Mobile phone services that offer directions and other location-based services will be huge in 2008, says Mark Collins, vice president of consumer data services for AT&T (T).

Qualcomm (QCOM), the second largest supplier of chips for cell phones, is under an intensifying investigation in Europe after complaints that it uses its influence in 3G phones to fleece suppliers and block competitors.

The European Commission, the same regulatory body that has brought antitrust charges against Microsoft (MSFT), Intel (INTC), Rambus (RMBS) and others, is conducting the probe. The commission says it will give the investigation high priority after two years with little action.

Refresh this page for updates as the event progresses.

Intel (INTC) CEO Paul Otellini is giving the opening keynote at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, the chip giant’s biggest event of the year. Intel controls 75 percent of the global semiconductor market, but is in a pitched battle with Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) for the future of chips that sit at the heart of PCs, phones, servers and more.

Companies such as Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Dell (DELL) and Apple (AAPL) use these chips across their product lines, and they, along with the rest of the information technology industry, will be looking to Otellini for a roadmap to the future.

Even if you’re not a heavy user of its Photoshop software, or even an investor in its stock, it might be a good idea to watch this afternoon’s earnings announcement from Adobe Systems (ADBE).

That’s because Adobe, the Silicon Valley-based software maker that also sells Flash, Photoshop, Acrobat, and other popular programs, will give investors the earliest possible peek at how healthy the technology industry was this summer. The next-earliest major tech company to report earnings is Oracle (ORCL), which releases its results on Thursday – but aside from that, no big players will weigh in until Intel (INTC) and Yahoo (YHOO) share their numbers on October 16.

Silicon Valley is still the headquarters location of choice for chip makers, research firm iSuppli says. In fact, the firm estimates that a quarter of all global chip companies have headquarters in the area south of San Francisco.

Last year 56 Silicon Valley semiconductor suppliers raked in $68.2 billion in sales. That’s still far ahead of the second-place locale, Taiwan’s Hsinchu City, which managed $50.2 billion.

Electronics and semiconductor market growth will slow in 2007, research firm iSuppli predicts. Though consumers worldwide continue to buy more phones, PCs and other gadgets, the growth rate will taper off from last year’s pace.

Texas Instruments (TXN) is in the cell phone world what Intel (INTC) is in PCs – the largest supplier of the chips that form the brains of the device. (Like Intel, TI has plenty of competition; Qualcomm (QCOM) is a strong number two.) As the global market for wireless devices grows, Texas Instruments’s technology vision will shape the way our devices function and our businesses run.

I caught up with Texas Instruments Chief Technology Officer Hans Stork to chat about the company’s vision for mobile and device technology, and where his researchers are looking to push boundaries.

It’s being said a lot these days: The next billion cell phone users won’t come from the developed world, because so many of us have phones already. That next wave will come primarily from China and India.

With that in mind, today I talked to Bill Krenik, wireless and advanced architectures manager at Texas Instruments (TXN), about the just-announced second version of its single-chip cell phone platform, called eCosto.