The grandmother of DRM companies, Intertrust, which holds tons of DRM patents and which once extracted $440 million in license fees from Microsoft, has made its first acquisition buying the assets of SeeqPod, out of Chapter 7 bankruptcy. SeeqPod offers a search engine which lets users stream songs from any website hosting music files, which was developed at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Warner Music group was one of the companies that sued SeeqPod into submission for copyright infringement. Intertrust plans to use its technology to deliver Internet TV, targeted advertising, recommendation systems, electronic music and healthcare information services, the company said, which is a radical departure from the purely licensing business model it has used to date. Intertrust is majority owned by Sony and Philips.
US researcher In-Stat says that the MPEG video SoC market reached over 650 million units in 2009, for the most part in digital set tops, TV sets, and Blu-ray players. The MPEG IC revenue in consumer electronics will grow to $4.5 billion by 2014 it says. Japan’s Renesas leads the market in Blu-ray MPEG SoCs while ST Micro had 60% of the H.264 decoder SoC market for terrestrial set top boxes. Zoran was the market share leader for MPEG 4 SoCs for Mobile CE Applications. In-Stat reckons that worldwide H.264 chip unit shipments will increase by 51% in 2010 over 2009.
Cablem’s the second largest Mexican cable operator has chosen a conditional access system from Conax, its open DVB solution. It appears to have replaced a system from NDS which was bought back in 2000. Cablem’s is a triple play operator with around 1 million subscribers.
Mobile games publisher Glu Mobile said this week that it has completed a previously announced private placement of shares with existing shareholders, generating proceeds of $13.5 million. Shareholders participating included Greenway Capital, Cannell Capital, Cypress Capital, Granite Global Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, Scale Venture Partners and Stephens Investment Management.
US cable equipment vendor Arris said this week that its Touchstone TM902 Embedded Multimedia Terminal Adapter (E-MTA) has been awarded EuroDOCSIS 3.0 and EuroPacketCable 1.5 certification by Cable Europe Labs. The Touchstone TM902 is a wideband voice and data modem with two ports for voice and one for high speed data and can deliver data throughput at up to 400 Mbps.
Staples said that it will begin selling the Amazon Kindle. Staples is the only US office superstore to carry the wireless reading device in all of its stores nationwide and will have them on shelves by Autumn. The latest Kindle is just $139 with a new electronic-ink screen with 50% better contrast, 21% smaller and 15% lighter, with a 20% faster page turn.
US flash memory retail leader SanDisk has added a new Sansa Fuze+ MP3 Player family for under $100. It comes with a new capacitive touchpad a 2.4 inch QVGA screen with gesture controls and works with most major audio formats including MP3, WMA, WAV, AAC/M4A, FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, Audible, Secure WMA, Podcasts. It works with video formats H.264, MPEG-4, WMV, Flip Video and photographic JPEG, BMP, TIFF, GIF, PNG. The device uses SanDisk slotRadio cards (or any microSD) and most SlotRadio cards come with 1,000 songs preloaded and cost around $40.
French IPTV set top firm Netgem said this week that Telekom Slovenia will deploy its smart set top technology and TV middleware to upgrade its legacy IPTV infrastructure. The work will begin in September. Telekom Slovenia currently has around 120,000 iO IPTV customers.
Widevine says that Best Buy has chosen Widevine to be a preferred provider of its adaptive streaming, and DRM software for its Insignia exclusive brand, connected devices. Insignia devices that include Widevine’s software platform are expected to start shipping in Q3 2010. In addition, CinemaNow, which Best Buy offers from Sonic Solutions as its digital video service, uses Widevine.
US encoder firm Harmonic has teamed up with Cinnafilm, which offer Graphical Processing Units driven video post production systems. The two will integrate Cinnafilm’s Dark Energy image processing tools with Harmonic’s Rhozet transcoding system. The integrated Dark Energy Convert, Optimize and Resize plug-ins are powered by Cinnafilm’s Pixel Strings motion estimation engine.
Intel said this week it will acquire the wireless division of Infineon Technologies for $1.4 billion. This will jump Intel straight back into the ARM architecture which is used on both applications processors and baseband modem chips in cellular phones. The Apple products use the Infineon 3G chips. It is likely that Intel will begin creating hybrid chips that offer Intel’s new App Processor on the same silicon as Infineon basebands. But it may be a tough marriage, and don’t expect Intel to put up a fight against Qualcomm and Texas Instruments any day now.
German chip designer Lantiq this week said it had three single-chip Gigabit Ethernet gateway chips for its XWAY xRX family which meet the Gigabit processing requirements of DOCSIS3.0 for cablecos, VDSL2 for telcos and xPON for fiber optic. They will be offered for use in gateways that connect the home to the Internet. The company said the new chips offer concurrent operation of 802.11n WLAN at 2.4 and 5 GHz with throughput up to 270 Mbps.