Samsung and LG Display lowered LCD factory utilization rates to mid-80 percent in late 2010, from 90 percent in November, to stave off growing inventory, Corning Vice Chairman James Flaws said in a conference call.

With new home construction still in the doldrums and well off its peak of 1.8 million housing starts in 2006, according to the National Association of Home Builders, the smart grid is offering home automation company Control4 new life and a foot in the door to a segment of customers the company hasn’t typically reached, Control4 President Glen Mella told us. “We believe utilities represent one channel for deploying a technology footprint into a large number of homes,” he said, saying 80 percent of the company’s business goes through custom installation and retail channels.

Voluntary, industry-led e-waste programs are not as effective and are not a substitute for state mandates, representatives of state and local governments and environmentalists said. They were polled by Green Electronics Daily on CEA’s efforts to develop a “national, industry-wide” e-waste program that would involve all stakeholders (CED Jan 10 p7). CEA has not released details of its proposal, but one stakeholder familiar with CEA’s plans said the effort was to experiment with a voluntary program in a state like Utah, which has no e-waste law, and see if it could be applied at a national level. A CEA spokesman declined to confirm or deny those details.

Sigma Designs will start volume production of its 3D-capable SMP8910 processor in Q3, capping a year-long effort to integrate VXP technology onto a single IC, Keith Jack, director of product marketing, told us. The new SMP8910, which is sampling with customers, strips out the decoding in the SMP8644 chips used in Blu-ray players and set-top boxes and replaces it with the VXP’s scaling and deinterlacing technology, Jack said. Sigma acquired VXP, which has found a home in front projectors as a standalone GF9452 and GF9454 video processor ICs, when it bought Gennum’s video processor business in 2008.

TORONTO -- Telco-delivered IPTV is finally beginning to take root in Canada, years after many phone companies began rolling out the new video technology over fiber lines in the U.S. Over the past few months, several major Canadian telcos have started offering IP video services over new fiber networks in their prime markets. The list of phone companies that have begun deploying IPTV includes such large national service providers as Bell Canada and Telus, as well as such regional players as SaskTel, MTS, and Bell Aliant.

After targeting the use of chemicals like brominated flame retardants, lead, cadmium and mercury, environmental groups are turning their attention to the use of nano materials in electronics. The Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition started a consumer campaign to get electronics makers to disclose the use of nano materials in products via a label. Environmentalists faced “pushback” from electronics manufacturers when they tried to get them to disclose nano material use for EPEAT certification, Sheila Davis, the coalition’s executive director, told us.

Global sales of 3D TVs will hit 30 million units this year, driven by the arrival of models featuring LG Displays’ film patterned retarded (FPR) technology that can be paired with passive polarized glasses, LG executives said Friday in a conference call.

Coby will decide this quarter whether to spin off V-Zon as a separate brand. The company has been testing the brand at P.C. Richard & Son stores to decide whether marketing a separate second brand “is a viable strategy,” Michael Troetti, president of Coby Electronics, told Consumer Electronics Daily. Coby V-Zon is the company’s sub-brand for portable DVD players and the company’s MPEG-4 video player, he noted.

The 3D Audio Alliance (3DAA) is being formed to drive development of open, royalty-free 3D audio transmission standards with a goal of setting specifications by Q2 2012, said Allen Gharapetian, vice president of marketing at SRS Labs.

LONDON -- “Digital piracy, and the lack of adequate legal tools to fight it, remains the biggest threat to the future of creative industries,” IFPI CEO Frances Moore told a news briefing Thursday for the release of the international recording industry’s annual Digital Music Report for 2011. “Legislation is only effective if it is enforced, and it hasn’t been enforced,” she said.