Game Boys and backseat monitors are “so five years ago,” suggests Tom Seder, a manager at the General Motors R&D labs.

Working with the Future Lab, at Israel’s Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, GM researchers are exploring ways to turn a car’s rear windows into interactive devices that could permit backseat passengers – children in particular – to have a more interesting experience while traveling.

SEOUL (Reuters) – Samsung Group, which includes Samsung Electronics Co, said on Tuesday it is raising its 2012 investment to a record $41.4 billion, underscoring the widening gulf between the dominant South Korean conglomerate and its faltering competitors.

Best known for making massive investments in new technologies ahead of rivals, Samsung is now banking on logic chips and OLED displays to repeat its roaring success in flash chips, computer memory chips and LCD flat-screens, even as a gloomy global economic and IT spending outlook forces its peers to be conservative in spending.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Sam Palmisano will step down as IBM’s CEO at the end of the year and will be replaced by longtime company executive Ginni Rometty.

Palmisano’s tenure was an extremely successful one: After taking the tech giant’s reins from Lou Gerstner in 2002, Palmisano transformed the company from a systems and services firm into a supercomputing and analytics mega-machine.

The makeover paid off. Shares have soared 73% during Palmisano’s tenure and IBM’s revenues have more than quadrupled in his nearly 10 years at the helm.

In perhaps tribute to the technology visionary, sales of Steve Jobs’ trademark black turtleneck have soared since news broke that the former Apple CEO died, according to a report in the Minneapolis / St. Paul Business Journal.

St. Croix Collections has seen sales of the iconic black mock turtleneck, which Jobs frequently wore at Apple product unveilings and other public appearances, double overnight, and some stores have run out of them, the report said.

First, Congress and President Obama can adopt strategies designed to unleash the massive amount of capital that is accumulated but not being invested. There’s some $2.2 trillion in cash in American banks that is not committed to loans. A couple hundred billion has to be held back for bad mortgages, but there’s about $2 trillion that could be used in cash reserves for up to $20 trillion in loans. So, in theory, that would take the world out of recession. And U.S. corporations have about $2 trillion more that they have decided not to invest.

As if the U.S. Postal Service weren’t already in enough financial trouble, a growing number of startups are about to make its future even more uncertain. They’re trying to lure one of its main revenue sources — the nearly 48 billion bills, statements, account notices and offers that companies send to households every year — into the electronic realm. That could make the USPS’s $3.1 billion third-quarter loss seem like small change. The companies aim to do so with secure online services that, unlike e-mail, are inaccessible to spammers and allow consumers to receive, organize and respond to important correspondence all in one digital place. Matt Swain, associate director at research firm InfoTrends, calls the technology “a potential game-changer.”

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Hewlett-Packard is taking a hatchet to its business and doing some radical restructuring.

The company said Thursday that it is looking to spin off its industry-leading but struggling personal computer business. HP also killed off the TouchPad tablet it launched last month, as well as its webOS smartphone line.

The move essentially leaves for dead the webOS software HP got by acquiring Palm last year, though the company said it will continue trying to “optimize the value” of its purchase. Though the move was unexpected, it’s not all that surprising: Despite a huge marketing campaign, TouchPad sales struggled so much that HP almost immediately cut the tablet’s price by $100. HP said none of its webOS products reached the company’s internal sales targets.

FORTUNE — Here’s a fun stat: The 300 million players who have downloaded Rovio’s Angry Birds games have flung more than 100 billion avians — more birds than actually exist in the entire world.

“Our goal is to be the first brand with a billion fans,” Peter “Mighty Eagle” Vesterbacka, Rovio’s chief marketing officer, told attendees Thursday at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech. “We don’t talk about consumers, users — we want fans.”

Angry Birds might seem like an overnight, stroke-of-luck success, but it was the 51st game launched by 8-year-old Rovio, and the game’s now-iconic characters and addictive nature were carefully crafted. Vesterbacka isn’t impressed with much of what he sees cropping up on Facebook.

WASHINGTON — Google Inc. won government clearance with restrictions Friday for its $700 million purchase of airline fare tracker ITA Software in a deal that will give the Internet search giant a key role in online travel.

Google promises to give consumers more choices and better ways to search for plane tickets as it incorporates ITA technology, which powers the reservation systems of most major U.S. airlines and many popular online fare-comparison services, including Kayak, TripAdvisor and Hotwire.

DALLAS – Alaska Airlines and its Horizon Air affiliate canceled 95 flights Saturday because a computer system used for flight planning failed.

The outage lasted intermittently for about seven hours and resulted in the two airlines scrapping about 12 percent of their combined schedule before technicians fixed the system, which returned at 10 a.m. Pacific time.

Company spokesman Paul McElroy said many other flights were delayed, and customers had trouble getting flight-status updates on the airlines’ website because of the outage.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Tablets aren’t killing personal computers yet, but they’re making consumers think twice before buying a laptop.

Tech consultancy Gartner on Thursday lowered its PC shipment forecast for 2011 and 2012. The company said soaring tablet sales will result in far fewer notebook and netbook sales over the next two years than it initially expected.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — You could be sitting on a pile of cash.

The old sofa in your living room, the pile of sports equipment in the garage, the outgrown baby gear, the used electronics are all worth cash — lots of it.The average household has more than $7,000 worth of unused stuff stuff
sitting around, according to research firm NPD Group. And that doesn’t
include big ticket items like TVs and furniture.