In honor of Comic-Con International, the huge and nerd-tastic comic book convention, opening tonight, here’s the new teaser trailer for the third of Hollywood director Chris Nolan’s elegant Batman movie series, “The Dark Knight Rises.”

The movie debuts next year and will be the final installment for this franchise. The previous film starred the late Heath Ledger as the Joker.

And, this latest effort already looks creepier and darker than ever, featuring a leather-clad Catwoman (played by Anne Hathaway) and a whole lot of special effects:

While the Consumer Electronics Show and other big events feature acres of tiny booths crammed one against another, Mobile World Congress features a different kind of bigness. The show is spread out over eight big buildings in a historic area of town. Every couple of buildings are set several flights of stairs up from the last one, with the final two buildings just a stone’s throw from the grand National Palace.

Connecting the buildings and lining the promenade between them are various smaller trailers and bungalows.

Unlike the cramped booths at CES, the spread-out nature of Mobile World Congress allows even moderate-size companies a good amount of space to show their wares. Even those with bungalows outside a main hall stand a good chance of attracting visitors. Companies that went with that approach included Acer and INQ Mobile, which was touting its new Android phone with quick access to Facebook and Spotify.

That said, some folks’ presence at Mobile World Congress is clearly bigger than others.

One booth that stands out is Google’s first-ever Android booth, tucked in the corner of Hall 8, just inside the entrance.

The two-story pavilion features many of Google’s partners showing Android applications, as well as a place to create one’s own Android mini-me, plus a sushi-bar-style conveyor belt featuring the many phone and tablet designs based on the Google operating system. Among the designs that scrolled by while I was standing there were well-known names such as Samsung and HTC, as well as less-familiar brands such as China’s ZTE and Alcatel, which is new to Android.

Perhaps the pièce de résistance of the booth is a slide that allows children of all chronological ages to relive their youth and glide down from the top floor back to the bottom. The most popular thing, though, was a series of collectible pins being passed out throughout Mobile World Congress by various Android partners. They were a hot commodity, and by Tuesday afternoon most booths were completely out of their supply of pins, placing green candy inside the dishes instead.

While impressive, the Android booth was not the largest by any stretch. One of the more massive setups I saw was the Ericsson booth, which occupied nearly all of Hall 6. A small Sony Ericsson booth was open to the public. Behind a security gate, though, was a massive spread for the many partners of both Ericsson and Sony Ericsson. It featured two bars and two kiosks serving various tapas.

There were meeting rooms and patio tables for more-casual interactions. On display were all kinds of Ericsson technologies ranging from its core infrastructure gear to all kinds of other products and research projects.

A few caught my eye, including a mobile payment section that featured a “Museum of Money” talking about days gone by when people used paper currency with all its flaws. Under glass were such relics as money, piggy banks and counterfeit-detection pens, while Ericsson showed off its many payment technologies.

In another corner, Ericsson was showing off a vending machine that is paid, not with cash or credit card, but via SMS message. Ericsson has a unit that serves as an intermediary between the vendor and the carrier to manage the transaction.

According to the CTIA, there are more than 246 million wireless data-capable devices at large in the U.S. today. Of these, 40 million are smart phones or PDAs, and more than 10 million are laptops. Little wonder that wireless data service revenue rose 31 percent to more than $19.4 billion in the first six months of 2009.

Revenue will no doubt continue that trend in the months ahead as wireless devices become more ubiquitous. Wireless carriers, then, would be wise to put some of their windfall toward building out their networks to cope with future demand lest they end up the butt of a joke in a rival’s advertisement.

Consider these remarks from Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski, spoken Wednesday at the CTIA wireless industry convention in San Diego: “We are fast entering a world where mass-market mobile devices consume thousands of megabytes each month. So we must ask: what happens when every mobile user has an iPhone, a Palm Pre, a BlackBerry Tour, or whatever the next device is? What happens when we quadruple the number of subscribers with mobile broadband on their laptops or netbooks? The short answer: We will need a lot more spectrum. The biggest threat to the future of mobile in America is the looming spectrum crisis.”

Digital Daily was on hand at Macworld ’09 Monday. Despite the flurry of wonky reporting about the health and/or “imminent death” of Steve Jobs–put into perspective here by BoomTown–nothing too remarkable happened during Apple’s (AAPL) final appearance at the annual event. Phil Schiller did a solid job delivering the keynote in Jobs’s place, introducing a new 17-inch MacBook Pro with an eight-hour internal battery and some innovative updates to iWork and iLife. Schiller ended his keynote with the announcement of changes in pricing and digital rights management for iTunes, punctuated by the surprise appearance of crooner Tony Bennett. Apparently, as Bennett sang, the best is yet to come. Crack photojournalist Adam Tow was on hand to capture the keynote in its entirety–All Things Digital’s photo coverage can be found here.

MediaMemo reported from CES about the pervasive 3-D theme of the conference and wondered whether people would pay cash to see a football game in 3-D at a theater instead of just staying home. There was the ongoing litany of the casualties of the econalypse: “Semantic” ad network Peer39 shut down its ad operation this week, Hearst is about to pull the plug on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Forbes announced layoffs and Sir Howard Stringer announced the elimination of thousands of jobs at Sony (SNE). MediaMemo also caught the much anticipated introduction of Palm’s (PALM) new smartphone, the Palm Pre, and its new Web OS, a combo Palm deems superior to the iPhone and that many others consider Palm’s last chance for survival. The product’s success or failure will have a lot to do with its pricing, about which there’s much disbelief.

BoomTown had the lowdown this week on an amusing rumor about a Microsoft-backed (MSFT) run at Yahoo (YHOO), the emergence of Carol Bartz as the top prospect for Yahoo CEO and Microsoft’s deal with Verizon (VZ) and Dell (DELL) to distribute search. Jerry Yang submitted to the all-seeing eye of BoomTown’s Flip camera along with Yahoo President Sue Decker to talk about Yahoo’s new product, Connected TV. The camera also caught some chatty attendees and a few demos, including one of a new Disney (DIS) music product given by a guy who looked like a member of ZZ Top.

Speaking of ZZ Top, catch gadget godfather Walt Mossberg trying out some 3-D glasses on his annual odyssey around the convention floor. All he needs is a longer beard and a ’32 Ford and he could be a band member, too. Walt and colleague Katie Boehret caught many of the more interesting gadgets on video, and Walt previewed some more for FOX News.

More next week.

Our industry is the one that this going to get the economy through this recession.

– Gary Shapiro, president and CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association

The International Consumer Electronics Show will kick off next week shrouded in a nimbus of recessionary gloom. Show attendance is expected to be down eight percent this year, according to Gary Shapiro, CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association, who expects 130,000 attendees to flood the convention–11,000 fewer than last year. The show floor itself will be slightly diminished as well. CES exhibitor booths required 1.8 million square feet in 2008. In 2009, they’ll take up 1.7 million, presumably thanks to the absence of Seagate (STX), Logitech (LOGI), Cisco (CSCO), Philips (PHG), Yahoo (YHOO) and Sanyo–all of which have abandoned plans to exhibit on the show floor. That said, the overall number of exhibitors will remain the same as last year, at about 2,700.

So the show will be a bit smaller and a bit less clamorous than in years past. Likely a bit more sober as well, given this rough retail year. Quite a change from the extravagance of years past, but not without a certain upside. “This is the bleakest CES in 30 years going in,” said Envisioneering Group analyst Richard Doherty. “[Some exhibitors] will be spending more of their time off the show floor. We may now be able to get between the Venetian and the convention in less than an hour.”

Our industry is the one that this going to get the economy through this recession.

– Gary Shapiro, president and CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association

The International Consumer Electronics Show will kick off next week shrouded in a nimbus of recessionary gloom. Show attendance is expected to be down eight percent this year, according to Gary Shapiro, CEO of the Consumer Electronics Association, who expects 130,000 attendees to flood the convention–11,000 fewer than last year. The show floor itself will be slightly diminished as well. CES exhibitor booths required 1.8 million square feet in 2008. In 2009, they’ll take up 1.7 million, presumably thanks to the absence of Seagate (STX), Logitech (LOGI), Cisco (CSCO), Philips (PHG), Yahoo (YHOO) and Sanyo–all of which have abandoned plans to exhibit on the show floor. That said, the overall number of exhibitors will remain the same as last year, at about 2,700.

So the show will be a bit smaller and a bit less clamorous than in years past. Likely a bit more sober as well, given this rough retail year. Quite a change from the extravagance of years past, but not without a certain upside. “This is the bleakest CES in 30 years going in,” said Envisioneering Group analyst Richard Doherty. “[Some exhibitors] will be spending more of their time off the show floor. We may now be able to get between the Venetian and the convention in less than an hour.”