Online advertising network Adknowledge said this week it has acquired Cubics, another network created just to reach the Facebook developer community. Cubics already represents the ad inventory on applications from 500 application developers, showing adverts from thousands of small businesses, achieving over 1 billion impressions a month. Adknowledge already supports Friendster and plans a Bebo network. Recently, Adknowledge completed the acquisition of Mediarun, one of the leading ad ad networks within the United Kingdom and Australia.
3D cinema chain IMAX said this week its has a joint-venture deal to install 100 IMAX projection systems in US cinema chain AMC, in 33 major US markets. The deal will double the number of IMAX theatres in North America, with the first 50 systems beginning in July 2008, 25 more for 2009 and the rest in 2010. The system is a new digital 3D system.
EMI Music says it will make DRM-free audio and video content available in the UK through the British Internet Broadcasting Co’s (BiBC) downloadable BoxOffice365 store, including artists Coldplay, The Spice Girls, Queen, Kylie, Pink Floyd and KT Tunstall. BiBC’s online store also functions as a white label service for other brands and says that it can put a store up for a major brand with the EMI music on it within days.
Spanish universal powerline chip maker DS2 has introduced a new low-cost 100Mbps chipset for, which is UPA-compliant and interoperable with its existing 200Mbps and 400Mbps range. The chip costs just $5.55 in volume.
DS2 also warned this week that demand for digital home bandwidth will outstrip availability by 2009. It research revealed networking bandwidth in the home increases three time faster than supply, hence the need for its other new chip, which runs at 400 Mbps across the home power grid.
Netherlands based conditional access supplier Irdeto, said this week it has agreed to supply two million smart cards over 30 months to China’s Jilin Provincial Network in its largest Chinese order to date. Jilin has three million analog cable subscribers and plans to shortly migrate 600,000 subscribers onto digital cable.
NextWave Wireless has acquired WebSky Argentina which owns a national 2.5GHz license and plans to build a WiMAX network there. The latest acquisition follows it taking a stake in central Europe’s WiMAX Telecom and brings NextWave a total of 42MHz of spectrum covering the Buenos Aires metro region and an area of 180 kilometers surrounding the capital. The acquisition is pending final approval of regulatory authorities. NextWave says it will now test its emerging products in Argentina and set up a wholesale business for new operators in the country. Argentina already has significant WiMAX activity, from Ertach, the 3.5GHz holder which is now part of Telmex.
The Ministry of Communications in Italy has announced that 48 companies have expressed interest in the auction for its 3.5GHz WiMAX spectrum in January 2008. Communications minister Paolo Gentiloni said that these first bids will be reviewed over the next five weeks including proposals from BT Italia, Telecom Italia, Orascom’s Wind unit and quad player FastWeb. The auction is expected to bring in as much as €200 million for the government.
UK quad play specialist Virgin Media could be fined up to 10% of its revenues following revelations that it failed to keep phone details up to date which it supplied to the British emergency services for 1.5 million telephony subscribers. Virgin is now in ‘urgent discussions’ with the UK regulator, Ofcom, in an effort to explain why its customers were either missing or inaccurately recorded on a database used by the police, the fire brigade and the ambulance service. Ofcom has the power to impose a fine equivalent to 10 per cent of a telco’s turnover, and last year’s Virgin Media’s turnover was £4 billion ($8 billion), though any real fine is likely to be far lower.
Swiss set top builder ADB and middleware provider Osmosys said this week that their latest home-networking enabled DVR, with HomeNet Osmosys software, has been certified by the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) as compliant with its 1.5 certification. It is claimed to be one of the first set tops to be DLNA compliant. The DLNA is a powerful organization with 18 voting members and hundreds of other members, which is trying to recommend standards, and specific implementations of standards which interoperate well together in the digital home, and with handsets. The certification includes universal plug and play (UPnP)
Ruckus Wireless says it will show its 802n wi-fi variant at the Consumer Electronics Show at Las Vegas in January. Ruckus says this version can handle multiple (3) concurrent HD video steams, plus voice and data channels, allows carriers to remotely manage a Ruckus home or a remote hotspot. Ruckus devices work by setting up multiple wi-fi channels around the home, and offers rapid packet resends, to make up for the inherent unreliability of wi-fi. The previous versions of Ruckus are popular outside the US, but did not take off there because it did not support HD.
Novarra, a supplier of mobile web gateway platforms said that its Vision platform is powering Tata Indicom’s new mobile internet service. The service is available on popular mass-market handsets such as the Motorola RAZR and the Samsung Explore. Novarra’s Vision server, transforms web sites so they can be viewed on a handset, with fast page delivery over Tata’s CDMA network and uses Vision micro-client version 5.0 for BREW. Mobile broadband costs just 10 Rupees ($0.25) a day on the service.
It turns out that the new Alcatel built IPTV service we talked about a few weeks back from Wind Telecomunicazioni in Italy, the third IPTV network there, will use Microsoft Mediaroom middleware. The service is called Infostrada TV and was launched last week with instant channel change, multiple picture-in-picture, PVR function and VoD, through a Motorola set top.
Nokia this week announced a deal with The Cloud, Europe’s biggest wi-fi hotspot network which will allow Nokia customers free access to the new Nokia Music Store while on the move at over 7,500 Wi-Fi hotspots.