Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
Governments across Europe have agreed to put the brakes on the growth of utility scale renewable energy generation in 2017. An European Commission (EC) directive will enforce a slowdown in the growth of utility scale renewables, by ending feed-in tariff policies for renewable electricity project over 1 MW. Energy providers have long felt aggrieved by the guaranteed price points created by the feed-in tariff, and have passed a large proportion of the extra cost onto customers. These energy providers will be the group most pleased with the directive. The directive looks set to reduce opportunities in the renewables industry in Europe, driving investment out, at a time when the full costs of installing renewables is on the verge of reaching…
The ZigBee Alliance has unveiled a new attempt to consolidate the fragmented state of the IoT market, to extend IoT interoperability beyond its familiar haunt of ZigBee. Called dotdot, the new specification is looking to better enable existing ZigBee developers to get their claws into ecosystems that opt to support dotdot, and hopefully unite the disparate IoT protocols under a common banner. dotdot is being positioned as a universal language for the IoT, which could be used by many other physical layers than just ZigBee – such as direct mesh networking rivals like Z-Wave and the 802.15.4 brother that is Thread, but also other low-power PHYs that are less well-known, or even future evolutions of things like WiFi and Bluetooth.…
Automotive-focused mapping platform Here has had a busy week at CES, announcing a string of deals that sees it further its ambitions to become the leading platform for automakers looking to build autonomous vehicles. With collaborations with Intel, Mobileye, and Nvidia, Here’s owners Audi, BMW, and Daimler have also been cashing in on its success, selling a 15% stake to Intel, and 10% to a trio of Chinese firms. The Mobileye deal is likely the most important announcement for Here, and sees it sign a strategic partnership with the company to integrate data from Mobileye’s automotive machine-vision sensors into Here’s Open Location Platform (OLP) – by integrating Mobileye’s Global Roadbook (GLRB) as a data layer. On paper, this is going…
Canadian video App specialist You.i TV, says it has adapted Turner’s Cartoon Network app for Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV. Previously it was on iOS, Android, and Kindle Fire. You.i TV prides itself on being able to write code once and put apps on any platform. It is showing it off at CES. Comcast has closed a new licensing deal with 21st Century Fox to keep Fox News on its pay TV platform and restore regional sports network YES after a year without what is the exclusive TV home of the New York Yankees. There are a number of retans disputes continuing right now, all of which may be resolved by next week. There is an increasing trend for…
If you live in a country where free to air TV is commonplace, then the only issue that makes it tough to arrange, is the installation of a rooftop home antenna. Which is why it makes complete sense for Dish and its set top sister company EchoStar, which also houses Sling Media, to go about the task of promoting cord cutting with its new AirTV. Dish is really taking on the task of eating its own children here. Dish is already in the business of installing satellite dishes and a rooftop antenna is a similar exercise – although increasingly indoor antennas can work in some parts of some countries, depending on signal strength. This may give Dish an edge where…
It’s rare when what were once conditional access specialists, have anything to announce, other than a particular chip integration or a design win, but at CES this week Nagra, Verimatrix and Irdeto have each shown new steps which show the changing way they see their respective futures. For Nagra, it was two announcements, working with both Samsung TVs and MStar chips to come up with what it is calling TVKey. This is a serious change in strategy for Nagra, in that it is offering its own hardware root of trust on both Samsung TVs and on any TV built around an Mstar TV chip. Today, security in the OTT market has become homogenized around browsers, initially sidelining security players into…
M&A, Strategies, Alliances TDK has acquired InvenSense, a US-based sensor manufacturer, to expand its electronic components offerings, citing the IIoT and consumer electronics as expansion opportunities. Volkswagen is buying PayByPhone, a mobile payments firm specializing in parking. Here is selling a 10% stake to a collection of Chinese companies. The deal will see Audi, BMW and Daimler slightly reduce their one-third stakes to 30% each, with NavInfo, Tencent, and GIC now holding 10%. No price was given, but a Chinese joint venture has been announced. Hardware TrackR has unveiled two new object trackers, called the Wallet 2.0 and the Pixel, as well as a Bluetooth outlet adapter for tracking items inside buildings, called the Atlas. Networks and Protocols Link Labs’…
M&A, Strategies, Alliances UIEvolution has acquired Surroud.io, and is merging the two companies to create Xevo, a company that will focus on advanced UI’s and software for automotive applications. Thundersoft has acquired Rightware, a provider of connected car software, for $68m, whose flagship Kanzi product is expected to power over 25m cars by 2022. The IEEE, AIOTI, oneM2M, and W3C standards bodies have published a whitepaper outlining semantic interoperability in the IoT. Syncsort has announced the completion of its acquisition of Trillium. relayr has acquired Proximetry, adding the IoT software company to its IoT platform and services portfolio, aimed at the IIoT. Laws and Regulation The UK government has proposed laws that would require all drones to mandate testing of…
This week, Thread and ZigBee have announced that the two low-power mesh networking IoT alliances have successfully carried out another test that shows how nicely the two protocols play together – so why haven’t they merged yet? We’ve already seen a momentous IoT standards consolidation in the merger between the AllSeen Alliance and Open Computing Foundating (OCF). The latest joint announcements from the two bodies declare that members from both camps have carried out demonstrations of devices running ZigBee’s Universal Language (also known as the Cluster Library, which runs on top of the ZigBee Pro networking stack), and that the two organizations are on track to release a coordinated set of end-to-end product development solutions in 2017 for ZigBee-certified devices…
One of the most interesting aspects of the emerging new mobile network architecture -whether the radios are 4G or 5G – is the potential for non-MNOs to harness the capabilities of a cellular platform. This is not possible just through an MVNO deal, but in ways that give enterprises, government agencies or web services providers new levels of control, and new ways to monetize the connectivity. The two most important examples are options to run LTE in unlicensed or shared spectrum; and for a non-MNO to deploy its own localized and specialized mobile core. Until true 5G network slicing is widespread, these two developments are the most realistic ways to start to extend control and monetization beyond the MNO, if…
FCC chairman Tom Wheeler has announced he will be stepping down from the helm on January 20, the same day that president-elect Donald Trump will be inaugurated. Wheeler was appointed by current president Obama, and despite a sometimes fractious relationship, both men have followed a more pro-consumer model than many past administrations, and one which has been criticized by Trump. So Wheeler was widely expected to resign almost immediately the new chief took over, but his departure deals a big blow for consumers, particularly in areas like net neutrality and the open set-top initiative. His three years running the FCC will be remembered for several major initiatives, which have seen varying degrees of success. In wireless, these are headed by…
The UK’s National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) has blasted the level of coverage achieved with 4G and urged early action to deploy 5G more effectively. The organization’s report particularly highlighted the role small cells will play in providing good services in urban areas, and on roads and railways, where the NIC says cellular coverage is “frankly appalling”. It has also looked further ahead and suggested new approaches to 5G spectrum allocation and usage, in order to open the market to hundreds of new service providers, supporting localized or specialized services. If adopted, these proposals would create a far more open landscape for 5G – but these big ideas should not be allowed to obscure the fact that 5G is not necessary…
Of course, cloud services providers are one of the adjacencies identified by Nokia in its recent strategy briefing, along with selected vertical markets and the IoT. The key areas of growth are expected to be: Professional and cloud services in the core telco market New IoT services IT services where these are tied to the network, but often with partners Disrupting rivals with extreme automation via SDN Managed and cloud services for key verticals – public safety, energy, transport, government, manufacturing – often linked to the IoT In a nutshell, Nokia’s Mobile Networks wants to build professional services in its primary market; develop new IoT services (of course); play selectively in IT services, disrupt through extreme automation (in terms of…
M&A, Strategies, Alliances IBM has joined the EnOcean Alliance; the energy-harvesting IoT protocol. Google has acquired Cronologics, a smartwatch startup founded by ex-employees. Silver Spring Networks and Ameresco have signed a master reseller agreement, adding another channel partner for SSN’s smart city and lighting portfolio. The Thread Group and the Fairhair Alliance have signed a liaison agreement to collaborate on commercial building standards, following a similar agreement between Fairhair and the ZigBee Alliance. Thread and ZigBee have also announced a successful demonstration of products running ZigBee’s universal language spec over Thread networks. We think a merger is on the cards. Saksoft has acquired DreamOrbit, to expand its IoT offerings for the logistics industry and its digital transformation clients. Forecasts, Reports,…
There has been an unexpected turn of events in the battle of the billionaires, with Bollore’s Vivendi initially securing a 3% stake in Berlusconi’s Mediaset at the start of this week – a figure which swiftly soared to 20% within 48 hours. This has all the makings of a deal in which Vivendi will likely commence proceedings for a full takeover in traditionally aggressive fashion, perhaps even by the time this goes to press. Berlusconi and his family conglomerate Fininvest are clearly on the ropes and have since taken defensive steps. The long and short of it is that Mediaset thought it could try to rattle the cage of French mass media firm Vivendi with legal action, following the well-publicized…
Telefonica has launched into a project to build its own open set top middleware, based on the Frog Source software from French pay TV player Wyplay – a venture which could spell bad news for vendors within the operator’s existing set top ecosystem. Frog Source provides the code which 200 set top software components are built on, and this effectively provides operators with a cheaper alternative to proprietary software – by allowing them to create their own products and drive down costs, as long as they have their own software engineers to put the system together. Source is just one quarter of the full Frog offering, contributing to removing the need for any design involvement from hardware manufacturers or chipset…
AMD has launched into the accelerator card market this week, with the launch of its new Radeon Instinct hardware. It’s a blow to Intel, which finds itself struggling to keep up with another GPU-based rival in the emerging market, but the initial benchmarks seem to indicate that AMD will not dethrone Nvidia. With Alibaba as a major cloud customer, and Google providing AMD’s hardware in its data centers for customers, as well as niche projects like that at the Canadian Hydrogen Intensity Mapping Experiment, AMD can certainly carve out a nice niche for itself – especially for workloads that might run better on its OpenGL/OpenCL architecture, instead of Nvidia’s CUDA design. However, AMD’s main competitive disadvantage is the comparative size…
Video compression, or encoding, defines what is possible in video services, particularly on resource-constrained mobile networks and devices, so the battle between two rival would-be standards, HEVC and AOMedia, is an important one to operators and content providers. The issues are highlighted by Beamr, a small Israeli start-up which has taken a $4m funding round from Verizon’s venture arm this month. Beamr offers technology to apply perception filters prior to encoding in order to optimize video. It has a computer look at video as if it were a human, and make differences which the human eye could not appreciate go away, making it easier to encode. The additional $4m funding came from Verizon Ventures and it joins existing investors Eric…
Less than a year after Qualcomm announced its first commercial server SoC, it has demonstrated a product which pushes the boundaries of the fledgling ARM-based server processor category, and presents a serious challenge to Intel. It announced that it is sampling a 48-core chip made with the new 10nm FinFET process, in words which sounded just like an Intel proclamation. Intel has repeatedly harnessed its own process expertise, and control over its own manufacturing, to score points over its rivals and push the limits of a platform. Now a former Intel executive, Anand Chandrasekher, is head of Qualcomm’s new data center business, and he is showing that a fabless chip supplier can also play the process leapfrog game with which…
M&A, Strategies, Alliances The prpl Alliance and the IoT Security Foundation have announced a collaboration to promote ‘security by design.’ KPMG and Microsoft have signed a partnership to combine their technologies to target large and medium-sized Indian enterprise customers, with automation and analytics offerings. Uber has acquired Geometric Intelligence, an AI software specialist focused on using small data sets for object recognition, to form a new AI lab in its San Francisco HQ. In wake of the AllSeen-OCF merger, 68 new members of the OCF have been announced. Alphabet is carrying out discussions with Whole Foods, Domino’s, and Starbucks, for its Wing Marketplace drone delivery service, to place food orders inside a Google portal. Gimbal has been acquired by The…