Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Gas-giant Air Liquide has continued to progress its hydrogen ambitions: this week with the acquisition of a 40% stake in France’s H2V Normandy – a subsidiary of H2V product. For a company of more than 100 years, the deal marks a significant shift in its operations, but not one that should be identified as unexpected. Through the acquisition of H2V Normandy, Air Liquide aims to demonstrate its long-term commitment to hydrogen energy, and to become a player in decarbonization in its home country of France and across the world. Through H2V Normandy, the company will hope to develop an electrolyzer which can produce and separate both hydrogen and oxygen, providing the company with an additional sales channel for both industrial…
Wind power will provide the backbone to the electricity sector’s transformation over the coming decade, according to a new report from Rethink Energy, with the technology paving the way for all zero-carbon technologies, accounting for two-thirds of global power production by 2030. In the report entitled Wind accelerates past nuclear, hydro in post covid power markets, and it makes it clear that all previous forecasts have under-estimated the appeal of wind by some margin. To get your copy of this report, please email [email protected] or go visit Rethink Energy’s forecast section where it can be bought online. This has been triggered by the recent surge in national renewable pledges, especially one from China, the election of a Green US President,…
Five years ago this week… The Faultline office was brought to a standstill as ST Micro dropped out of the set top game. Up until that point, it had always been Broadcom versus ST Micro, and suddenly the balance of power was gone, with any likely candidates for filling the power vacuum hailing from the East (China’s MediaTek, for example). Not only were 800 jobs lost, but many of ST Micro’s partners that were less welcome at Broadcom, such as MaxLinear and Quantenna, would experience setbacks. This semi-monopoly raised fears around vendor lock-ins, as well as legitimate serious questions as to Broadcom’s incentives for innovation, considering that the emergence of multiple security cores on its chips had taken years. …
How far CEOs shape their companies and how far they merely work within trends that are in motion anyway is an endless debate and, like the ‘great man’ theory of history, one that changes with fashion. But the appointment of a new CEO is always a time of anticipation – that a struggling company might find its way, or a dramatic new strategy might emerge. It is even more interesting when two arch-rivals change leadership at the same time. That happened in the mobile semiconductor business in 2013, when Intel and ARM appointed new CEOs within weeks of one another. Now, there is a similar upheaval, with Qualcomm appointing Cristiano Amon as its new CEO, and Intel naming Pat Gelsinger,…
As the digital dust settled from CES, it became apparent that the virtual event was something of a walled garden compared to the totally free virtual fanfares that kept us engaged throughout 2020. Even a media pass meant meeting strict criteria that was a first even for Faultline. So to wrap up our 2021 CES series giving a glimpse into the digital debut of the world’s largest consumer electronics show, for those who were unable to attend, we turn our gaze to the latest trends and technologies in gaming – a sector we see as something of an unsung hero during the pandemic. Dr. Poppy Crum, Chief Scientist at Dolby Labs, heralded the huge leaps made in visual and audio…
Digital media measurement vendor DoubleVerify has spent years ardently stressing the festering problem of connected TV advertising fraud. On one hand, CTV ad fraud has been exacerbated by the pandemic and therefore been good for business, while the other hand shows that the proliferation of CTV viewing has made DoubleVerify’s job of debunking myths a little trickier. With TV ad dollars shifting post-haste from traditional pay TV to CTV apps, marketers are being lulled into a false sense of security on the pretense that their ad dollars are being targeted at the crème de la crème of targeted viewers. That just isn’t the case for many advertisers. DoubleVerify’s reporting recently discovered that an unnamed client’s ad campaigns were running in…
Paramount+ will join the OTT video ranks across the US, Latin America, and the Nordics in March 2021, marking the realization of a long-held dream for executives on both sides of the now merged ViacomCBS divide – none more so than President and CEO Bob Bakish. But what do we know about the video technology stack powering Paramount+? Is this ultimately a rebranded and rebuffed CBS All Access with some added Viacom va-va-voom? Ultimately, the answer is yes, which is precisely why Faultline has reservations about the competitive credibility of Paramount+ entering – or rather reentering – an increasingly congested market. It has plenty of content, but it takes much more than an extensive back catalog of nostalgia to win…
It would be easy to deduce that the arrival of a set top specialist from French giant Orange into the CEO position at subsidiary Viaccess-Orca was a decision made with obvious synergies for both companies. Orange wants more and better TV data to advance its addressable advertising business, while VO wants a bigger slice of the uniquely convoluted French addressable advertising market (and beyond). Speaking to Philippe Léonetti this week, who took the VO CEO helm in May 2020, Faultline got a pretty good idea of how his experience in pioneering Orange CPE translates over to the vendor world. Ploughing data into everything VO does is clearly the message Léonetti has been conveying to his team over the past 9…
It seems that Google is on the cusp of mandating native support for the AV1 codec for Android TV devices. However, if the rumored deadline of March is indeed correct, that would be a severe shakeup in this market, as only a few silicon designs are currently available. Given that Google’s own hardware doesn’t have AV1 support yet, this is a bit bemusing. The latest round of reporting was triggered by XDA Developers, after the outlet saw an internal slide from a Google presentation that seemed to corroborate the much older rumor mill reports. So, it does seem that March is going to be a cutoff, of sorts, for any media player device that runs Android 10 or 11. This…
Just as Faultline had almost given up hope after last week’s political angle at CES left us hanging, a data privacy session at the virtual event provided some poignant technology predictions for the Biden administration – delivered in warts-and-all fashion by execs from Amazon, Google, and Twitter. A distinct lack of finger-pointing between the three speakers, representing their respective technology titans, might seem like a disappointing outcome for the neutral observer that tuned in expecting a data privacy war of words. However, the unanimous agreements about the challenges facing the technology industry over the next four years, and which issues the next US administration might fit onto its overfilled plate, made for a compelling discussion. Panelists gushed over Europe’s privacy…
O-RAN gains new open source software release, codenamed Cherry The O-RAN Software Community – an open source grouping that sits alongside the O-RAN Alliance – has published its ‘Cherry’ software release. Cherry contains new functions aligned with O-RAN specifications including the E2, A1 or O1 interfaces, and new service management & orchestration (SMO) elements. Chih-Lin I, co-chair of the O-RAN technical steering committee, said: “It not only realizes more 3GPP-defined models, but also brings O-RAN defined interfaces including E2 and A1 closer to commercialization. More ML and AI technologies are implemented in the RIC [RAN Intelligent Controller], RICAPP and NRTRIC [near-real time RIC] projects to push the traffic steering use case forward, which makes it a more intelligent RAN. The…
IBM’s Red Hat and Intel have announced plans to pool more R&D efforts and resources focused on 5G and networking, in a mutual bid to accelerate commercial uptake of automated, cloud-native infrastructure in telecoms. The two companies said they want to address challenges that operators and enterprises face in deploying 5G cost-effectively, and to help improve ROI with more flexible and automated platforms that will lower total cost of ownership. The aim is to focus their joint R&D on more complete and pre-integrated technology stacks that will enable operators to roll out 5G more quickly, and in a way that immediately supports a wide range of services in order to improve ROI. In particular, Intel says the platforms will help…
Despite a spate of initiatives and alliances around the Industrial IoT (IIoT), there is a sense of chipping around the edges and gathering low hanging fruit rather than driving broader collaboration across the field. There have been a few wider collaborative activities aimed at drawing in larger numbers of partners in all relevant sectors spanning the field, but so far these seem to be at the stage of identifying and overcoming obstacles to progress. Such constraints are both technological and commercial, since collaboration is required between enterprises that are either unfamiliar in dealing with each other, or wary of partnering because they are competitors. Neither of these barriers are insurmountable, because technical issues are already being overcome, while necessary collaboration…
Telefónica has achieved a record of sorts by passing the 80% mark for Spanish 5G coverage, higher even than carriers such as Korea Telecom or China Mobile. But while that is a great effort, coverage is not the same as revenues or customers, and on those metrics, the Asian giants are in the ascendant, although Chinese 5G coverage has been criticized for not being as good as it seems. One challenge when comparing 5G roll-outs and assessing operator claims is that we are not always comparing equal fruit, with some services being faster, reliable and more consistent within their coverage areas than others. In the USA, for example, AT&T claims to reach 225m Americans, 69% of the population, with its…
Nature abhors a vacuum and so do vendors peddling O-RAN products, as they manoeuver to exploit Huawei’s exit from emerging 5G roll-outs, especially in North America and some parts of Europe, where restrictions on the Chinese vendor’s equipment have been introduced. At the same time these vendors must overcome the reluctance on the part of some operators to take the risk of switching horses midstream and trusting unproven suppliers and technologies. Such operators are more inclined to stick with the few remaining mainstream cellular vendors, primarily the Nordic duo Ericsson and Nokia, though Samsung is rising up the ranks and accounting now for about 12% of 5G network sales. We reported last week that some operators, such as Three in…
Intel has appointed only its eighth CEO in over 50 years, lining up Pat Gelsinger, currently CEO of VMware, to replace Bob Swan. Gelsinger is unique among Intel CEOs in not being an internal promotion, but that does not make him an outsider. He joined Intel from college and scored several notable firsts there – first as the architect of the 80486 processor in 1989 (the first Intel chip to use more than one million transistors); then as the company’s first ever CTO in 2000. The story of Gelsinger’s time as CTO offers insights into why Intel wanted him back, but also the difficulties he may face. He was a maverick and a visionary, who helped broaden Intel’s horizons beyond…
How far CEOs shape their companies and how far they merely work within trends that are in motion anyway is an endless debate and, like the ‘great man’ theory of history, one that changes with fashion. But the appointment of a new CEO is always a time of anticipation – that a struggling company might find its way, or a dramatic new strategy might emerge. It is even more interesting when two arch-rivals change leadership at the same time. That happened in the mobile semiconductor business in 2013, when Intel and ARM appointed new CEOs within weeks of one another. Now, there is a similar upheaval, with Qualcomm appointing Cristiano Amon as its new CEO, and Intel naming Pat Gelsinger,…
France will invest $14.32 billion in Africa’s Great Green Wall between 2021 and 2025, with the aim of preventing desertification in the Sahel region of the Northern Sahara Desert. The announcement was made by President Macron at a biodiversity summit in Paris on Monday, where UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson also pledged t£3 billion of the UK’s £11.6 billion climate finance budget to 2025 to supporting nature and biodiversity. The World Bank also said that it would invest over $5 billion over the next five years to help restore degraded landscapes, improve agriculture productivity, and promote livelihoods in 11 African countries as they recover from the Covid-19 pandemic. The world’s largest asset manager, BlackRock, still holds $85 billion in coal-related…
There is a new EV base SPAC in town focused on the US bus market, but this time it involves a ten year veteran business, Proterra, which has already sold over 1,000 buses, to 130 customers across 43 US states. It claims that its ZX5 range of buses have travelled over 16 million miles in service and they offer a range of over 300 miles per charge. A number of SPACs (special purpose acquisition companies) have been arranged in the past months, as a quick route to public markets in the US. However a number in the EV and Fuel Cell space such as Nikola and QuantumScape have first seen prices rise dramatically, and then seen the stock crash and…
We’re fairly sure the move this week from giant French oil services group Schlumberger is a significant pro-hydrogen move, taking the company out of its roots in oil and opening a brand new front. On the surface of it, Schlumberger’s New Energy division is going to partner with pure research player, the CEA, alongside Vinci Construction, and materials supplier Vicat and a climate investor part of the French Occitanie region, to introduce a line of reversible fuel cells. The CEA started life as the Atomic Energy Commission in France, and is now expert in solid oxide electrolyzers. One of its roles is to certify the performance of new products on the market. Last year it worked with a number of…