dynamic is now extending to ye olde desktop PC, which is now in line for its own radical changes.  Sales of desktop computers are also declining.

Samsung Electronics Co. of South Korea, the world's largest maker of liquid-crystal display televisions, may be barred from selling TVs and computer monitors in the U.S. after losing a patent case filed by Japanese rival Sharp Corp. The U.S. International Trade Commission in Washington said Wednesday that Samsung violated Sharp's patent rights and ordered both sides to submit arguments on whether an import ban should be imposed. In a notice on its website, the agency said it wanted to consider the effect of a ban on "competitive conditions in the U.S. economy."

Among the several records broken by ultra-skydiver Felix Baumgartner on Sunday, there was one that may have been unexpected: most viewers to a live event ever on YouTube . The highest skydive in history, during which Baumgartner became the first free-falling human to break the sound barrier, racked up 8 million simultaneous views on YouTube. The live stream of the event lasted more than two hours, showing the relatively slow accent by balloon to about 24 miles above Earth, then the jump that hit speeds as high as 834 mph and took a little more than 10 minutes.

Is OnLive still alive? The online-game streaming company may have laid off a significant number of workers, triggering wide speculation about whether it is on life support. The stories of layoffs, reported by Mashable , Kotaku , Engadget and Gamasutra , were dismissed in an email as "rumors" by OnLive spokeswoman Jane Anderson, who declined comment further. Mashable reported that "the entire staff" of OnLive was laid off Friday morning, while Engadget put the figure at 50% of employees.

LAS VEGAS -- Walking around the Consumer Electronics Show on Tuesday, nothing stood out quite as much as watching a woman stick her hand behind a TV and then seeing her hand through the set's transparent screen. No, it wasn't a magic trick. The Hisense employee was showing off the company's see-through 3-D concept, which is a very thin TV with a transparent display. Many walking by the unusual TV made double takes as they couldn't quite figure out what they were seeing. The transparent TV sits about a foot away from a wall with a bright light behind it, which is necessary in order to see the images that appear on the set's display.

The iPad mini may not be the only major new product Apple announces this month. A new report by 9 to 5 Mac 's Mark Gurman says the Cupertino, Calif., tech giant also plans to announce a 13-inch MacBook Pro with high-resolution Retina display, expanding the company's catalog of Retina-enabled products. It already offers a 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display. The report says Apple will introduce the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina at the rumored Oct. 23 iPad mini event.

A rumor sprang up this week suggesting that Samsung would release a 5.8-inch smartphone in Europe that would be its biggest phone yet. The name of the device, however, leaves some of us scratching our heads. Fonblet? The term appears to be a combination of the phonetic sound of "phone" with the back end of the "tablet. " But as silly as the name is, it raises the important question of what we should call these oversized devices. Samsung kicked off the whole smartphone/tablet hybrid device trend in 2011 with the launch of the 5.3-inch-screen Galaxy Note.