Searching Weekly Analysis
Searching Weekly Analysis
First it was China, now Russia – a giant market aiming to create its own mobile platform, reducing reliance on western technologies and patents and becoming self-sufficient. Russia wants to create its own smartphone operating system, according to minister of communications Nikolai Nikiforo, to squeeze the power of Apple and Google, and seems focused on using Jolla’s Sailfish as the basis of it. This has all kinds of echoes of the past. China has repeatedly tried to create its own platforms in the mobile world, from its WiFi security system, WAPI, to its own 3G standard, TD-SCDMA. Early this year, a government-backed mobile OS, COS, was unveiled, with similar objectives to those voiced by Nikiforo, to provide a localized source…
Qualcomm, beleaguered in its critical IPR business, is pushing its formidable engineering resources into new markets for its chips, notably the internet of things (IoT). At an event in San Francisco last week, it extended the reach of its AllJoyn connectivity platform, the basis of the AllSeen would-be standard, while its Atheros unit unveiled two new IoT chipsets. In addition, the company insisted that it was already generating significant new business from some aspects of the broad IoT market. In particular, the firm’s president, Derek Aberle, said there were already 20m connected cars on the road with Qualcomm modems or processors inside, and 120m smart home devices. Non-handset business contributed $1bn of revenue in the fiscal year to September 2014,…
The operating system is the seat of power in any connected device and Huawei looks set to enter that game, with its own software platforms both for the internet of things and for smartphones. The two projects have different remits. The IoT offering LiteOS, is one of several which are emerging in this nascent market, looking to underpin and accelerate development of a broad developer ecosystem on top of a selected chip platform with integrated connectivity. These look to bridge the traditional real time OS (RTOS) and the fully-fledged ‘fat’ OS of a smartphone. While some companies are playing a fairly discreet hand with undoubtedly significant assets (Intel does not crow too loudly about the RTOS roots of its Wind…
The perpetual motion that is the US’s telecoms M&A merry-go-round continues – for every hiccup, like the collapse of Comcast’s plan to buy Time Warner Cable, there is another new deal proposed, most recently Verizon’s bid for AOL. The telco should add to its portfolio further, says analyst Michael Rollins at Citigroup, by acquiring Dish Network too. “This AOL deal suggests a legacy business did not get in the way of Verizon’s strategic aspirations,” wrote Rollins in client note last week. “In contrast, Dish has highly valuable and strategic mobile spectrum and also owns a linear video business. Verizon should consider the purchase of Dish sooner than later, which could elevate its wireless and over-the-top video strategies even further.” It…
Qualcomm is under intense pressure in its traditional markets for smartphone chips and IPR. Antitrust probes round the world, industry shifts towards new licensing models, the rise of some powerful competitors in China, and the trend for handset makers to design their own processors – all these are creating the most dangerous situation for the company since the mobile world decided to move away from the CDMA-based technologies the US giant dominates. Qualcomm has always had weeble-like qualities though, and regularly bounces back from the most threatening situations with a new twist on its business model or its technology. This year, that will focus primarily on the internet of things, not just a slew of new chips from its Snapdragon…
The proposed acquisition of EE, the UK’s largest mobile operator, by incumbent telco BT has sparked more intense regulatory scrutiny than was first expected, and may force the wireline firm to separate its wholesale and retail activities and open up its dark fiber to rivals. Regulator Ofcom already, back in March, initiated a review of BT’s wholesale business, OpenReach, in response to claims that there would be conflicts of interest between its leased line backhaul services and its ownership of an MNO. Now Ofcom is also proposing to force the telco to open up its unused dark fiber lines for competitors to attach their own equipment – a move separate from the EE deal review, but clearly triggered by it.…
Panasonic has launched the first of its Viera smart TVs powered by Firefox in Europe this week. With a global rollout scheduled to follow in the next few months, Firefox is looking to bolster its slipping desktop browser share by forgoing the browser with an entire standalone operating system. Back at January’s CES, Panasonic caused something of a stir by choosing to use Firefox as its smart TV operating system. Back then, Faultline pointed to the news as a potential breaking point for the Smart TV Alliance, and a sign of increasing fragmentation in the TV market, rather than convergence. This still seems to be the case, and Samsung is pushing ahead with its own Tizen operating system, for its…
74-year old John Malone must wake up every morning and simply want to devour the newspaper headlines, and this week he has very much been at the heart of them. His main job, if he really has one, is steering Liberty Media and its raft of possessions, including substantial shareholdings in DirecTV, the Atlanta Braves Baseball team, Barnes and Noble, Starz and Encore movie channels, and Sirius XM Satellite Radio, as well as Charter and separately his holdings in Liberty Global in Europe and Latin America. Liberty Global is one of the reasons he is in the news this week, saying openly what a great fit that Liberty Global would be for Vodafone to acquire. While at Faultline we don’t…
The perpetual motion that is the US’s telecoms M&A merry-go-round continues – for every hiccup, like the collapse of Comcast’s plan to buy Time Warner Cable, there is another new deal proposed, most recently Verizon’s bid for AOL. The telco should add to its portfolio further, says analyst Michael Rollins at Citigroup, by acquiring Dish Network too. “This AOL deal suggests a legacy business did not get in the way of Verizon’s strategic aspirations,” wrote Rollins in client note last week. “In contrast, Dish has highly valuable and strategic mobile spectrum and also owns a linear video business. Verizon should consider the purchase of Dish sooner than later, which could elevate its wireless and over-the-top video strategies even further.” It…
After its launch in the US and its slow expansion into Europe and Latin America, Netflix stands to massively increase its subscriber numbers by tapping into a market like no other – China. On the back of rumored talks with Alibaba founder Jack Ma’s Wasu Media Holding, and also BesTV New Media, Netflix looks to have found a way around the country’s strict regulatory hurdles. As is often the case, Bloomberg is the source of the reports, but it has proved a fairly reliable source of leaks and rumors in the recent past. With Netflix stock breaking the $600 mark for the first time, Netflix is hoping to channel that investor confidence into its new Chinese venture – which could…
UK set top maker Amino has acquired one of the across the board self-proclaimed, end to end OTT players that have emerged over the past two years, opting for Booxmedia of Finland, a company driven by exiles from Nokia. CEO Donald McGarva told us, “We don’t want to give up on the set top space, but we realize that IP devices are critical to the future of entertainment, and right now Amino is trapped inside the home, and we want a presence outside it in the cloud. We have seen the tablet become the a second screen, and perhaps it is becoming the first screen, and we wanted to have a place on that. “We looked at quite a number…
We know everyone under the age of 28 loves Apple devices and believes in them like a religion, but this week there was a real example of how far the mighty Apple has fallen in terms of its ability to innovate. It admitted that for the past 6 years it has had a project to re-invent the TV, and couldn’t think of anything to differentiate it, so would not launch one. Back in February 2009 we quoted Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster saying what we were all thinking, why shouldn’t Apple produce a TV and DVR. Surveys basically said that if Apple bought a TV from someone and put its brand on the box, it would sell at a $100…
M&A, Strategies, Alliances Stream Technologies and Solair have partnered to simplify app creation for developers looking to add devices to Steam’s IoT-X multi-network M2M platform. Samsung launches its Artik hardware and software development platform, with 3 flavors of reference designs to suit all types of IoT devices. Cisco is buying Tropo for its cloud API platform, with the aim of providing a collaborative PaaS for enterprise and partner developers build apps with ease. Audi and Qualcomm are investing €18m in Cubic Telecom, an Irish M2M platform provider. ARM has launched an interoperability certificate for its mbed platform – mbed Enabled. Ayla Networks and Blue Rocket partner on an OEM accelerator program to speed up the time to market for new…
Despite the headlines you’ve probably seen, car crashes still aren’t big news. In the past nine months, there have been four crashes involving autonomous vehicles (AV) since September 2014, according to California’s DMV. Three of the crashes involved Google’s self-driving Lexus SUVs and one was an Audi powered by Delphi. None were serious, or the fault of the technology, and were the fault of inattentive humans – the exact problem that autonomous cars promise to solve. Last September it became a legal requirement of the Californian DMV for AV manufacturers to report all AV accidents regardless of their severity, even if the car was not in its autonomous mode. With the transition between human and autonomous driving not well defined,…
In what would have been an unexpected move just 2 years ago, Microsoft has partnered with open-source powerhouse Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu), as well as industrial giant General Electric (GE) and consumer electronics maker Acer – as well as DataArt, which is contributing its DeviceHive platform to the cause. The end goal is to create a predictive maintenance for the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). Under its new CEO Satya Nadella, Microsoft appears to have opened up to new cloud-based opportunities – trying to push Windows to as many screens and platforms as possible. Consequently, partnering with one of the biggest players in Linux is both a sensible and not entirely unexpected move, especially as Canonical’s Snappy Ubuntu Core…
Continuing its push into the IoT, but more importantly away from its diminishing smartphone business, Samsung unveiled its Artik development platform at IoT World in San Francisco. The new open platform includes three hardware modules as well as all the necessary code to develop apps to run on them – all powered by Samsung’s own Exynos chips. For Samsung, this is a move away from its declining smartphone and tablet business, which is quickly being eroded by increased competition from Chinese vendors at both ends of the pricing scale. Additionally, the Artik venture will enable Samsung to meet its goal of connecting every one of its products to the internet by 2020 – meaning that its consumer and industrial appliances…
MediaTek has stepped up its bid for Qualcomm’s crown boldly, launching the mobile device world’s first 10-core applications processor, the Helio X20. The product breaks all kinds of records, and highlights the intense innovation which is going on in the ARM-based market, as those firms blessed with an architectural licence come out with highly differentiated approaches. In MediaTek’s case, this is not so much about the number of cores – which Qualcomm will no doubt dismiss as unnecessary at this stage of smartphone development, as it initially did with octacore and 64-bit. It is also about the ‘tri-cluster’ architecture of Helio X20, a different take on power management from Qualcomm’s, or from ARM’s Big:little. With tri-cluster, MediaTek allows the chipset…
Continuing its push into the internet of things (IoT) – and just as importantly, away from its diminishing smartphone business – Samsung unveiled its Artik development platform at IoT World in San Francisco this week. The new platform aims to create an open developer ecosystem, and so gain market power rapidly in a competitive area. It includes three hardware modules as well as all the necessary code to develop apps to run on them – with two of them powered by Samsung’s own Exynos chips, and the smallest member by an Ineda SoC. For Samsung, this is part of its stated aim of offsetting a decline in smartphone growth by shifting resources to chips (including wider roles for the Exynos…
One of the essentials to make 5G a success will be to adopt different starting points when considering real world requirements. Futuristic devices, notably autonomous cars, may be far more useful in defining next-generation standards than smartphones or even embedded IoT devices, argue many stakeholders, because their network usage patterns are so different. Huawei director Ryan Ding believes the control of self-driving vehicles must be a key element of the 5G platform, since this will push requirements for low latency, high speed, real time management and peak reliability to the limit. Ding said, in an interview with Global Telecoms Business, that a car going at 60 miles per hour will cover about one inch per millisecond, and the wireless system…
Google may have worked closely with mobile network operators, a necessity to get broad distribution for Android devices and all its mobile services. However, it has always been working towards a new world, in which wireless networks would be open access bitpipes, and a host of web service providers would use those pipes to deliver their applications and monetize their users’ connections. Building its own networks, whether powered by fiber, WiFi homespots or balloons, is largely a red herring in terms of the real strategy. Google has the money to create some of the open access networks it wants, and so accelerate the process of disrupting the status quo in which a few carriers control spectrum and networks, and impose…