AdMob, the mobile advertising start up which claims to serve 3 billion adverts a month to handsets, has taken on another $12.5 million, topping up its recent C round of funding, to $28.2 million in a deal with Draper Fisher Jurvetson Growth Fund and Northgate Capital. Previous investors in this round include Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners. The money will be used in part to fund a new Android advertising unit, which clearly puts the tiny company up against Google itself, and to open new international markets and for sales expansion.
US research group In-Stat reckons that makes of tiny PCs such as Ultra Mobile PCs (UMPC)s, are obliged to put broadband wireless on their devices, or they have no chance of success ‘ either WiMAX, or one of the cellular alternatives EV-DO or HSDPA, and later LTE. This is to get around the spotty coverage which Wi-Fi gives, the market research firm says. But In-Stat unhelpfully gives no guidance to which variety it is best to use, but says the connect rate for UMPCs will rise from 20% to 50% by 2012.
Comcast has said that it is trying out wi-fi enabling 100 rail stations in New Jersey and making it free for Comcast customers. Customers can use the same user names and passwords they use for their cable modems in their homes. This is a direct copy of the Cablevision plan to spend $300 million rolling out WiFi in New York and Long Island over the next few years. So far the Comcast service is just a trial.
Vodafone’s last quarter had revenues of £10.5 billion ($15.25 billion) up 14.3% but it was helped by currency exchanges, because Vodafone reports in British Pounds and these have been weak against the Euro, which much of its revenues is received in. If Vodafone unravels the currency benefits an compares like with like, it has seen European revenue fall 1.4% while Africa and Central Europe have gone up 2.3% and Asia Pacific is up 8.4%. In its strongest European markets Germany and Italy, business is up, while the UK is flat and there is continued weakness in Spain. The company reports good progress on its £1 billion cost saving program and expects operating profit between £11.5 billion to £12.0 billion, up slightly. Data revenue was up 45.6% which, after reversing currency effects, was 25%.
Cambridge, UK IPTV set top maker Amino, said this week it has just shipped its two millionth AmiNET set-top box (STB), the first of which was launched in 2002. CEO Andrew Burke said ‘We now have deployments in over 80 countries worldwide.’ Amino acquired content management company AssetHouse and set top maker Tilgin’s IPTV division during the past year.
Cambridge Broadband Networks has secured $7.5 million in new funding, from Accel Partners, Adara, Amadeus Capital Partners and TVM. The company supplies point-to-multipoint microwave backhaul systems and customers include MTN Group, Vodacom and Maxis Telecom and has just moved manufacture of its VectaStar products to China, to ramp production.
Silicon Image, a semiconductor and IP house which works with HDMI and distribution of HD content, has joined MoCA (Multimedia over Coax Alliance) as a Contributor level member, which gives it voting rights. Presumably it plans to become another source for MoCA chipsets which it says is complementary to its LiquidHD suite of protocols which supports whole home entertainment networks.
The UK Competition Commission says that the proposed Project Kangaroo, which is a common platform to offer streamed content to PCs for the BBC, ITV and Channel 4, should not go ahead and has blocked the joint venture. The regulator pointed out that the three broadcasters almost have a monopoly on TV content which is filmed in the UK.
Alcatel-Lucent more or less hit the targets set for it by new CEO Ben Verwaayen in terms of revenue, operating margin and cashflow, but this still meant that revenues were down 4.5% to a touch under €17 billion for the year and €5 billion for the quarter, operating income was back up to €466 for the year, and €297 million for the quarter. Net loss for the year was €1.6 billion mostly fuelled by write downs of €3.9 billion. Alcatel shipped less DSL ports that in the past, increased MPLS shipments, slowed down the rate that wireless business was falling, and reckons it’s well positioned to benefit from the Chinese 3G roll out.
The ITU has recommended another standard for IPTV, the ITU-T Y.1901, which specifies high level requirements for the support of IPTV services, including QoS/QoE, service and content protection, middleware, content, network and end system aspects. This new standard plus the basic architectural standards in ITU-T Y.1910, will eventually lead to customers being able to buy IPTV set tops from the shelf, says the ITU ‘ not for some time we shouldn’t think.
The US Super Bowl just past, will drive the sale of around 2.6 million HD TV sets, says the Consumer Electronics Association leading to another record-breaking year for HDTV sales with 29.8 million HD sets expected to ship, out of a total of 34.5 million digital televisions sold in the US in 2009, up from 26.8 million HD sets sold in 2008.