US President Donald Trump and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) have announced a number of new initiatives and projects that it believes will help accelerate its 5G network growth ambitions in the United States.

US chip firm Qualcomm has announced that it has released a chipset which has been specifically designed based on 3GPP cellular standards for the 'connected cars'. In a statement issued to the press, Qualcomm introduced the 9150 Cellular Vehicle-to-Everything (C-V2X) chipset which combines LTE network connectivity with direct communications in the internationally harmonized 5.9GHz band.

Qualcomm Technologies has launched the Qualcomm Vision Intelligence Platform, featuring the company's first family of system-on-chips (SoCs) purpose-built for the Internet of Things (IoT) using advanced 10nm FinFET process technology.

New legislation in relation to self-driving technology and autonomous transportation which is currently being drafted by the US Republican party - will prevent individual US states from establishing and forming its own set of rules and guidelines in relation to the design, testing and subsequent deployment of self-driving cars.

Research conducted in the United States is projecting that the sales of autonomous vehicles is set to explode exponentially in the next eight years. The increase in sales is expected to be primarily propelled by aggressive investment from the likes of Google subsidiary Waymo.

South Korean conglomerate Samsung Electronics has announced that it intends to become a major player in the global race to develop autonomous driving technology. It has been claimed that Samsung will formally outline its strategy for the automotive sector at the Frankfurt Motor Show later this week.

Smart Dubai is organizing a trip for Happiness Champions from various government entities in Dubai to attend a training course on the 'Quality of Service' at the Disney Institute in Orlando, USA.

The smartest cities in the US have been formally announced following weeks of public voting in a survey conducted by IDC Government Insights. Over 3,000 votes were cast in the inaugural IDC Smart Cities North America. (SCNAA)

Smartphones are now in 80 percent of U.S. homes - a six percentage point increase year-over-year (YOY) - and U.S. consumers now own 27 million more smartphones than they did just last year, according to new research from the Consumer Technology Association (CTA).

The US Territory of Puerto Rico was recently hit by the strongest storm in almost 90 years. Knocking out the island's electricity grid, 90 percent of cell phone sites stopped working, according to the US Federal Communications Commission. The recent string of monster storms in North America has drawn attention to the importance of critical communications and promoting public safety.

T-Mobile announced on June 26 it had completed the United States' first mobile broadband data session live in the field using License Assisted Access (LAA) on its commercial network. The field testing, which began in Los Angeles, showed blazing 741 Mbps download speeds using 80 MHz of aggregated spectrum.

T-Mobile recently announced plans to roll-out its new 600MHz LTE network in the US, leveraging the massive haul of super-premium low-band spectrum the operator won in the government broadcast incentive auction concluded earlier this year. The announcement came just two months after the company received its spectrum licenses from the FCC.

More than a dozen tech giants in the United States, including Verizon, Facebook, Snap, Twitter and Alphabet's Google, have filed a 44-page brief with the Supreme Court calling for tighter restrictions on government officials having access to private and sensitive cellphone data of individuals.

Artificial intelligence (Al) is regarded as a key to drive the world's future development. Although Europe and the United States are dominated by private enterprises, while the Mainland China is led by national entities, the core of AI formation, in fact, is rested on available top-notch talent. The 2017 Global AI Talent White Paper released by the Tencent Research Institute in December last year stated that there are approximately 300,000 AI researchers and practitioners in the world, while the market demand for AI talent is in millions. In the first 10 months of 2017, the demand for AI talent was twice of that in 2016. The report suggests that the bottleneck is education - though there are 20,000 graduates from related disciplines each year, the number is far from adequate to meet the demand.

US president Donald Trump's administration has announced that it will unveil its revised guidelines on self-driving regulations early next week, following pressure from leading US car manufacturers who had requested the government to relax and eliminate legal barriers that prevented automakers from putting autonomous vehicles on public roads.

Uber have announced that it will resume its ride-hailing services in Taiwan following a series of successful talks with island authorities. The US firm suspended its services in the region after being hit with a series of fines and penalties after government figures claimed that Uber was misrepresenting itself by claiming to be a technology platform and not a transportation company. However, after a number of ‘constructive talks' Uber have ended its two-month suspension on services in Taiwan.

US-based global ride hailing service Uber has suffered a fresh setback following a decision by a UK court to uphold recommendations made by a regulatory body that drivers needed to prove their ability to communicate in English.

The UK government has announced that it is set to invest £150 million in digital infrastructure and open data in its efforts to make Scotland's biggest city, Glasgow, a world-leading 'smart city'. Glasgow has already received £24 million since 2013 which has been circulated through the Innovate UK innovation agency. The investment has served to not only enhance connectivity in the city, but it has also helped Glasgow develop technologies of the future that will be cost effective and energy efficient.

Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) has announced that it is set to commence on a pilot of a 'smart restroom' program in one if its terminal buildings. It will become the first airport in the world to install a restroom traffic management system that has been specifically designed to improve the cleanliness and flow of passenger movement in public restrooms at busy airports.

A number of US and European energy companies have been penetrated by a group of sophisticated hackers in a cyber espionage campaign. The cyber-attack successfully infiltrated some of the core systems that control the firms operations according to reports from researchers at security firm Symantec.