Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
There is a kind of visible desperation about video for Verizon – it HAS to make at least ONE thing work in video, but it appears not to know precisely what that thing is going to be. To that extent it can be seen as a technology business without a vision – a solution looking to solve the right problem. This week it opened yet another video door, one that is supposed to convert your Verizon service contract to be the location of all your TV viewing, in a complete Mobile First TV approach – this time adding to its Go90 service by buying into AwesomenessTV, previously owned by DreamWorks Animation and Hearst. Verizon will buy 24.5% of the equity…
There is no way that some of the largest technology businesses in the world were going to allow Apple (and by association, Samsung) to control the entire video world, simply by controlling a codec patent pool, based on patents which it didn’t even invent – just because more copies will run on those brands phones than on anything else. Which is the political explanation we are happiest with around the current battle of the codecs – and this week the Microsoft, Google, Cisco, Mozilla, Intel, Netflix, Amazon phalanx that makes up AOMedia, has taken the next step along the road to preventing that kind of power being usurped by Apple. It is only a collection of these powerful, but for…
Microsoft has been making a lot headlines recently, mostly centered around the upcoming Windows 10 Anniversary Update, the first major revision to Microsoft’s latest OS. The company announced that it will be adding the Open Connectivity Forum (formerly, the Open Interconnect Consortium, and now featuring Microsoft as a key member) protocols to Windows 10 later this year. The OCF’s open-source implementation of its standard is called IoTivity, and is a direct rival to the AllSeen Alliance’s AllJoyn framework. Both software environments aim to allow devices to discover each other in a transport-agnostic manner, and subsequently communicate – which allows them to form larger interoperable ecosystems. Microsoft is offering an open source bridge to connect the OCF’s IoTivity with the already…
GreenPeak Technologies has announced that its silicon technology is behind People Power’s latest product offering – Presence Security, home monitoring platform that uses wireless sensors. More significantly, perhaps, for GreenPeak is the future of ZigBee, with GreenPeak CEO Cees Links telling us that the company was expanding from being ZigBee-focused and looking to offer all sorts of low-power RF silicon to its customers. People Power specializes in cloud and mobile software, and currently offers three modular smart home solutions. The aforementioned Presence Security is the first, and pushes notifications of movement and activity to the homeowner if they are detected when no one should be in the house. The second is Presence Pro Energy, which tracks historical energy usage and…
M&A, Strategies, Alliances Molex has joined the EnOcean Alliance, announcing that it will be integrating EnOcean’s energy harvesting wireless protocol into its Transcend Network Connected Lighting System. Trouble at Nest seems to be continuing, with its director of hardware design and engineering, and a senior engineering manager apparently leaving the company. Wink talks about how it was sold to Flex (Flextronics), following Quirky’s bankruptcy, essentially as a debt write-off to the smart home hub’s manufacturer. Software Microsoft has open-sourced its Xamarin application development platform, after acquiring it in March. It’s the latest in a string of announcements meant to curry favor with the open source community, including bringing the bash command line into Windows 10, in partnership with Canonical. Altice’s…
Amazon seems to be continuing its strategy of expanding Alexa from the ashes of its aborted Fire Phone project – this week expanding its third-party support for adding Alexa to other devices. While the Echo seemed like a surprise hit for the company, it’s still a little baffling that it hasn’t made more of an effort to sell it outside the US. But a conversational AI-based digital assistant is a very complex feat of software engineering. Running on a central cloud computing installation, the system responds to the voice-inputs recorded on the end-device – processing them and then responding to a question or command in the way it perceives to be correct. This decision can evolve over time, and take…
IBM has won a pretty significant contract for its neurosynaptic processor, called TrueNorth, which uses an architecture similar to the mammalian brain in order to achieve incredible computational power at very low power levels. This week, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) announced that it is going to use TrueNorth to evaluate the safety of the USA’s nuclear arsenal. The sixteen chips are being delivered as part of a $1m contract, and will power a super-computing system that will simulate the security and the inevitable deterioration of the US nuclear weapon stockpile, for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). Crucially, this avoids the need for underground nuclear testing, as the computer will simulate the performance of the weapons. With TrueNorth…
Ingenu’s RPMA low-power wide-area networking (LPWAN) technology has secured a deployment in Nigeria, as the connectivity component of Shell Nigeria’s oil pipeline infrastructure. Shell claims that an investment of $87,000 has saved the company over $1m within a year, largely from having to carry out fewer field visits. Shell employed Upland Consulting, a Nigerian firm, to assess and deploy the networking technology best suited to the task – which forms the backbone of the Digital Oilfield (DOF) system, provided by Koncar Electronics and Informatics – a Croatian manufacturer of industrial equipment for the power industry. Ingenu CEO John Horn said that Shell used eight RPMA access points for the deployment, which was completed in three months. Koncar has secured a…
The steering committee of the Linux Foundation’s Hyperledger Project came very close to approving a vote to formally merge the blockchain codebases of its three founding contributors – IBM, Blockstream, and Digital Asset. However, an unnamed dissenting member has, for now, prevented the move that might unify a very exciting technology for IoT communications. IBM has been a vocal advocate for blockchain, and notably founded the ADEPT project with Samsung in January 2015. Although Samsung appears to have cooled on the technology, IBM has forged ahead – and sees it as a powerful tool to sell to new and existing business customers that use its extensive cloud platforms and software. With its Bluemix application PaaS, IBM will also be putting…
Samsung is reportedly developing an open source real-time operating system (RTOS) for the IoT, with rumors pointing to its launch at the Samsung Developer Conference next month. Samsung’s Tizen OS, designed as a rival to Android, failed to take the smartphone world by storm, with just a handful of adoptions in India and Russia, and has only received mediocre IoT success thanks to Samsung’s own hardware clout in the smart home and IIoT (Industrial IoT) arenas. Now the South Korean electronics giant has decided to have another crack at climbing up the IoT software ladder. Samsung has a significant advantage in the IoT thanks to its broad range of devices and appliances, not just smartphones, wearables, and TVs, but…
German fashion retailer Gerry Weber is dismantling its current RFID inventory system after just five years, citing its failure to keep up with business requirements. It is a cautionary tale for any business considering using IoT technology to improve efficiency, but it appears that Gerry Weber can afford to swallow the bitter pill. The crux of the problem is that the retailer cannot integrate its current RFID inventory management system into its new Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform, which was commissioned two years ago from SAP – a German business software specialist. Gerry Weber believes that the time is right to use a standard software implementation, rather than the customized one used to launch the RFID platform in 2009. For…
Nordic operator Tele2 is the latest to announce plans for a commercial roll-out of NFV-based virtualized systems, in this case a virtual packet core for its Swedish operator. The deployment will allow the carrier to offer a wider range of services on a more flexible basis to consumers, enterprises and the Internet of Things, said Tele2, and will be followed by other virtualized network systems and applications at a later date. Its vEPC will be deployed in the cloud in the third quarter using OpenStack technology, provided and managed by Linux organization Canonical. Juju, Canonical’s virtual network function (VNF) manager, will be used to on-board new services and its BootStack will be the managed cloud platform. Huawei will provide the…
The US is becoming a patchwork quilt in spectrum terms, as operators seize airwaves in a growing variety of bands to meet their capacity needs. As the 600 MHz incentive auction kicks off, some of these are proving more contentious than others. The first stage of the 600 MHz process will be the reverse auction, in which the broadcasters agree how much spectrum they will part with. The broadcasters had until Wednesday this week to register their interest and that is now followed by a period in which the FCC reconfigures the airwaves for mobile use and establishes its targets for the amount that can be cleared. The forward auction, in which those airwaves are sold, will start in June…
If Google has won the smartphone operating system war, there is still room for a new approach in the fragmented and immature world of the Internet of Things. Many newly connected devices will require an OS which supports apps and web services, but otherwise has more in common with the real time OSs (RTOSs) of the embedded market, including tiny footprint and minimal latency. That will open opportunities for RTOS experts like Intel’s Wind River; for embedded chip giants like ARM with its mBED OS; and for mobile players which were forced to accept Android’s leadership in smartphones, but now want another chance. Huawei has already shown off its own operating system for IoT devices, and now Samsung is set…
As Oracle and Google prepare for a new trial in their long-running row over Java copyright, the database giant is looking for a massive $9.3bn in damages, a claim Google’s experts predictably dispute. The spat has been dragging on for almost six years since Oracle first sued Google over the use of Java in the Android operating system. When it created its mobile OS, Google opted to design its own Java virtual machine, Dalvik (now superceded by Android Runtime) rather than using the VM from Sun, the owner of Java at the time (subsequently acquired by Oracle). Oracle claims Google used Sun APIs which should have been subject to copyright fees, while Google has counter-argued that APIs are subject to…
Telefonica and Ericsson have conducted the latest live demonstration of LTE-Unlicensed, bringing the technology closer to commercial implementation even outside the US and Korea. And with another 5 GHz LTE technology, LTE-LAA (Licensed Assisted Access) due to be standardized in 3GPP Release 13 this year, there is intense focus on these new options for mobile operators. Some of the debates, as the platforms near reality, concern use cases and the way these systems will be sold and managed, especially in the enterprise, which will be the first major opportunity. But others revolve around the same old issues – whether LTE-U and LTE-LAA really can be a good neighbor to other 5 GHz residents, notably WiFi. This still hotly disputed, with…
Telefonica and Ericsson have conducted the latest live demonstration of LTE-Unlicensed, bringing the technology closer to commercial implementation even outside the US and Korea. And with another 5 GHz LTE technology, LTE-LAA (Licensed Assisted Access) due to be standardized in 3GPP Release 13 this year, there is intense focus on these new options for mobile operators. Some of the debates, as the platforms near reality, concern use cases and the way these systems will be sold and managed, especially in the enterprise, which will be the first major opportunity. But others revolve around the same old issues – whether LTE-U and LTE-LAA really can be a good neighbor to other 5 GHz residents, notably WiFi. This still hotly disputed, with…
High Dynamic Range (HDR) is not dependent on having a 4K video. HDR can be used to improve the picture quality of 1080p and lower resolutions. What does that mean? Existing wireline pay TV services and cellcos could greatly improve their picture quality without having to make enormous and very costly upgrades to their networks. If HDR is as good as promised, operators could offer picture quality that approaches, even equals or surpasses, 4K – and needing only around 25% more bandwidth. HDR viewing does require HDR content, which means HDR-capable cameras, production gear and TV sets are required – which means HDR could be soon be available for sports and other live events such as live broadcasts and news.…
US financial analysts are already starting to imagine that they see an improvement in video subscriptions for US cable operators, in particular Comcast. They continue to ignore the facts in front of them, which are that all US cable operators are now including OTT video services in their numbers, and that these services are not only less profitable, but also, in many cases, they are no longer on long term 2 year contracts. This trend only became noticeable when each and every US cable service moved from only offering a TV Everywhere service, where customers had to also be a customer for the main cable video service, to a situation where anyone from outside their footprint can buy into an…
Israeli perceptual filtering specialist Beamr has announced this week it will be acquiring Vanguard Video, a provider of HEVC and H.264 codec technologies – in a bid to claw its way towards the top of the encoding pile. In the space of just a few months, three encoding pioneers in Elemental, Envivio, and Thomson Video Networks were all snapped up for considerable sums of money. Faultline believes that Elemental’s technology at Amazon is likely to be the most successful and lead AWS to some major progressions in video encoding, but the impact of these deals is that the field has now been left open for a new generation of Elementals and Envivios to triumph. One of these companies to show…