IN BRIEF

CAMARILLO, Calif.

Gasoline prices drop 3 cents per gallon

The national average price for gasoline fell about 3 cents over the last two weeks, according to a survey released Sunday.

The average price of self-serve regular gasoline on Friday was $2.94 a gallon, mid-grade was $3.07 and premium was $3.18, according to the Lundberg Survey of 7,000 stations nationwide.

Of the cities surveyed, the cheapest price was in St. Louis, where a gallon of regular cost $2.76, on average. The highest was in Honolulu at $3.35.

NEW YORK

New chips to link Wi-Fi, Bluetooth technology

The popular wireless technology known as Bluetooth could get a lot faster next year by taking advantage of Wi-Fi technology already built into many gadgets.

Linking Bluetooth and Wi-Fi may make it easier and faster to transfer large amounts of music between computers and cell phones, or send pictures from a camera phone to a printer, or video from a camcorder to a TV.

Michael Foley, director of the Bluetooth Special Interest Group, said the first devices with the technology could be on the market in the middle of next year. The industry group behind Bluetooth, which has more than 10,000 member companies, plans to announce today that it is pursuing the technology and will make it available next year.

A fast transfer channel for Bluetooth using a different radio technology, ultra-wideband, was announced in 2006, but delays in getting it to work prompted the Bluetooth group to look at Wi-Fi too, Foley said.

Some products already combine Bluetooth and Wi-Fi functions, but they work off separate chips. Most likely, manufacturers will use single chips still under development that combine Bluetooth and Wi-Fi capabilities.

BOSTON

Technology outlook for '08 grows dimmer

The technology industry's outlook for 2008 looks worse than it did just two months ago, when fears of a U.S. recession already were leading analysts to predict a slowdown in purchases of computers, software and tech services.

A report being released today by Forrester Research Inc. says U.S. companies and government agencies are expected to increase their spending on information technology by just 2.8 percent this year. That is a substantial downward revision from the 4.6 percent growth that Forrester was predicting in December.

Typically, the analyst firm leaves its tech-spending forecasts alone for several months, because the economic trends that support such predictions tend not to change very quickly. However, Andrew Bartels, a Forrester vice president, said that in the past two months "there is a clearer sense that we're in or headed toward a recession."

Forrester expects the worldwide tech market to grow a healthier 6 percent, but the December forecast had envisioned a 9 percent gain.