Samsung: Galaxy S III won’t be unveiled at Mobile World Congress
by Don Reisinger

The Samsung Galaxy S II on display at last year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Samsung smartphone fans hoping to catch a glimpse of the next Galaxy S will need to wait a bit longer.

Despite rumors suggesting the company would be unveiling the Galaxy S III at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this month, Samsung confirmed today in a statement to The Verge that it has decided to wait to announce the handset.

“The successor to the Galaxy S II smartphone will be unveiled at a separate Samsung-hosted event in the first half of the year, closer to commercial availability of the product,” Samsung told The Verge in a statement.

Samsung’s decision to not unveil the next Galaxy S at Mobile World Congress is somewhat surprising. The last two versions of the smartphone were unveiled at the major mobile event, and all signs pointed to the company following suit this year.

Although Samsung has been tight-lipped on the Galaxy S III’s features, that hasn’t stopped the rumor mill. Just last week, rumors cropped up, suggesting the device’s versions would come in dual- and quad-core flavors and boast as 12-megapixel camera. The devices are also expected to support Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich). But as with any other rumor, take all that with a grain of salt, since Samsung hasn’t delivered a single detail on the device just yet.

Regardless, Samsung has confirmed that it will be showing off other devices at the Mobile World Congress. And as one might expect, CNET will have the full coverage of that–and every other device on display at the event–when it kicks off February 27.

Samsung did not immediately respond to CNET’s request for comment on the Galaxy S III.

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Digital Brain In Works At Qualcomm | View Clip
02/01/2012
KPBS-TV – Online

Digital Brain In Works At Qualcomm
Helen Hawes

A digital human brain? Sounds like something out of a 21st Century remake of “Frankenstein.”

But that’s happening at Qualcomm, said CEO Paul Jacobs. He described the process of discovery at today’s President’s Lecture Series on the SDSU campus.

“The team actually started out by building a retina and they came to me and said: ‘Look, it responds to these optical illusions the same way a human does. They put another layer of cells behind that it started to find features, They put another layer, it started to find corners or oriented lines or something, another layer, it started to find patterns,” Jacobs said.

“Today it tracks objects. It’s actually not programmed, it’s taught.”

Jacobs laughed at the silence in the room, conceding he evokes images of “The Terminator.”

But his emphasis was on helping humanity through what he calls “the digital sixth ense” — merging the cyber and real worlds.

For healthcare, this would translate to devices like wristbands with sensors that monitor vital signs and transmit them to physicians.

A cross-section of business leaders, entrepreneurs and students attended the invitation-only event.

Cord Claffey, a finance major and President of the Associated Business Student Council, was one of eight students invited to a question and answer meeting with Jacobs prior to the speech.

Claffey said he was impressed with how passionate Jacobs is about his business. He was inspired by Jacobs’ message to “take risks and never let anything hold you back.”

The afternoon ended with a quick-fire from Coach Steve Fisher, who asked Jacobs a series of personal questions.

Jacobs said if he were to pursue another occupation, it would be fine art or architecture.

The best advice he received is that there is no “they.”

His favorite word is “awesome,” and his least favorite is “can’t.”

And a secret about him is that when he was a kid, he and his friends put a local skateboard dealer out of business by asking their friends what kinds of boards they wanted, buying the parts from a distributor and assembling the boards themselves.

The book he’s currently reading is by “11.22.63″ by Stephen King.

Jacobs said the person who influenced him the most is his father, Qualcomm founder Irwin Jacobs, and his best college memory is of meeting his wife, Stacy.

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Healthcare in the cloud: an exclusive look at Qualcomm 2net (VIDEO) | View Clip
01/31/2012
TheVerge.com

Healthcare in the cloud: an exclusive look at Qualcomm 2net (VIDEO)
By T.C. Sottek

Our own Joshua Topolsky recently visited Qualcomm Life, a new Qualcomm company focused on integrating data from existing medical devices with the cloud. Josh spoke with Don Jones, VP of Qualcomm Life, who showed off how its 2net system wirelessly transmits data from medical devices — in the video, Jones shows off a connected pulse oximeter and blood pressure monitor that send data to a nearby laptop via a 2net transmitter containing cellular and local radios. Qualcomm’s goal is to enable hundreds or thousands of devices to connect to the 2net platform, which would allow healthcare professionals and caretakers to see a broader set of health data for individual patients.

http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/31/2761842/Qualcomm-2net-healthcare-cloud

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UPDATE 2-Infineon sees more confidence and stability in Q2 | View Clip
02/01/2012
Reuters

UPDATE 2-Infineon sees more confidence and stability in Q2
* Sees Q2 sales flat to slight lower from Q1
* Sees Q2 operating margin down 1 pct point
* Q1 opg result, ex-items 141 mln eur vs 130 mln f’cast
* Shares up 5 pct, outperforming main market

FRANKFURT, Feb 1 (Reuters) – German chipmaker Infineon AG expects sales to key automotive customers to pick up in the second quarter and said its important chipcard market looks like it’s stablizing after a fall-off in the first quarter.

Overall sales in the current quarter should be flat to slightly lower than in the previous three months, the company said on Wednesday after reporting a smaller than expected fall in first quarter earnings.

Infineon said its automotive clients, which account for 41 percent of revenue, have continued to show confidence, while there have been “some early signs of stabilization” in the chipcard market which provides about 10 pct of sales.

“Our strategy to focus on less volatile and more profitable businesses is paying off demonstrated by a stronger top-line as compared to our peers”, said Chief Executive Peter Bauer.

Infineon in 2010 sold its wireless chip unit to Intel , reducing its exposure to the volatile phone market, though it still provides a cheap chip to Apple’s iPhone.

Infineon shares were up 5 percent at 1220 GMT, outperforming the STOXX Europe 600 Technology index, which was up 1.2 percent.

“Guidance for the second quarter is better than expected,” said UBS analyst Gareth Jenkins, keeping his ‘buy’ recommendation on the shares.

The semiconductor industry hit a slump last year as demand for consumer gadgets slowed in Europe and elsewhere due to economic uncertainties at a time when vendors had invested heavily in the new production gear.

Peer STMicroelectronics, which has a high exposure to the wireless market, last week warned that revenues could drop up to 10 percent the current quarter as Nokia, a key client for its mobile arm, is struggling.

INDUSTRIAL STILL WEAK

Infineon, whose customers include Japanese carmaker Hyundai , software maker Microsoft and the U.S. Government Printing Office, said its automotive sales should be up in the second quarter while chip card & security turnover should be about flat. Sales at the power management and industrial power control businesses are expected to be down on seasonal and late-cyclical weakness.

Infineon stopped short of updating is full-year outlook but analysts said they now saw room for outlook hikes.

“We need more visibility on our sales, but we are slightly more positive on our sales than we were 3 months ago,” Infineon Chief Executive Peter Bauer said.

Infineon said in November its fiscal full-year revenue would likely fall, hit by a slowing economy and growing caution among customers in industrial and chip card markets.

Analysts on average see Infineon’s 2011/2012 revenue declining 5.2 percent.

Infineon, which was spun off from engineering group Siemens more than a decade ago, said its financial first-quarter business segment result, a measure of operating profit, fell 28 percent from the previous quarter to 141 million euros ($184.6 million).

That was above a consensus forecast of 130 million in a Reuters poll.

The company expects the margin on its operating result, excluding special items, to be down broadly by 1 percentage point in the second quarter.

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LG Electronics Shares Rise After Mobile-Phone Business Returns to Profit | View Clip
02/01/2012
Bloomberg – Seoul Bureau

LG Electronics Shares Rise After Mobile-Phone Business Returns to Profit
By Jun Yang

LG Electronics Inc. (066570), the world’s third-largest maker of mobile phones, posted the first profit at its handset business in seven quarters, helping shares reverse earlier losses in Seoul trading.

The mobile-phone business had an operating profit of 12 billion won ($10.7 million) in the quarter ended Dec. 31, the Seoul-based company said in a statement today. That compared with the 12.9 billion-won median loss in a Bloomberg News survey of four analysts.

LG has introduced smartphones using Google Inc.’s Android software and sporting what it says are sharper displays and faster processors than the components in Apple Inc.’s iPhone. Profit from selling TVs also exceeded estimates in the quarter, helping narrow the company’s net loss from a year earlier.

“The handset business will continue improving,” Chun Sung Hoon, a Seoul-based analyst at Hana Daetoo Securities Co., said by telephone. “With everyone using the same software platform, the competition comes down to hardware competitiveness, which LG is strong at.”

LG rose 1.9 percent to 84,300 won at the close of trading in Seoul, after falling as much as 2.8 percent earlier in the day. The benchmark Kospi index gained 0.2 percent.

Mobile Turnaround

South Korea’s second-largest electronics company wants to boost sales to 57.6 trillion won this year from 54.3 trillion won last year. It plans to spend 1.6 trillion won in capital expenditure and invest 2.6 trillion won in research and development.

LG turned around its handset business even as sales fell about 18 percent, helped by higher-priced models. The company’s operating margin from selling mobile phones turned positive for the first time since the first quarter in 2010.

LG said it sold 17.7 million mobile phones, including basic types. It didn’t give a breakdown for smartphones.

Smartphone sales may have gained 47 percent to 5.7 million units in the fourth quarter from a year earlier, according to an estimate from Macquarie Group Ltd. That projection is lower than the 54 percent growth in global shipments estimated by research company Strategy Analytics.

Samsung Electronics Co.’s smartphone sales during the quarter more than tripled, and Apple more than doubled iPhone shipments.

TV Profit

LG is counting on devices running on faster networks using long-term evolution, or LTE, technology. The company sold more than 1 million units of the Optimus LTE phone since it debuted in October, LG said last month.

The home-entertainment division, which makes TVs, had an operating profit of 149.7 billion won, rebounding from a 65.2 billion-won loss a year earlier. The median of four analyst estimates in the Bloomberg News survey was for a profit of 136.5 billion won. Sales fell 5 percent to 6.3 trillion won.

Operating margins at the business recovered to 2.4 percent from negative 1 percent a year earlier, helped by high-end models, the company said.

LG is seeking to boost liquid-crystal-display TV sales by about 20 percent to 30 million units this year with models showing 3-D images.

The company wants to become the largest seller of 3-D TVs this year by capturing about 25 percent of the market, with about 80 percent of the new products in South Korea having 3-D features, LG said last month.

OLED TVs

LG is using a 3-D technology called Film Patterned Retarder, or FPR, an alternative to the shuttered-glasses approach used by rivals including Samsung. LG says its polarized glasses are lighter, more comfortable and cause less eye strain.

Demand for panels using FPR helped LG Display Co. (034220) report a narrower-than-estimated fourth-quarter loss.

“LG’s rather audacious challenge to Samsung in the 3-D TV market has been a success,” Daniel Kim, a Seoul-based analyst at Macquarie Group Ltd., wrote in a Jan. 16 report.

LG also plans to start selling TVs using the organic light- emitting diode, or OLED, technology in the second half of this year. OLED produces sharper images than LCD.

The home-appliance division had an operating profit of 64.6 billion won, a 17 percent drop from a year earlier, on 2.99 trillion won in sales. That compares with the 62.9 billion won median of the four analyst estimates.

Price cuts amid competition with Samsung, in addition to higher raw material costs and weak demand, probably contributed to the lower profit, said Park Seong Min, a Seoul-based analyst at Kyobo Securities Co.

The air-conditioner business reported a 37.9 billion-won loss, compared with a 9.7 billion-won profit a year earlier, LG said.

To contact the reporter on this story: Jun Yang in Seoul at jyang180@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Michael Tighe at mtighe4@bloomberg.net

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Amazon’s Sales Miss Estimates, Profit Drops | View Clip
01/31/2012
Bloomberg News

Amazon’s Sales Miss Estimates, Profit Drops
By Danielle Kucera

Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN), the world’s largest Internet retailer, missed analysts’ fourth-quarter revenue estimates and reported a 57 percent decline in profit, dragged down by shipping costs and the money-losing Kindle Fire.

Net income fell to $177 million, or 38 cents a share, from $416 million, or 91 cents, a year earlier, the Seattle-based company said today in a statement. Analysts had projected 16 cents, according to a Bloomberg survey. Sales rose 35 percent to $17.4 billion, compared with an estimate of $18.3 billion.

Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos is squeezing profit margins in search of growth, looking to add customers by pushing free shipping and offering its Kindle devices at cut-rate prices. That has conditioned investors to expect strong sales increases, making the latest results disappointing, said Colin Gillis, an analyst at BGC Partners LP in New York.

“To miss on the top line, that’s what breaks the momentum,” he said in an interview. “The bull case just breaks down.”

Amazon shares fell as much as 11 percent in extended trading after closing at $194.44 in New York. The stock has gained 15 percent in the past 12 months.

Potential Loss
First-quarter operating income may range from a loss of $200 million to a gain of $100 million, the company said. Analysts were projecting a profit of $268.1 million. Sales will be $12 billion to $13.4 billion, Amazon said, compared with an estimate at the top of that range.

Amazon’s Prime program, which offers unlimited two-day shipping for $79 a year, boosted expenses over the holiday shopping season, said Jason Helfstein, an analyst at New York- based Oppenheimer & Co.

“With shipping, if you look at that net loss number as a percentage of revenue, it keeps going up,” he said in an interview. “They’re trying their best to offset that in other ways.”

The Prime program is designed to lock in customers and encourage them to do more shopping in the long run.

While that means money spent on shipping increases as a percentage of revenue — to 8.4 percent of sales in the third quarter from 7.6 percent three years ago — those subscribers may spend at least three times more than regular customers as they become habitual shoppers on Amazon’s site, said David Spitz, president of ChannelAdvisor, a Web-strategy consulting company in Morrisville, North Carolina.

Payoff Later?

“That ratio grows with the tenure of a subscriber, meaning that after a couple of years, a Prime subscriber may be spending six times or more,” Spitz said.

The approach is the same for the Kindle Fire tablet. At $199, the device is less than half the price of Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s cheapest iPad. Consumers can spend the money they save on Amazon’s e-books and video content, Jordan Rohan, an analyst at Stifel Nicolaus & Co., said in a note yesterday. That eventually will more than make up for revenue lost selling the device, he said.

For now, Amazon isn’t generating as much revenue as anticipated. Investors had speculated that the company would get a bigger boost from a 15 percent gain in industrywide holiday e- commerce spending, which ComScore Inc. (SCOR) pegged at a record $37.2 billion.

“When you have revenue growth start to stall, then the valuation question marks start to rise,” Gillis said.

Amazon trades at 141.9 times earnings in the past 12 months, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. By comparison, Apple’s price-to-earnings ratio is 13.

To contact the reporter on this story: Danielle Kucera in San Francisco at dkucera6@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tom Giles at tgiles5@bloomberg.net

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Broadcom Forecasts First-Quarter Sales That May Beat Analysts’ Estimates | View Clip
01/31/2012
Bloomberg News – San Francisco Bureau

Broadcom Forecasts First-Quarter Sales That May Beat Analysts’ Estimates
By Ian King

Broadcom Corp. (BRCM), a maker of chips that help mobile devices connect to the Internet, forecast first-quarter sales that may exceed analysts’ estimates amid stronger demand for parts for Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s iPhone.

First-quarter revenue will be $1.7 billion to $1.8 billion, the Irvine, California-based company said in a statement today. Analysts on average had estimated sales of $1.73 billion, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

Broadcom is benefiting from demand for radio chips that help Apple’s smartphones and tablets connect over Wi-Fi and Bluetooth signals. Apple’s phone sales more than doubled to 37 million in the quarter. Broadcom’s forecast allayed concerns that weaker mobile-phone shipments in the first quarter would drag down chip orders, said Daniel Amir, an analyst at Lazard Capital Markets in San Francisco.

“This is definitely a positive surprise,” said Amir, who recommends buying the shares. “It’s possible that their share gains are leading to them outgrowing the industry.”

Broadcom shares climbed 2.6 percent to $35.25 in extended trading after the report. They fell less than 1 percent to $34.35 at the close in New York. The stock has gained 17 percent this year.

Fourth-Quarter Profit
Fourth-quarter net income fell to $254 million, or 45 cents a share, from $266 million, or 47 cents, a year earlier, the company said. Sales in the fourth quarter declined 6.4 percent to $1.82 billion. Excluding certain costs, Broadcom’s profit in the recent period was 68 cents.

Broadcom was estimated to have fourth-quarter profit before costs of 65 cents a share on sales of $1.8 billion, the average analysts’ estimates in a Bloomberg survey.

Product gross margin, or the percentage of sales remaining after deducting the cost of production, will be “roughly flat” in the current quarter from the 49.3 percent reported in the fourth quarter, the company said.

Separately, Broadcom said it increased its quarterly dividend by 11 percent to 10 cents a share.

To contact the reporter on this story: Ian King in San Francisco at ianking@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Tom Giles at tgiles5@bloomberg.net

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LTE will ‘dominate’ wireless infrastructure budgets by 2013: report | View Clip
01/31/2012
ZDNet News

LTE will ‘dominate’ wireless infrastructure budgets by 2013: report
By Rachel King

Summary: Global spending for LTE infrastructures is expected to nearly triple between 2012 and 2013, according to new research.

As 4G LTE coverage and usage increases, so will the budgets of wireless providers building out these wireless infrastructures, according to a new report from IHS iSuppli.

While this might seem quite obvious, the amounts that telcos are going to have to spend are the key points here.

The report predicts that global spending on LTE technology is projected to reach $24.3 billion in 2013 — almost three times as much as the $8.7 billion figure expected for this year.

Overall, iSuppli’s report posits that LTE will end up dominating wireless infrastructure budgets as soon as next year.

IHS director and principal analyst for communications and consumer electronics research, Jagdish Rebello, cited in the report that the number of mobile network operators that are experimenting with, deploying and/or commercially operating 4G LTE networks has grown to total approximately 200 worldwide, up from 160 in 2010.

While 3.5G remains the dominant air interface technology in the mobile infrastructure market, the 4G LTE space has been gaining momentum. This trend started in the second half of 2009 when some wireless operators in Europe, North America, Japan and South Korea started to deploy LTE technology…

…And such widespread support will drive carrier spending on LTE to surpass 3.5G by next year.

Another survey published today, this one from personal cloud provider Funambol, found that 89 percent of mobile users think that their digital content usage and volume is “out of control.”

Thus, one could draw the conclusion that there is definitely a need to build out the LTE infrastructure quickly to accommodate the escalating amount of data consumption, particularly in countries where smartphone ownership is rising.

But the question remains asks whether are wireless providers acting quickly enough.

Graph via IHS iSuppli

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ITC Judge Throws Out Barnes & Noble Antitrust Claims Against Microsoft | View Clip
02/01/2012
PC Magazine

ITC Judge Throws Out Barnes & Noble Antitrust Claims Against Microsoft
By Chloe Albanesius

An International Trade Commission (ITC) judge has thrown out Barnes & Noble’s antitrust claims against Microsoft.

Details are scant about today’s ruling, which came from an ITC administrative law judge, but a one-liner on the docket says the commission approved Microsoft’s motion to dismiss Barnes & Noble’s patent misuse claim.

In November, Microsoft asked the ITC to investigate whether Microsoft is using its Android patent effort to secure a monopoly on the mobile phone market.

The move comes days before the two sides are set to face off in an evidentiary trial, which will now instead focus on patent validity, infringement, and domestic industry questions, according to patent blogger Florian Mueller.

The battle between Microsoft and Barnes & Noble goes back almost a year. In March 2011, Redmond filed suit against the retailer for patent infringement regarding its Android-based Nook e-readers. Microsoft holds patents relating to navigation and how Web sites display content; technology used on the Android platform. Microsoft tried to come to a licensing agreement with Barnes & Noble regarding the Nook, but to no avail, the company said.

In a blog post, Mueller said that the ITC’s Office of Unfair Import Investigations (OUII) had indicated support for Microsoft’s position prior to today’s ruling. “The OUII basically concluded that even if all of what Barnes & Noble said about Microsoft’s use of patents against Android was accurate, it would fall far short of the legal requirements for a patent misuse defense,” he wrote.

In October, Microsoft announced that it had secured deals for the “majority” of Android devices. Mueller speculated today that such “a level of acceptance … wouldn’t be possible if Microsoft’s terms were as unreasonable as Barnes & Noble alleged.”

“My concern was that Barnes & Noble’s ‘defense’ was actually an assault on the very concept of patent licensing,” Mueller continued. “If Microsoft really wanted to destroy Android (which is what Barnes & Noble pretty much alleged to be the objective), it would seek injunctions against Barnes & Noble’s and other vendors’ Android-based devices instead of selling licenses to more than 70 percent of the market.”

Barnes & Noble and Microsoft did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

It should be noted that Mueller last year was commissioned by Microsoft for a patent study, which has prompted some grumblings from companies like Google about conflicts of interest. In an October interview with PaidContent, however, Mueller denied any conflict and said he has “had consistent positions for many years” and works with a large number of clients.

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Analysis: Patent Plaintiffs Target Facebook as IPO Approaches | View Clip
01/31/2012
Reuters – San Francisco Bureau

Analysis: Patent Plaintiffs Target Facebook as IPO Approaches

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – As it prepares for one of the biggest IPOs ever, Facebook is coming under the same fierce attacks being waged against other big technology companies: patent lawsuits.

Last year, Facebook was named as a defendant in 22 lawsuits accusing it of patent infringement, double the number from 2010, according to a Reuters analysis of court documents on legal database Westlaw, a Thomson Reuters unit.

Among the lawsuits is one alleging Facebook violated a patent that covers the core ability to transmit messages to large networks of users. Facebook said in a court filing earlier this month that it will seek to dismiss that lawsuit.

Previously, the bulk of legal challenges brought by patent holders against tech companies has focused on markets like smartphones, with defendants including Apple and Microsoft.

The attacks against Facebook signal that social media has become a new front in the Silicon Valley patent wars. The company’s adversaries include a former lawyer at Kirkland & Ellis, one of the biggest U.S. law firms, whose new firm filed the lawsuit over how Facebook transmits messages.

Before 2010, online game developer Zynga, Web discount deals operator Groupon and professional social network operator LinkedIn had not faced a single patent lawsuit, Westlaw data show. Last year, the year those three companies went public, the lawsuits mounted.

Facebook faces more patent cases than any of those other companies.

Facebook is expected imminently to announce its intention to hold an initial public offering of its stock, in what could be one of the biggest U.S. market debuts ever. The company could be valued at as much as $100 billion.

The IPO climate raises the stakes for companies to demonstrate solid returns and low risks. As companies undertake an IPO, the heightened level of scrutiny from Wall Street makes aggregators think they can more easily wrest a quick settlement from companies, said Colleen Chien, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law in Silicon Valley.

Companies are most vulnerable to patent challenges when they file their intention to go public with a form S1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, said Ron Laurie, a specialist in IP and investment banking.

“You just knew when you filed the S1, the letters would start rolling in,” said Laurie, co-founder of Inflexion Point Strategy.

A Facebook representative declined to comment.

The vast majority of the lawsuits against Internet companies were not filed by business competitors, but rather by aggregators who amass patent portfolios and attempt to wring licenses out of existing companies. The threat of litigation often compels companies to pay licensing fees to use patented technology.

Some of the most well-known aggregators are involved in the lawsuits: another company suing Facebook obtained its patents from Intellectual Ventures, the entity co-founded by former Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold.

IPO FRENZY

Overall, patent litigation involving tech companies has exploded over the past two years.

Smartphone manufacturers like Apple and Microsoft are engaged in a fierce legal war against fellow competitors like Motorola Mobility, all the while fielding lawsuits from aggregators. Some patent holders are derided as “patent trolls” by critics, a term the holders say unfairly paints them as villains for helping inventors make money.

Apple was sued over patents 76 times in 2011, up from 56 in 2010, according to the data available on Westlaw. Microsoft, meanwhile, faced more than double the number of patent lawsuits in 2011.

While Internet companies face relatively smaller numbers of patent lawsuits, the rate of increase for fast-growing sites has been steep.

Zynga faced nine patent lawsuits in 2011 compared to two the year before. Groupon was sued ten times in 2011, up from three in 2010, and LinkedIn faced 10 patent suits in 2011, up from five the year before.

Groupon declined to comment on patent litigation, while LinkedIn and Zynga representatives did not respond to interview requests.

Microblogging website Twitter was sued in five patent cases in 2011, up from just one case in 2010, according to court filings on Westlaw’s database. A Twitter spokeswoman declined to comment. Stock investors have eagerly been awaiting a Twitter IPO, but the company has repeatedly said that it is in no hurry to go public.

Unlike other industries, in tech there is much more confusion about what the language in software patents covers, said Julie Samuels, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

“Folks who want to use those patents offensively can take advantage of that confusion,” Samuels said.

But the rising fortunes of newer Internet companies give extra motivation for aggregators to demand licenses, according to one IP lawyer at a social media company.

“By and large the discussions are very divorced from the technical nature of the patent,” said the lawyer, who was not authorized to speak publicly. “They tend to be more focused on your financials.”

Pragmatus AV, a Virginia-based LLC that holds 51 patents, sued Facebook, LinkedIn, Google’s YouTube video service and photo-sharing website Photobucket.com in 2010 after acquiring a set of patents from Intellectual Ventures. The three patents in the Facebook lawsuit involve methods for “storing and accessing media files.”

Steve Mallouk, vice president of channel licensing at IV, said in a statement that IV “does not own or operate Pragmatus AV.” However, IV declined to discuss the terms of its patent deal with Pragmatus, including whether IV has a stake in the litigation against Facebook and others.

If Pragmatus was hoping for a quick settlement, it hasn’t happened yet. The defendants are currently seeking to have the case in a San Francisco federal court put on hold, pending a reexamination of Pragmatus’s patents by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. A lawyer for Pragmatus did not respond to a request for comment.

Another lawsuit against Facebook was filed last year in a Long Island, New York, federal court by John Desmarais, who gained notice for leaving Kirkland & Ellis to start suing tech companies, armed in part with thousands of patents acquired from Micron.

Desmarais declined to comment.

Beyond these aggregators, no patent wars have broken out between large competitors like Facebook and Google, which moved into social networking with Google+. Facebook has only been a patent plaintiff once – against a Massachusetts media company that had already sued the social networking giant, according to the Reuters review of Westlaw filings.

Still, Samuels doesn’t rule out the possibility of a future competitor war among social networking companies.

“All it takes is one party to start the lawsuits rolling,” she said.

(Reporting By Dan Levine in San Francisco; Editing by Martha Graybow, Gary Hill)

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Qualcomm Mirasol technology secures more orders | View Clip
02/01/2012
DigiTimes – Online

Qualcomm Mirasol technology secures more orders
Siu Han, Taipei; Jackie Chang, DIGITIMES

Qualcomm MEMS Technologies’ (QMT) Mirasol display technology has been securing orders from South Korea-, China- and Taiwan-based e-book reader customers. Qualcomm indicated its second plant in Longtan, Taiwan will begin operations in second-half 2012.

The market believes the technology, with better resolutions and yields, can help color e-book readers to increase production and lower costs.

Qualcomm announced cooperation with Kyobo, a South Korea-based book seller to develop the first e-book reader device that adopts the Mirasol displays. In January 2012, cooperation between Qualcomm and China-based Hanwang Technology to develop color Mirasol e-book readers was announced during CES 2012. Qualcomm continues to expand its customer base announcing cooperation with Taiwan-based Koobe to launch a second-generation Jin Yong Reader device.

The first generation Jin Yong Reader adopted black and white displays from E Ink Holdings. The second generation is set to use Qualcomm’s 5.7-inch Mirasol color e-paper display with a screen resolution of 233ppi. The device also has touch features.

According to Qualcomm, the Mirasol panels have been produced at a 4.5G experimental production line at its current Longtan plant. Capacity has been limited with the main product size set at 5.7-inch.

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Telecom monopoly overcharging Mexicans billions | View Clip
02/01/2012
CNET.com

Telecom monopoly overcharging Mexicans billions
by Dara Kerr

Telephone service in Mexico is run by a monopoly that is overcharging customers billions of dollars, according to a new report by the Organization for Co-operation and Development (OECD).

“The lack of telecommunication competition in Mexico has led to inefficient telecommunications markets that impose significant costs on the Mexican economy and burden the welfare of its population,” say the report’s authors.

The culprit companies, America Movil (mobile phones) and Telmex (fixed lines), are owned by the world’s richest man–Carlos Slim. According to Forbes’ list of top billionaires, Slim’s net worth is $74 billion; next in line is Bill Gates with a $56 billion worth.

“The Mexican telecommunications market is dominated by a single company with 80 percent of the fixed line market and 70 percent of the mobile phone market,” reads the report. The average market share of the largest telecom company in the 34 other countries that the OECD examined, including the U.S., Japan, and Chile, is roughly 40 percent.

In total, Mexicans are being overcharged $13.4 billion a year, according to the report, and poor people are being charged disproportionately higher. This equals a $25 billion cost to the Mexican economy each year, which is equivalent to nearly 2 percent of the country’s GDP, say the report’s authors.

Mexico is the second-largest economy in Latin America and, according to the report, the America Movil and Telmex monopoly is limiting it from growing. In order for the country to develop, more people need access to telephone services, the costs must go down, and there needs to be more public investment in telecommunications.

According to the report, the Mexican government is partially responsible for Slim’s monopoly because it restricts foreign investment in the telecom industry and does not give the regulatory authority, Cofetel, enough independence or power.

Earlier today, Reuters reported that Slim held a news conference to repudiate the OECD’s findings and to deny that Telmex was monopolizing the market. He announced that he did not know how the OECD got its figures and that Mexico’s 4-cent revenue-per-minute was lower than other Latin American countries, including Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Peru.

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Sony’s Hirai, exec who led PlayStation turnaround, promoted to CEO | View Clip
02/01/2012
Associated Press – Tokyo Bureau

Sony’s Hirai, exec who led PlayStation turnaround, promoted to CEO
Kazuo Hirai will take over from current CEO Howard Stringer in April
By Jay Alabaster

IDG News Service – Sony said Wednesday that executive Kazuo Hirai, who runs the company’s core consumer products division, will be promoted to CEO and President from April.

Hirai, a charismatic Sony veteran who has long been groomed to lead the company, will take over from current CEO Howard Stringer. Stringer will continue as chairman of the board of directors after the handover.

Hirai, 51, is widely credited with leading a turnaround in Sony’s PlayStation business, after taking over just after the launch of the PlayStation 3 game console. He is fluent in English and will become the company’s youngest leader since its founder, Akio Morita, according to local media reports. When Sony promoted Hirai to his current role from April of last year, Sony said its management changes were aimed at “empowering the next generation of Sony’s management.”

The management shuffle comes a day before Sony is due to release its earnings for the October-December quarter. The company said in November it expects losses of well over a billion dollars in its current fiscal year through March, after saying several months earlier it could make a AY=60 billion (US$770 million) profit.

“The path we must take is clear: to drive the growth of our core electronics businesses – primarily digital imaging, smart mobile and game; to turn around the television business; and to accelerate the innovation that enables us to create new business domains,” Hirai said in a news release announcing the leadership change.

Howard Stringer, a former television executive who was knighted in 2000, has led the company since 2005, when it was struggling to achieve profitability. He oversaw the cutting of about 10,000 jobs and slashed numerous product companies, while selling off company assets to raise cash and closing factories. The selection of a foreigner to lead a beloved Japanese company like Sony was seen as controversial domestically, and he was sometimes criticized for not spending enough time in Tokyo.

Japanese companies often make key personnel changes in April, when most begin their fiscal year.

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Facebook Picks Morgan Stanley to Lead IPO | View Clip
02/01/2012
Bloomberg BusinessWeek – Online

Facebook Picks Morgan Stanley to Lead IPO
By Douglas MacMillan, Lee Spears and Serena Saitto

Facebook Inc., the world’s largest social-networking service, chose Morgan Stanley to take the lead on its planned initial public offering, four people with knowledge of the matter said.

Facebook will file plans with regulators today to raise $5 billion, though the amount may increase, two people said. Morgan Stanley stands to earn a larger share of the fees collected by securities firms for arranging the IPO. Goldman Sachs Group Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM), Barclays Plc (BARC) and Bank of America Corp. will help with the sale, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter is private.

Getting picked for the IPO is a coup for Morgan Stanley and Michael Grimes, the global co-head of the bank’s technology investment banking unit. The securities firm won the biggest share of business underwriting U.S. initial offers by Internet companies last year, data compiled by Bloomberg show. Taking the lead on Facebook may catapult the New York-based bank to the top of the U.S. IPO league table for a third year running.

“This means a huge windfall for them,” said Jack Ablin, who helps oversee $55 billion as chief investment officer for Chicago-based Harris Private Bank. “The fact that they have led so many high-profile social media deals in the last year is proof positive that Morgan Stanley (MS) is most likely to be able to get this deal done.”

Bankers’ Fees

Investment banks working on behalf of Facebook may generate as much as $500 million in fees, depending on the company’s ultimate valuation, Ablin said.

Jonathan Thaw, a spokesman for Menlo Park, California-based Facebook, declined to comment, as did representatives of Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Bank of America and Barclays Capital, the investment banking division of Barclays.

Facebook had been discussing raising as much as $10 billion, a person with knowledge of the matter said late last year. At that size, Facebook’s IPO would be the biggest ever by an Internet or technology company, data compiled by Bloomberg show, trumping the combined U.S. and German debut from Infineon Technologies AG (IFX) totaling about $5.85 billion in 2000.

Silicon Valley relationships may have paid off for Morgan Stanley after it took the lead on last year’s biggest Internet IPOs, from companies such as Zynga Inc. and Groupon Inc. (GRPN)

“Morgan Stanley was able to leverage its dominance among Internet companies going public,” said Anupam Palit, head of research at GreenCrest Capital Management LLC.

League Table Leader

On underwriting league tables, Morgan Stanley took 20 percent market share for IPOs by Internet companies on U.S. exchanges in 2011, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. New York-based Morgan Stanley also led all U.S. IPOs last year with 13 percent share, selling an estimated $4.6 billion of shares and generating an estimated $262 million in fees, the data show.

Grimes, a Los Angeles native who graduated from the University of California at Berkeley, meets regularly with investors in search of promising startups, has close ties to venture capitalists at such firms as Sequoia Capital and is an early adopter of his clients’ products.

A banker with Morgan Stanley since 1995, Grimes also may have benefited from longstanding ties to Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, who was a senior executive at Google at the time of its IPO. Morgan Stanley led that deal.

Morgan Stanley usually allocates a portion of initial offerings for clients of its retail brokerage, Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, a joint venture with Citigroup Inc.

Gorman’s Goal

Morgan Stanley Chief Executive Officer James Gorman has said that new equity issuances provide investment banking revenue to the brokerage and drive higher trading activity.

That may help the brokerage, the world’s largest, with more than 17,000 advisers and $1.65 trillion in client assets, make strides toward Gorman’s goal of a 20 percent pretax profit margin. The unit had a 10 percent margin in 2011. Morgan Stanley owns 51 percent of the joint venture and has the chance to increase that stake to 65 percent starting in May.

Morgan Stanley also worked on IPOs by Yandex NV, Zynga and LinkedIn Corp. (LNKD), among the biggest Internet debuts in the U.S. last year. It was one of the lead managers on Google’s IPO in 2004 and led Apple Inc.’s IPO in 1980. Goldman Sachs, which placed fourth in U.S. Internet IPOs in 2011 behind Deutsche Bank AG and Bank of America, helped take Yandex, Zynga and Groupon public, while losing out on LinkedIn, the data show.

Goldman Sachs-Facebook ‘Strain’

Goldman Sachs’s 2010 investment in Facebook alongside Digital Sky Technologies didn’t go off without a hitch. The bank halted an offering of the shares to U.S. investors, it said in a January 2011 statement, on concern that “intense media attention” toward the deal could violate U.S. rules limiting the marketing of private securities. Goldman Sachs instead restricted the offering to non-U.S. clients.

“It would seem that the Goldman Sachs-Facebook relationship was strained as a result of that deal,” Ablin said.

Morgan Stanley, for its part, was lead-left in 2011 on U.S. Internet IPOs from companies including Zynga, Groupon and Pandora Media Inc. (P) that handed declines to some investors. Zynga dropped as much as 20 percent after its $1 billion IPO before rising back above the offer price. Groupon slid as much as 24 percent before recouping losses. Pandora’s stock declined as much as 39 percent. The doubling of LinkedIn’s shares on their debut raised concern that Morgan Stanley and the IPO’s other banks could have set a higher initial price.

The average fee on the IPOs of Yandex, Zynga, Renren Inc. (RENN) and Groupon, the four Internet companies that each raised more than $500 million in U.S. initial offerings last year, was 5.1 percent, data compiled by Bloomberg show. At that percentage, a $10 billion Facebook IPO would generate fees of as much as $510 million for its underwriters.

Morgan Stanley’s assignment was initially reported by IFR.

To contact the reporters on this story: Douglas MacMillan in San Francisco at dmacmillan3@bloomberg.net; Lee Spears in New York at lspears3@bloomberg.net; Serena Saitto in New York at ssaitto@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Tom Giles at tgiles5@bloomberg.net; Jennifer Sondag at jsondag@bloomberg.net

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RIM’s Stymiest Vows More Forceful Board to Claw Back BlackBerry’s Market | View Clip
02/01/2012
Bloomberg News – Toronto Bureau

RIM’s Stymiest Vows More Forceful Board to Claw Back BlackBerry’s Market
By Hugo Miller and Doug Alexander

Feb. 1 (Bloomberg) — Research In Motion Ltd. (RIMM)’s Barbara Stymiest, a week into leading a board that had faced investor criticism for being ineffective, said she plans further changes to the director lineup to help revive the BlackBerry maker.

Stymiest, named chairwoman Jan. 22 after investors campaigned for an overhaul, said she’s reviewing the composition to fill gaps in directors’ knowledge. The addition this year of India-born investor Prem Watsa brings a key understanding of Asian markets to RIM’s leadership, she said in an interview.

Stymiest, who replaced founder Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, faces the challenge of convincing investors she can help push for changes needed for RIM to revive plunging sales and stock price. Stymiest declined to say whether any new directors would be proposed ahead of Waterloo, Ontario-based RIM’s July shareholder meeting.

“Driving change in an organization means a high-performing board and a high-quality management team,” Stymiest, 55, said yesterday in the wood-paneled dining room of her Toronto home. “You get those two right and you can drive change quickly and effectively.”

While her appointment was part of a larger management shakeup, Lazaridis and Balsillie remain on the board, prompting investors including Jaguar Financial Corp. (JFC) to say the overhaul wasn’t enough.

Calls for Change

Stymiest and new Chief Executive Officer Thorsten Heins replaced co-CEOs Balsillie and Lazaridis, who also shared the roles of co-chairmen and ran RIM for more than 20 years. While the two men made the BlackBerry a must-have gadget for bankers and lawyers and made RIM Canada’s biggest company by market value, in recent years they oversaw design flaws and marketing missteps that has led to a 89 percent plunge in the share price from its 2008 high.

Amid RIM’s decline, shareholders including Northwest & Ethical Investments LP started calling for a management overhaul last year.

Northwest & Ethical urged RIM to split the roles of chairman and CEO, and later withdrew its demand after RIM promised to review its governance structure and report the findings. As part of its report, published this week, RIM’s review committee succumbed to the shareholder’s demand and said separating the two roles is the best course of action. It also recommended an independent leader for the board.

‘Cosmetic’ Changes

Jaguar, which describes itself as a merchant bank that invests in undervalued companies, also pushed its own change campaign and said it had the support at least 8 percent of RIM investors. The shareholder said RIM was hurt by “management dominance and a lack of board oversight.”

After Stymiest’s promotion, Jaguar CEO Vic Alboini said she isn’t “strong enough to cause dramatic change.”

“She’s been part of the problem,” he said. “I don’t think she’s going to be strong enough to make the changes necessary. We would say to her, ‘Prove us wrong.’”

Charlie Wolf, a Needham & Co. analyst, said Lazaridis and Balsillie, who together own about 10 percent of RIM, made “as little change as possible,” calling the new adjustments “cosmetic.”

“RIM’s previous leadership is still involved so their influence is there,” said Ittai Kidron, an analyst at Oppenheimer & Co. in New York.

Improving Execution

The BlackBerry’s share of the global smartphone market fell to 11 percent in the third quarter of 2011 from 21 percent two years earlier, according to Gartner Inc., as Apple’s iPhone and devices running Google Inc.’s Android software won over users with faster browsers and larger screens.

Heins said in an interview last week that his immediate priority is to revive BlackBerry sales in the U.S., get a revamped version of RIM’s struggling PlayBook tablet onto the market next month and introduce its new operating system, BlackBerry 10, on time later this year.

“We can improve on product execution and Thorsten is well- positioned to do that,” Stymiest said. She said her job is to provide “flawless oversight” of the management team.

She says she’s working on RIM almost every other day and travels frequently to meetings at the company’s headquarters in Waterloo. Much of the rest of the time she works out of the third-floor office of her century-old Toronto home.

Keen Golfer

Stymiest said her experience with the Toronto Stock Exchange gives her insight into the technological challenges RIM faces. She ran the bourse for five years and oversaw the transformation of a company plagued by a history of computer problems and breakdowns into North America’s first publicly traded exchange in November 2002.

Royal Bank of Canada hired Stymiest as an executive during a 2004 management overhaul, putting her in charge of “strategic development,” with all corporate areas reporting to her, including finance and risk management.

Stymiest last year left her position as a senior executive at Royal Bank, the country’s largest, saying she wanted to devote more time to board work, charity and improving her golf handicap.

Next to the window in her home office, which has a view over downtown Toronto, are framed photos of Stymiest at golf events with past Masters champion Fred Couples and Montreal Canadiens hockey legend Guy Lafleur.

Patent Purchases

As part of the effort to bolster its competitive position, RIM is likely to acquire more patents, Stymiest said. That would help the company defend its intellectual portfolio and acquire new technologies, she said.

“You’ll continue to see RIM make strategic acquisitions of patents to give it the degrees of freedom to have the most competitive, compelling device going forward,” she said.

Last year, RIM spent $770 million as part of the $4.5 billion winning bid for bankrupt Nortel Networks Corp (NT).’s patent portfolio. Intellectual property is an increasingly important part of smartphone makers’ strategies, with Google Inc. citing patents as one reason for its decision in August to spend $12.5 billion buying Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc.

Fairfax Financial Holdings Ltd. (FFH), the insurer run by Watsa, last week doubled its stake in RIM to give it a share worth about $450 million in a vote of confidence in the BlackBerry maker after Watsa joined the board in the January shakeup. Lazaridis, RIM’s second-largest investor, said he’s planning to buy another $50 million worth of RIM stock.

Asked whether she will follow suit, Stymiest said she’s “contemplating it.”

“I’m well exposed to RIM and continue to accumulate.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Hugo Miller in Toronto at hugomiller@bloomberg.net; Doug Alexander in Toronto at dalexander3@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Peter Elstrom at pelstrom@bloomberg.net

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Panasonic, Samsung to propose tie-up with Olympus: report | View Clip
02/01/2012
Reuters

Panasonic, Samsung to propose tie-up with Olympus: report

(Reuters) – Japan’s Panasonic Corp and South Korea’s Samsung Electronics have each decided to propose capital ties with disgraced medical equipment maker Olympus Corp, the Mainichi newspaper reported on Wednesday.

Other firms are already jostling to partner with Olympus, which has a 70 percent share of the global market for diagnostic endoscopes. Fujifilm Holdings Corp has proposed an alliance while medical equipment maker Terumo Corp has said it wants to strengthen ties.

Electronics giant Sony Corp is also interested, sources have said.

Still another Japanese firm, which was not identified, is also soon set to make a proposal to Olympus, which is looking to shore up its finances after a $1.7 billion accounting fraud severely depleted its net assets, the newspaper said.

A Panasonic spokesman said the company was checking the report and had no immediate comment. Samsung declined to comment.

Olympus is unlikely to respond quickly to any approaches. Olympus’s president has said any decision on alliances should be made by a new management team, due to chosen at a shareholders’ meeting in April.

The accounting scandal erupted after Olympus fired its British chief executive Michael Woodford on October 14, prompting him to blow the whistle on the firm’s dubious bookkeeping.

Since then, Olympus has admitted to having used improper accounting tricks to conceal massive investment losses, and is under investigation by law enforcement agencies in Japan, Britain and the United States.

Olympus shares have fallen by half since the scandal surfaced, leaving it with a market capitalization of just $4.5 billion.

However, the company is being supported by major Japanese shareholders, who prefer bringing in an equity partner rather than selling the whole company or its assets.

(Reporting by Nobuhiro Kubo; Editing by Edwina Gibbs and Richard Pullin)

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Intel samples Atom server SoC, snags Xeon win | View Clip
02/01/2012
EE Times

Intel samples Atom server SoC, snags Xeon win
Rick Merritt

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – Intel Corp. is sampling an Atom-based system-on chip for servers, a company executive said at a press conference here announcing a new low-power system using one of its Xeon processors.

The Atom-based chip is a previously announced sub-10W, 64-bit device with a PCI Express interface, supporting ECC memory and Intel’s virtualization and hyperthreading technology. Given the hyperthreading support, it is likely a dual-core part.

The part is “at a performance, power and cost level we like, and in 2013 we plan a part an order of magnitude above it,” said Jason Waxman, general manager of Intel’s data center group.

Waxman was on hand for the announcement of a low-power, highly dense Xeon-based server from SeaMicro, a startup that previously built only Intel Atom-based servers. SeaMicro rolled a new generation of its system ASIC capable of linking over PCI Express to either Atom or Xeon CPUs.

The new 1W ASIC is at the heart of SeaMicro’s new SM10000-XE server that packs up to 64 Intel Xeon E3-1260L processors into a 10U chassis consuming up to 3.5 kW. The startup claims the system, now available for prices starting at $138,000, uses half the power while offering three times the density of competing systems.

The SeaMicro ASIC links over PCI Express to an Intel hub chip. It uses its own fabric as a cluster interconnect, linking processors in the chassis and providing external Ethernet and storage connections.

Each board in the chassis uses four of SeaMicro’s 90nm fabric ASICs, designed in an older process for highest yields. The chips also shut down unneeded blocks in the Intel hub chip, brininging it and the CPU to about 30W down from about 45W

“This is the most efficient Xeon server ever built,” said Andrew Feldman, founder and chief executive of SeaMicro, predicting the new system could outpace sales of its existing Atom-based systems.

“We will definitely sell more Xeon systems because Atom is a newer footprint and slower to be adopted while Xeon is in mainstream of what people use today,” said Feldman.

He claimed business was “phenomenal” in 2011, the startup’s first full year of sales, exceeding combined sales of hot startups such as 3Par, Aruba and others combined in their first full years. Users from Mozilla and a U.S. government security reseller said they have purchased at least five of the systems each, a mix of Atom and Xeon systems.

Long term, SeaMicro wants to eliminate the Intel hub chip from its boards to lower power and increase density, something the new Atom chip will enable. The startup also aims to support a mix of Xeon and Atom processors in a chassis, Feldman said.

Feldman was also on hand for the announcement late last year of Applied Micro’s X-Gene, a 64-bit ARM server SoC due to sample late this year and be in production in 2013.

No one has a 64-bit ARM server SoC available yet, noted Feldman. “With 90 percent server market share, the ball’s in Intel’s court to be best in class, and we will use processors customers are demanding,” he said.

“We take nothing for granted and expect ARM licensees to be formidable competitors,” said Waxman.

Startup Calxeda announced a 32-bit ARM server SoC shipping late this year that Hewlett-Packard is building into a prototype system. In addition, Marvel announced in late 2010 a quad-core ARM server SoC.

Waxman said Intel continues to estimate that by 2015 about ten percent of the total server market of roughly $50 billion a year could be for what it calls microservers. Such systems are similar to those of SeaMicro in that they use a single processor chip per node, sport low power, a relatively small memory footprint and shared resources such as Ethernet links.

SeaMicro has taken in $60 million in venture financing to date. It also received a $9.3 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy. The company has no plans to raise another venture round in 2012, but may need to do so before it hits profitability, Feldman said.

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Videoplaza secures $12 million for ad platform led by Qualcomm, Innovacom | View Clip
02/01/2012
TechCrunch Europe

Videoplaza secures $12 million for ad platform led by Qualcomm, Innovacom
by Mike Butcher

With the huge rise in the consumption of online video it follows that services to monetize that video are becoming hot properties. To that end, today Videoplaza, a ‘sell side’ ad management platform for video, has secured a Series B round of $12million led by Qualcomm Ventures and Innovacom. The company previously received rounds from VCs Creandum and Northzone, which also participated, which means VideoPlaza has received $18 million to date.

Given Qualcomm has a big stake in the future of the chipsets for video, this is a smart strategic investment.

Sorosh Tavakoli, CEO of Videoplaza says the money will go towards expansion and R&D efforts. The TV has a global value of around $160 billion according to some estimates, so there remains plenty of opportunity online as people switch viewing habits to IP delivered content.

Videoplaza says it has grown its international client base and delivered five times more ads in the last year across 17 markets, while opening new offices in Madrid, Berlin and Singapore. Bruno Dizengremel, Partner, Innovacom believes Videoplaza’s technology is “at the heart of the monetization strategy” for broadcasters and premium publishers.

The company’s technology platform delivers Flash, Silverlight, HTML5, iOS devices, Android, Sony Playstation, Samsung Smart TVs, and closed IPTV environments. By 2013 it expects more than half of its traffic to come from non-PC devices – based on the fact that by Q4 of 2011 some 8% of the company’s traffic was generated from non-PC devices.

Videoplaza has competition from multiple avenues including Brightcove, YuMe, spotXchange, among others, however its laser-like concentration on remaining a ‘sell side’ platform appears to be standing it in good stead, while others diversify their products.

The total wireless (GSM, CMDA and FWP) subscriber base in India increased from 884.37 million in November 2011 to 893.84 million at the end of December 2011, registering a growth of 1.07%, according to the latest figures by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI).

The overall wireless tele-density in the country has reached to 74.15.

“Out of the total 893.84 million subscribers, 646.77 million were active on the date of peak VLR for the month of December 2011,” TRAI stated.

The latest figures reveal that the total number of telephone subscribers (wireless and wireline) in the country has increased to 926.53 million at the end of December 2011 from 917.33 million at the end of November 2011.

The overall tele-density in the country has reached to 76.86 at the end of December 2011, up from 76.18 in the previous month.

The wireline subscriber base declined from 32.96 million at the end of November 2011 to 32.69 million at the end of December 2011. The overall wireline tele-density marginally declined to 2.71.

3.4 million requests for mobile number portability were made during December, bringing total requests for the year to 29.24 million.

The TRAI figures further reveal that the total broadband subscriber base has increased from 13.13 million at the end of November 2011 to 13.30 million at the end of December 2011, thereby showing a monthly growth of 1.30%. Yearly growth in broadband subscribers is 21.88% during the last one year (Dec. 2010 to Dec. 2011).

Idea cellular added the most number of subscribers during December 2011. The operator added 2.39 million new users during this month.

Uninor was at the second place and it added 2.12 million new subscribers during the month of December 2011. Airtel added 0.96 million subscribers, whereas Reliance Communications added 0.95 million new users. Vodafone added 0.91 million new subscribers during December 2011.
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India to allow 2G spectrum sharing | View Clip
01/31/2012
TelecomAsia.net
India to allow 2G spectrum sharing
Dylan Bushell-Embling

Indian operators will be allowed to share spectrum, following a new ruling by the telecom ministry – but the decision only applies to 2G frequencies.

The key decision-making body of the Department of Telecom (DoT) has elected to allow a limited form of spectrum sharing, Economic Times said.

But as well as being limited only to 2G spectrum, operators will also not be permitted to share spectrum in circles where they do not hold frequencies themselves.

The decision therefore does not apply in any way to 3G roaming pacts such as the deal reached last year between Bharti Airtel, Vodafone and Idea Cellular to each offer 3G services in regions where they do not hold spectrum of their own.

The DoT has been opposed to the deal, on the grounds it would devalue 3G licenses and give the operators an unfair advantage over rivals.

But the would-be partners have taken the government to court in a bid to have the deal cleared.

Under the DoT’s proposed spectrum sharing terms, operators will also be disallowed from sharing spectrum if it would exceed the limits laid out in merger regulations – that no entity can have more than 25% of the spectrum in a region.

Operators would also each have to pay license fees on the total value of spectrum jointly held, as if they each owned the spectrum individually.
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Exclusive: Europe Sets Sights on Deeper Mobile Roaming Cuts | View Clip
01/31/2012
Thomson Reuters
Exclusive: Europe Sets Sights on Deeper Mobile Roaming Cuts

BRUSSELS/PARIS (Reuters) – European Union lawmakers are seeking to further ratchet down the fees mobile operators charge users when they travel abroad, according to a draft plan seen by Reuters, taking aim at a lucrative source of industry profit.

The EU Parliament is pushing for much steeper reductions in so-called roaming fees than those proposed last year by European Commissioner Neelie Kroes.

The charge for a one-minute outgoing call when abroad would be 15 cents compared with Kroes’s plan for a one-third cut to 24 cents. The cost of surfing the Internet would be slashed to 20 cents per megabyte from 50 cents.

If the parliament’s tougher caps are adopted, it would be a blow to mobile operators, which generate some 5 percent of sales and 7 percent of operating profit from roaming fees.

Angelika Niebler, a German politician steering the proposed regulation through the parliament, said mobile operators should not charge customers differently depending on where they are.

“There should really be no roaming (fees) at a time when we are supposed to have a single market,” Niebler said in an interview.

The two sides are set to debate the measures in the coming months with the aim of arriving at a compromise law that would be phased in over three years starting in 2012.

The tough approach from Brussels comes as large incumbent operators like Vodafone, France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom face strong competition and lower mobile prices in many markets.

They have yet to figure out how to translate consumers’ growing appetite for smartphones and tablet computers into profits, while the need to invest heavily in fiber broadband buildouts and new fourth generation mobile networks is pressing.

Stephane Beyazian, telecoms analyst at investment bank Raymond James, said the industry would not welcome steeper cuts to roaming charges but could absorb them.

“It would be a bad surprise, but it would not be catastrophic,” he said, adding that industry was satisfied with the Kroes proposal made last summer.

A telecom operator source said the measures would mean a major change to the industry’s business model.

“This is the first credible step towards a roaming-free Europe,” said the source, who favors the parliament’s approach.

FIRST DRAFT

In her proposal last July, Kroes proposed two ways to bring down roaming charges: caps on the cost of texts, calls, and Web surfing while abroad and ‘decoupling’, which allows consumers to choose their provider when they cross borders.

She said this would boost competition across Europe by making it easier for mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs), which do not have their own infrastructure or spectrum, to piggyback on large operators’ networks.

This would allow a big retailer like Britain’s Tesco to sell a cheaper mobile roaming service to a tourist visiting London.

Large telecom operators operating in many European countries, such as Vodafone in Britain, Spain, Italy and Germany, tend to support “decoupling” because it will allow them to offer cross-border services to more customers.

But smaller operators and MVNOs argue they need more help -in the form of lower rents to use other operators’ networks – to be able to compete with the bigger players.

“MVNOs are concerned about high wholesale access charges, which will make it impossible for them to enter the roaming market and compete,” said Innocenzo Genna, a consultant representing a group of independent Italian virtual operators.

HORSE TRADING

The parliament and the Commission are now trying to reconcile their proposals, with telecoms firms lobbying intensely in Brussels for concessions.

Under the parliament’s proposal, the caps proposed by Kroes would come into force in July 2012, with its steeper cuts implemented in 2013 and 2014.

Niebler’s draft proposal would lower the cost of incoming calls to 5 cents per minute by 2014, half the rate proposed by Kroes, and cut the price of a text message by 50 percent to 5 cents.

The current caps are 35 cents for outgoing calls and 11 cents for incoming calls respectively. There are no caps in effect for what operators can charge customers using the mobile Internet while abroad.

(Additional reporting by Kate Holton in London; Editing by Rex Merrifield and David Cowell)
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Andreessen Horowitz bags $1.5 billion | View Clip
01/31/2012
Fortune – Online
Andreessen Horowitz bags $1.5 billion
By Dan Primack

Andreessen Horowitz raises a whopping $1.5 billion.

Andreessen Horowitz is a Silicon Valley venture capital firm. Unlike most other Silicon Valley venture capital firms, however, Andreessen Horowitz doesn’t struggle to raise new funds. Instead, institutional investors virtually beg for the privilege of participating.

It can’t be long until other VCs film a series of video spots talking about how “I wanna be like Marc.”

Today the Menlo Park-based firm announced that it has closed its third fund with $1.5 billion in capital commitments. That includes a $900 million general fund and a $600 million parallel fund, with management fees required on both (last time around, Andreessen Horowitz only charged management fees on the general fund).

For context, the average American venture fundraise last year netted just $107 million.

It’s also a big jump in size for Andreessen Horowitz, which raised a total of $950 million for its first two funds combined. Marc Andreessen says that part of the increase is to allow for a longer investment period of two-to-three years, rather than the 13 months or so that it took to invest Fund II.

Beyond that, no major investment strategy changes are on tap. The firm still plans to focus on early-stage and growth equity tech investments inside the U.S., with the possibility of participating in larger transactions like the 2009 carve-out of Skype from eBay Inc. (EBAY). It also is pulling back a bit on later-stage “pre-IPO” rounds, but could revisit the area if macro economic conditions cause mutual funds to retreat.

Andreessen also pushed back a bit against his firm’s reputation for overpaying — a knock that comes from both competitors and even some of his own limited partners. “We were heavily criticized for overpaying for Skype, and then we did deals like Facebook and Twitter and Gorupon and Zynga and even Jawbone,” Andreessen says. “But there were strategic reasons to invest in those companies, and some people got confused between valuation and strategy. Since July, though, we haven’t participated in anything you’d probably characterize as having a very high valuation. We even have a slide showing 40 impressive names we passed on last year, half due to valuation. I think it’s largely a lagging reputation.”

One Andreessen Horowitz limited partner tells me that the firm’s fundraising success is largely predicated on its extraordinary access. “They don’t yet have the returns of an Accel or a Sequoia, but they are in the same sorts of deals,” he says. “It’s just a matter of time.”
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Koobe’s Jin Yong Reader gets Mirasol, brings color to Taiwanese hearts | View Clip
01/31/2012
Engadget
Koobe’s Jin Yong Reader gets Mirasol, brings color to Taiwanese hearts
By Dante Cesa

It’s no accident that Koobe’s Jin Yong Reader bears a striking resemblance to Kyobo’s eReader and Shanda’s Bambook which we toyed with back at CES. But while those e-readers brought Mirasol to their respective South Korean and Chinese markets, Koobe’s entrant will do the same for Taiwan. As for the trio’s striking resemblance, know that they’re all based on the same Qualcomm-heavy reference hardware, which pairs a 1GHz Snapdragon S2 with a 5.7-inch 1024 x 728 XGA Mirasol display. For those unaware, the addition of the latter part means the e-readers boast limited color on their non-backlit displays, all while retaining an E Ink-like low power draw. The trinity also feature a highly customized layer atop Gingerbread, and in Koobe’s case, come pre-loaded with 15 novels by, you guessed it, Jin Yong. Naturally, pricing and exact availability have yet to be announced, but we’re told they’ll be available “soon.” PR for those interested awaits after the break.
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Qualcomm gets mirasol displays in a fourth e-reader | View Clip
01/31/2012
U-T San Diego
Qualcomm gets mirasol displays in a fourth e-reader
Power saving display screen technology targeting Asian markets
Mike Freeman

Qualcomm has gotten its power-saving mirasol display screens into another e-reader targeting the Asian market.

The San Diego company said Monday its MEMS Technology division had inked a deal with electronic publishing outfit Koobe of Taiwan to have mirasol displays in the next generation of Koobe e-readers.

Koobe e-reader with Qualcomm’s mirasol display screen Called Jin Yong Readers, the devices were introduced two years ago with a black and white display screens. Qualcomm’s mirasol display screens provide full color, touch screen controls and video.

Qualcomm is spending about $1 billion to build a mirasol screen factory in Taiwan, which should be ready for production later this year. In the meantime, it is producing screens at a smaller plant nearby.

The company is betting that smart phones, e-readers and tablets will migrate to micro-electro-mechanical systems, or MEMS, for display technology to improve battery life and outdoor viewing, in part because they use ambient natural light.

Qualcomm claims its mirasol displays offer significantly longer battery life than typical LCD screens now common in phones and tablets. Exact performance varies, but the company says e-readers should last about three weeks between charges if used for 30 minutes a day with the Wi-Fi connection off.

The Koobe deal is the fourth e-reader using mirasol technology scheduled to come to market. Others include The Kyobo e-reader in Korea, the Hanvon C18 e-reader in China and Bambook Sunflower e-reader, also in China.

Qualcomm did not provide information about when the Koobe e-reader in Taiwan would be available, and what the retail price would be.

The Jin Yong Reader is named after China’s best-selling living author. It comes preloaded with 36 Jin Yong’ works. It also includes access to Koobe’s vault of novels, comics, interactive e-books, animated picture books and magazines.

Koobe distributes digital content from newspapers, magazines and book publishers. It specializes in e-publishing software, e-readers and other devices

The Jin Yong Reader will feature a 5.7 inch mirasol display. It also will have a Qualcomm Snapdragon chip to power the device.
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5 Things We Should be Excited About in 2012 | View Clip
01/31/2012
IBTimes
5 Things We Should be Excited About in 2012

2012 is already here, and the tech world is as busy as ever. There were a lot of potentially revolutionary technologies and products announced and demonstrated during 2011, and this year, we’re starting to see them out in the wild. Among all the other good stuff, there are a few products that really stand out. Here’s my selection of things from the tech industry that have a lot of potential and we should expect to become big this year:

Transparent video/HUD glasses.

Transparent HUD glasses (or video glasses, as others call them) are the wave of the future – they will let you use your smartphone as your only computing device, anywhere you want, on a very big display. You will be able to browse the Web, write documents, chat, watch videos and do anything else that you’d normally do on a laptop. Lumus and Vuzix already have working prototypes in the pipeline, and hopefully, we’ll see the first products go on sale this year.

Quad core tablets and smartphones.

Obviously, in order for the smartphone and tablet to replace the traditional laptops and desktop computers, they’ll need to be more powerful. The current dual core processors are pretty decent when it comes to performance, but they’re nothing compared with the upcoming quad core CPUs. NVidia already has the Tegra 3 in production, and it will be available for smartphones by summer, plus Qualcomm, Samsung and Apple also have their own models in the works.

Ivy Bridge processors.

On the other side of the narrow sea, in the x86 world, Intel is making some advances, as well. Their new Ivy Bridge processors are more power efficient and faster at the same time than the previous generation – a milestone that was made possible thanks to the new tri gate transistor technology, as well as the 22 nm manufacturing process. Intel also has a few chips (the Medfield platform) that will compete directly with ARM, and it actually looks like a decent competitor this time.

OLED TVs.

OLED technology offers a lot of benefits over LEDs, Plasma and other displays, with the most important ones being better colors, brightness and contrast – and these are the specs that are most important when it comes to a panel. As LG demonstrated with their 55 inch 4K 3D TV, OLEDs are ready for the prime time, and 2012 will be the year they start taking over, at least in the TV world (though I hope they’ll arrive on laptops soon after).

Mirasol displays.

Mirasol is another great development when it comes to display technologies, and it kind of goes in a direction opposite of OLED – instead of bringing better picture quality, it brings massive savings in battery life, with the first Mirasol-equipped eReader being able to last up to three weeks of use – compare that to the usual 1-2 days for a modern smartphone (and yes, the display eats up 60-80% of the battery in most usage cases). If perfected, it could bring back the week long battery life for smartphones and make laptops last for days, as well. I think we’ll see a lot of eReaders and even tablets using Mirasol screens by the end of the year, and hopefully the technology will be further improved, as well.

There’s a lot of stuff to be excited for in 2012, but I believe the above technologies and products will define the year – I guess we’ll have to wait and see if that is true.
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Why Doctors Need to Embrace Their Digital Future Now | View Clip
01/31/2012
Wired Magazine
Why Doctors Need to Embrace Their Digital Future Now
By Thomas Goetz
Wired February 2012
We understand digitizing a book, but what does it mean to digitize a human being? asks Eric Topol.

Medicine has certainly progressed in the past 50 years, but the day when tricorders diagnose every ailment instantly and treatments are tailored to our DNA seems as far off as ever. Eric Topol is trying to bridge that gap. In his new book, The Creative Destruction of Medicine, Topol—a professor of genomics at the Scripps Research Institute—calls on patients to demand true digital medicine now. We talked to him about genetics, gadgets, and his vision of a Khan Academy for doctors.

Wired: Not many doctors get to take the stage at the Consumer Electronics Show, as you did in 2010. What was that like?

Eric Topol: It was a revelation. Normally people go to CES to learn about gizmos like HDTVs. And here I come to do a demo of wireless devices for health. The reaction was astounding: They began clapping when this little device I was holding showed an ultrasound of my heart on the big screen. It made me realize that consumers want to care about their health. They just need to get activated.

Wired: And that starts with this nifty concept you have of digitizing medicine.

Topol: Right. We understand digitizing a book, but what does it mean to digitize a human being? When I went to medical school, the term digital applied only to rectal exams. But today you can get a DNA sequence, you can get biosensors that record nearly every physiologic metric from blood pressure to brain waves, you can get a digital scan of any part of the body. These tools offer a window into each person that was unfathomable a few years ago.

Wired: But it’s not just the body; this scales up to the entire infrastructure of medicine.

Topol: That’s right. The digital world—the Internet and the cloud and supercomputing and social networking—is breaking medicine out of its cocoon. It’s a superconvergence we’ve seen in other walks of life but not in the health and medical sphere.

Wired: So what does digitized medicine get us?

Topol: We can start capturing people’s health data throughout their lives—all the little things that have lasting implications. For instance, we can track cumulative radiation exposure from every scan and x-ray. And consider the risk of drug interactions: Every year hundreds of thousands of Americans wind up in hospitals or worse because we didn’t match up the patient genomically with the right drug or dosage. Just capturing those things could save thousands of lives.

Wired: How do we make this happen now, rather than just waiting for a new, net-savvy generation of doctors?

Topol: We need a Khan Academy for doctors: captivating 15-minute videos on genomics, on wireless sensors, on advanced imaging, on health information systems. These things can revive the excitement they felt as premeds, when they first decided to go into this field. If we can get practicing physicians up to speed and really inspired, maybe we won’t have to wait a generation. I shudder to think about waiting 10 or 20 years for this transformation to occur.

Wired: But there are obstacles. For instance, many people in the tech world are afraid of running into bottlenecks getting FDA approval for new medical devices.

Topol: The FDA is moving very slowly, with considerable restraint and resistance. That’s one reason the technology is years behind where it should be. One example is a device called AliveCor. It’s a couple of sensors on a case that you can put on the back of an iPhone or a Droid phone to get your electrocardiogram and heart rhythm. It’s very inexpensive—less than $100. You can even send the results to your Facebook friends. In Europe it’s already approved and available today. But not in the US. A lot of these great, innovative ideas like sensors or rapid point-of-care geno-typing are moving slowly through the process with a considerable lack of support, as I see it. And these are largely just diagnostic tools, not therapeutics.

Wired: Meaning that they’re not doing anything to your body; they’re just taking information.

Topol: Exactly. A perfect example would be the glucose sensor that you can put on and get a reading every five minutes.

Wired: Which has likewise been hung up in FDA limbo.

Topol: Yeah. If you’re a diabetic and you’re using a glucose sensor, you have to carry your phone and another device, because the FDA doesn’t want glucose going through the phone. That’s really unfortunate; people would rather not pull out a glucose monitor in public. If it were in their phone, it would look like they’re just checking email.

Wired: But people with diabetes have many tools to manage their disease, and they’re self-tracking their care. You could argue that’s the epitome of digitizing medicine and giving people access to tools. They should feel empowered. But here’s what I call the diabetic’s paradox: When you survey them about these tools, they say they’re a source of frustration and anxiety—all these negative emotions. Giving them this responsibility and the tools seems to be a burden.

Topol: That’s an important issue. Will having more information induce fear and anxiety? I personally believe that if the information is easy to obtain and work with, most people would want to have it. For diabetes in particular, we know there’s a relationship between lack of glucose regulation and complications like blindness and kidney failure. So if you were diabetic and you knew that you could get your glucose in a tight, normal range just by adjusting your lifestyle, wouldn’t that be great? It could be rather seamless in your life. And you could look at your data and start to figure out what works in you: How much do exercise and certain foods help? What’s going on in your life that gets your glucose out of whack? But instead, what we have now requires finger sticks multiple times per day, the ranges are fuzzy and inexact, and the tools are horrible. As long as it doesn’t involve pain, as long as it’s simple to use out of the box, this will work. This will be better. That’s what we’re aiming for.

Wired: You write a lot about imaging—x-rays, CT scans, MRIs—and how that’s all gone digital. And that’s very much a two-edged sword, as you well know.

Topol: Absolutely. We are grossly overusing imaging in this country, and that’s really scary to me. The mass use of radiation scans is way out of line with any other place in the world. There are estimates that 2 to 3 percent of cancers in the US each year are engendered by exposure to repetitive imaging. So I present this as a shout-out to consumers. When you’re asked to have a CT scan or a nuclear scan, do you know how much radiation that involves? How many of those sorts of scans have you already had? Is it necessary? Is there an alternative? I don’t think many people know about that. We need tools that let us track our radiation exposure for ourselves, each of us. So that, I think, is an important part of how we can reboot the future of medicine.
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AT&T shakes up management team in wake of failed T-Mobile deal | View Clip
01/31/2012
FierceWireless
AT&T shakes up management team in wake of failed T-Mobile deal
By Phil Goldstein

AT&T (NYSE:T) reshuffled its top executives in the first major restructuring of the company’s executive team since the collapse of its $39 billion bid to acquire T-Mobile USA.

John Stankey, previously the president of AT&T’s business solutions unit, was named to the newly created position of group president and chief strategy officer. AT&T said he will be responsible for finding future growth opportunities, including corporate development; addressing long-term wireless capacity needs, which likely means hunting for new sources of spectrum; and for looking at the best strategic paths for the company’s low-growth and non-strategic assets. Interestingly, AT&T also said that Forrest Miller, a 30-year veteran who was the company’s head of corporate strategy and mergers and acquisitions, will retire, and it appears Stankey will take over Miller’s duties.

Additionally, AT&T said that Ralph de la Vega will remain as the president and CEO of AT&T Mobility, but will no longer run the company’s consumer markets business. He will continue to focus on expanding AT&T’s position in smartphones.

Meanwhile, Andy Geisse was named the head of AT&T’s business and home solutions operation, and will run the company’s business segment as well as AT&T’s U-verse, broadband and voice services in the company’s landline operations. Finally, CTO John Donovan will get the new title of senior executive vice president of AT&T’s technology and network operations, and he will be in charge of all of AT&T’s technology and networks, including its mobile broadband network.

All of AT&T’s top executives, from Randall Stephenson on down, have expressed disappointment that the company’s bid for T-Mobile fell apart in the face of opposition from regulators at the Department of Justice and FCC, but have said that they will continue to press for more wireless spectrum while at the same time working to improve AT&T’s network coverage and capacity through internal efforts.
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Japan’s newest mobile network makes U.S. LTE seem sluggish | View Clip
01/31/2012
Giga Om
Japan’s newest mobile network makes U.S. LTE seem sluggish
By Kevin Fitchard

Japanese operator eAccess isn’t deploying any old LTE network. It’s going for broke, pushing the upper limits of the technology to launch a network that could theoretically support downlink speeds of 300 Mbps, according to TeleGeography. That makes Verizon’s LTE network, which can breech 25 Mbps on a good day, seem pokey.

Theoretical speeds are just that, theoretical. Just as T-Mobile’s 21 Mbps and 42 Mbps HSPA+ systems could never actually deliver those peak speeds in real world environments, eAccess customers won’t be downloading the human genome onto their smartphones. TeleGeography reported that subscribers to the carrier’s eMobile service can expect more realistic speeds of 75 Mbps with a 25 Mbps uplink tossed in for good measure. Considering that’s faster than most residential broadband connections, I doubt customers will complain.

In order to achieve that performance eAccess had to max out the technical capabilities of today’s LTE standard (for the less acronym averse that’s 3GPP Release 8), a luxury that many global operators don’t share. eAccess is building its network over 40 MHz of spectrum, while Verizon and AT&Ts’ rollouts use 20 MHz or less.

eAccess also has to cram four LTE antennas into its devices, while we only use two antennas stateside. It’s highly unlikely eAccess will be able to incorporate this technology into smartphones. Double antennas means double the power consumption, but they also create a problem for spatial design. Those antennas will need room to stretch, otherwise the network won’t find them. That probably means the full capabilities of the network will only be available to larger devices such as laptops or tablets. Or if eAccess sticks to its wireline roots, it may use it as residential broadband service. A smartphone with a 75 Mbps connections is overkill anyway.

When can we expect networks like this in the U.S.? Well, the operators are working on incorporating technologies from the next wireless standard, LTE-Advanced, into their current networks. LTE-Advanced promises speeds as high as 1 Gbps for stationary devices, but operators don’t have the spectrum to implement the full capabilities of the standard at once. We’ll likely see more conservative LTE-Advanced deployments that may well give eAccess’ super-LTE network a challenge in a dead heat.
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Sprint grants LightSquared new extension to get FCC clearance | View Clip
01/31/2012
Dow Jones Newswires
Sprint grants LightSquared new extension to get FCC clearance
By Greg Bensinger, Dow Jones Newswires

U.S. operator has until mid-March to resolve FCC concerns its network interferes with GPS.
Sprint Nextel Corp. granted billionaire Philip Falcone’s LightSquared Inc. a new six-week extension to get Federal Communications Commission clearance to operate its planned nationwide fourth-generation network.

A Sprint spokesman said Tuesday the carrier had given LightSquared until mid-March to resolve FCC concerns its network interferes with global-positioning systems. That follows a 30-day extension Overland Park, Kan.-based Sprint gave LightSquared at the end of last year.

LightSquared has battled criticism from the Defense Department, lawmakers, GPS device manufacturers and others who say its wireless airwaves, or spectrum, will jam GPS signals. LightSquared–which is backed by Falcone’s Harbinger Capital Partners hedge fund–needs FCC authorization to roll out its network to 260 million people by 2016.

The FCC is accepting public comment until Feb. 27 on LightSquared’s argument that GPS device manufacturers aren’t entitled to legal protection from interference caused by its signals.

Getting the FCC’s approval is a condition of Sprint and LightSquared’s 15-year accord to share spectrum and network construction and equipment costs. LightSquared has said the agreement will help it save about $13 billion through the end of this decade.

To help mitigate any GPS interference, LightSquared last year agreed to lower the power of its cell towers and to use only a portion of its airwaves. The company has argued that it should not bear the cost of providing technology to companies to prevent any GPS signal-jamming.

LightSquared said earlier this month it has enough cash to operate through several quarters, though it has said it needs an additional $3.5 billion to be cash-flow positive over the next two years. The company said it is not raising additional funds as it works to resolve the FCC’s concerns.

Officials from LightSquared and the FCC couldn’t immediately be reached for comment.
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RIM Publishes Promised Corporate Governance Report | View Clip
01/31/2012
Dow Jones Newswires – Toronto Bureau
RIM Publishes Promised Corporate Governance Report
By WILL CONNORS
TORONTO—The board of Research in Motion Ltd. issued a long-promised report Monday recommending separating the roles of chair and chief executive, a suggestion made moot by the company’s decision last week to replace the company’s longtime co-CEOs and chairmen.

The report, issued by a committee made up of board members, was made at the behest of a shareholder proposal last April to review RIM’s corporate structure. The shareholder, Canadian-based Northwest & Ethical Investments L.P., had threatened to bring RIM’s corporate governance issues to a vote at its annual shareholder meeting last year.

RIM avoided a shareholder vote by agreeing to study its unusual board and management structure, which for years allowed the co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis to also serve as co-chairmen.

As RIM’s smartphone market share came under attack from rivals Apple Inc. and Google Inc. recently, and RIM’s share price tumbled last year, the structure became a lightning rod for criticism by shareholders and analysts.

Just a week before the end-of-January deadline for the report, RIM on Jan. 22 said Messrs. Balsillie and Lazaridis had stepped down from their executive roles. RIM replaced them with chief operating officer Thorsten Heins. Barbara Stymiest, a board member since 2007, took on the role of board chair.

RIM had long resisted separating the roles, arguing its lead nonexecutive director provided adequate pushback to management. In its report Monday evening, RIM’s board conceded that wasn’t good enough for many shareholders.

“While the Committee is comfortable that our Lead Director has performed the appropriate governance functions expected of that position up to the present, the Committee recommends that RIM should separate the roles of Chair and CEO and amend the Board mandate accordingly,” the report says.

“The Committee believes that appointing an independent Chair is the appropriate solution for RIM shareholders and will resolve the issue for RIM and its employees and business partners.”
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Nokia Siemens to Cut 4,100 Jobs in Germany, Finland | View Clip
01/31/2012
Dow Jones News GmbH
Nokia Siemens to Cut 4,100 Jobs in Germany, Finland
By PHILIPP GRONTZKI

FRANKFURT—Finnish-German network equipment vendor Nokia Siemens Networks said Tuesday it will cut some 2,900 jobs in Germany, and up to 1,200 jobs in Finland, as part of its massive restructuring plan announced in November.

In Germany, the majority of the jobs, representing about one third of its work force in the country, will go by the end of this year, NSN said. The number doesn’t include head count reductions resulting from potential asset sales.

The joint venture, owned by Nokia Corp. and Siemens AG, employs around 9,100 people in Germany and plans to cut the number of manufacturing, customer support and research sites in the country to just five from 35 now, according to a spokeswoman. That plan includes the closure of the Munich site, its biggest center in Germany.

“The company plans to significantly realign its operations in Germany to fit with its new focused strategy to become a leading mobile broadband and services company,” Nokia Siemens Networks said in the statement.

In Finland, the plan is to cut about 700 jobs in the city of Espoo, where Nokia has its headquarters, about 150 in Oulo and about 350 in Tampere.

The cuts represent 17% of NSN’s 6,900 strong work force in Finland.

The company plans to start talks with employees on Feb. 2.

“Finland will continue to be an important R&D and innovation center for Nokia Siemens Networks,” the company said in its statement.

NSN said in November it would cut 17,000 jobs globally by the end of 2013, and restructure its business in an effort to reach sustainable profitability and position itself for independence. The joint venture started operations in 2007 and has been struggling in the face of tough competition ever since.

Siemens Chief Financial Officer Joe Kaeser already said in November that charges linked to the Nokia Siemens Networks revamp will hurt profit of the Munich-based conglomerate this year.

—Arild Moen in Helsinki contributed to this article.
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ARM tips ‘gods and giants’ roadmap | View Clip
01/31/2012
EE Times Europe
ARM tips ‘gods and giants’ roadmap
Peter Clarke

LONDON – Processor and related IP licensor ARM Holdings plc has disclosed the names, but little else, on the roadmap of cores it is working on in 2012 and revealed a gods and giants theme. The roadmap includes high performance processors, a low power microcontroller and graphics cores.

The codenames for the next-generation graphics cores are Skrymir and Tyr. Skyrmir is a giant in Norse mythology and Tyr was a god of war and single combat and whose day is Tuesday. ARM paired these two cores together in a presentation given to analysts as it presented its financial results for 4Q11.

This might suggest that Skyrmir/Tyr will be the means by which ARM will deliver its big-little processing approach in the graphics domain.

In the processor domain ARM offers paired A15 and A7 cores as the big and little elements. For most of the time light computational load applications run on the A7 while the A15 is switched off. As the computational load increases clock frequency is wound up until eventually the application moves to the A15 and the A7 is switched off. The movement of tasks between paired A7 and A15 cores is triggered by the same system that drives the dynamic voltage and frequency scaling.

Warren East, CEO of ARM, described the Skrymir and Tyr cores as being about high performance and energy efficiency, but said further details would be released later in 2012. The cores are intended to cover a range of applications from phones though mobile computing to consumer electronics and ARM has signed lead partners for the development of the cores. When asked if the close coupling of the names as Skrymir/Tyr indicated big-little pair East declined to answer directly but said: “The plan will be to bring the big-little approach to graphics.”

ARM has chosen a classical giant and a god for the names of its next-generation high-end processing cores. Atlas and Apollo will implement the ARMv8-A architecture which supports 64-bit computing. The chips are being designed for likely implementation in 20-nm manufacturing process technology and to address applications from servers down to smartphones. Again lead partners are signed up ARM said.

The linking of the names as Atlas/Apollo could again suggest that Atlas is intended to be big and Apollo the little in big-little pairing. “We expect Atlas, Apollo to come into volume in 2014 and at that time it will be a 20-nm world out there.”

The fifth chip in the 2012 roadmap is neither god nor giant. The chip codenamed Flycatcher is part of ARM’s Cortex-R series and will be the smallest and lowest power ARM processor core available. ARM has one lead partner signed up to help the company develop the core.

East said the ultralow power Flycatcher would be a natural fit in intelligent sensors and for nodes in wireless sensor networks. “ARM7 Thumb was a low power core back in the day. Cortex-M0 is Thumb2 product and even lower power and Flycatcher will be even lower power; inherently low power,” said East.
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50 billion devices online by 2020 | View Clip
01/31/2012
Daily Telegraph, The
50 billion devices online by 2020
The number of web-connected devices will grow more than fourfold by 2020, networking giant Cisco has claimed.
By Matt Warman

The company also said that there will be more than 7 billion mobile devices globally by 2015, and that a greater use of video will mean total internet traffic will more than quadruple by 2014.

Estimates suggest there are currently approximately 14 billion devices connected to the internet. Increasingly, however, ‘machine-to-machine’ communication, rather than mobile phones or laptops, is expected to play a greater role.

Padmasree Warrior, Cisco’s Chief Technology Officer, said that she expected home networking speeds to increase twenty-fold over the next decade, and that workers would increasingly bring their own devices, such as phones or laptops, to work. Although this posed security challenges, she said that users were increasingly productive if allowed to use their own technology.

Technology companies such as Citrix have already begun to give new employees a budget to spend on a laptop, rather than issue them with a company machine.

Cisco is hosting its international conference, Cisco Live, in London to coincide with its sponsorship of the Olympic Games. The company demonstrated a new type of video conferencing, bringing different users on to the same ‘virtual set’ and has also announced a new wifi router, promising a 30 per cent performance improvement over current models.

The new device, which is aimed at large-scale clients such as in universities or shopping centres, is able to offer a tailored service depending on whether it is being used by mobile phones, tablets or laptops.

Cisco says its increasing use of the 802.11r standard will allow people to switch between networks in less than 50ms. This could make widespread use of the internet for voice calls a reality on mobile phones.
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Nokia design chief hints at Lumia phones with NFC and wireless charging | View Clip
01/31/2012
Guardian, The
Nokia design chief hints at Lumia phones with NFC and wireless charging
Exclusive: Marko Ahtisaari interview points towards new designs of Lumia phones without tab on USB charger slot
Marko Ahtisaari: smartphone evolution is only just beginning
Charles Arthur
Marko Ahtisaari, Nokia’s design chief.

Nokia is working on a Windows Phone model that incorporates NFC (Near Field Communications) technology to connect to external accessories – and is even considering versions with wireless charging, its design chief has indicated in an exclusive interview.

The company is also working closely with Microsoft, which is providing the software for its new top-end smartphones, to co-ordinate software details such as tile colours to match its hardware accessories, Marko Ahtisaari, Nokia’s head of design, told the Guardian.

New versions of the Lumia design, introduced to showcase Windows Phone in November, will also remove the flip-up plastic tab that presently covers the micro-USB charger for the phone – one of just two moving parts on the Lumia 800 phone.

“If you can take away a moving part and make it [the phone] more beautiful in the placement of the components, we’ll do it, so that’s something where we can certainly keep improving,” Ahtisaari told the Guardian. “Take it to the extreme, and why are there any connectors?”

Nokia Lumia 800: the first versions went on sale late in 2011 Ahtisaari is extremely influential within Nokia, having been appointed last week to its leadership team, reporting directly to chief executive Stephen Elop.

The removal of the USB connector would imply the use of wireless charging – a system that has already been demonstrated by products such as HP’s TouchPad, which had a wireless charging system. A Nokia spokesman said the company declined to comment on future product features.

Speaking in Nokia’s headquarters in Espoo, Finland, earlier this month, Ahtisaari said that new elements will “ship with the product that we will ship in the future”. Nokia already has “open NFC” incorporated into a number of its smartphones to enable rapid, password-free setup of Bluetooth pairing between phones and accessories such as speakers and headsets.

Although current versions of Windows Phone do not include NFC elements, Microsoft has indicated that it could be included in versions shipping by October 2012. And Elop also said at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas that although the current Windows Phone Lumia models – the 800 and 900 – do not have NFC, “it is growing in importance, and I personally believe in it”.

NFC “open” allows Bluetooth pairing without the use of password by tapping the devices to be paired together: an exchange of electronic tokens takes place, so that Bluetooth connection – for a hi-fi, speakers or headset – can occur within seconds with virtually no other interaction. Current secure Bluetooth pairing otherwise requires the user to enter a password of up to eight digits.

Nokia has shipped more than a million Lumia phones since introducing them in November. The company decided to abandon its Symbian platform for high-end smartphones in January 2011 after Elop decided it could not compete against Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android mobile operating systems.

He also suggested that touchscreen interaction is in its very early days, comparing it to the early days of the automobile: “In the 1880s in the car industry cars had tillers – it took 15 years to agree on the steering wheel controlling the front wheels. We’re in the middle of that part of the evolution of interaction.”

Charles Arthur’s trip to Finland was paid for by Finnfacts, an independent media service organisation that provides contacts between international media and Finnish business.
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Apple Hires Dixons Chief to Run Retail Stores | View Clip
01/31/2012
Wall Street Journal – San Francisco Bureau
Apple Hires Dixons Chief to Run Retail Stores
By JESSICA E. VASCELLARO

John Browett, the CEO of the troubled European electronics retailer, Dixons has been appointed head of retail by Apple in a move that certainly surprised the industry. WSJ’s Ben Rooney analyzes the move.
Apple Inc. tapped the chief of one of Europe’s largest electronics retailers as its new head of retail, filling its most high-profile vacancy with a rare company outsider.

Apple announced Tuesday that John Browett, who has been chief executive of Dixons Retail PLC since 2007, would join the company as a senior vice president in charge of the technology giant’s retail operations and expansion in April.

Mr. Browett, who was also an executive at Tesco PLC, succeeds Ron Johnson, who left Apple to run J.C. Penney Co. in November. Mr. Johnson was credited with creating Apple’s highly successful retail strategy, and his departure left a rare hole in Apple’s executive ranks.

With the move, Apple is taking the unusual step of appointing a senior executive from outside the Cupertino, Calif., company. Apple hired executive search firm Egon Zehnder International to help with the search, according to people familiar with the matter.

The company considered a range of executives from the U.S. and Europe, according to a person familiar with the matter. Apple also considered Steve Cano, an Apple retail executive who was one of Mr. Johnson’s lieutenants, according to this person.

Mr. Browett, age 48, headed Tesco’s online operations before joining Dixons and was previously an adviser on retail and consumer goods at Boston Consulting Group Inc. He is credited with leading a transformation of Dixons’ fortunes through store revamps and service improvements amid severe headwinds caused by the economic downturn that saw U.S.-based competitor Best Buy Co. Inc. recently pull out of the U.K. market it entered with much fanfare in 2010.

In a statement, Apple’s chief executive Tim Cook said Mr. Browett shared Apple’s commitment to customer service. “We are thrilled to have him join our team and bring his incredible retail experience to Apple,” he said.

Dixons’ shares, which have risen more than 40% since the start of the year, fell 13% Tuesday after the announcement. The electronics chain said Sebastian James, Dixons’ Group Operations Director, would become the company’s new chief executive.

Dixons operates the Currys and PC World chains in the U.K. and also has stores in Nordic countries, Italy and Greece.

—Joann S Lublin contributed to this article.
Write to Jessica E. Vascellaro at jessica.vascellaro@wsj.com
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Disruptions: In Davos, Technology Moves Center Stage
By NICK BILTON

Eric E. Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, at Davos on Friday.

DAVOS, Switzerland — When I set out to report at the World Economic Forum, I imagined it might be difficult to find technology-related stories. It turns out, I was a tad wrong. I would have had more luck finding a snowless Alpine mountain in the winter than finding people discussing a topic that did not involve technology.

After a year that has included the social media-fueled protests of the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, global Internet privacy legislation and billions of dollars in technology stock offerings, tech and social media have not only entered the building, they are the walls holding it up.

Even the 102-page program guide for the World Economic Forum, where business, political and intellectual leaders gather each year to talk and frolic, has more references to technology and social media than any of the nerdiest Silicon Valley blogs I read daily.

Of course, tech is not a new concept at the forum. Eric E. Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, told me he had been attending Davos for 15 years, two years before Google was even created.

But what has changed, I was told by dozens of people I spoke with, is technology’s infusion into every topic here.

Sessions on philanthropy, agriculture, social unrest, media and the economy were all full of digital banter. One attendee even told me that social media repeatedly came up during a discussion on religion.

Paulo Coelho, the best-selling Brazilian novelist, said in an interview that business and political leaders were finally accepting the power of social media. “Five years ago Davos was discussing new business models; now that has totally dropped. Now it is all about the Internet,” he told me. “They used to have answers here, and now it seems people are more comfortable with questions; the Internet has a lot of questions.”

Mr. Coelho, by the way, has more than seven million followers on Facebook and three million on Twitter.

Anna Ewing, Nasdaq’s chief information officer, said, “Technology is now framed as a core strategic and business issue.”

“It’s part of every discussion here,” she said, and “not just something that is being talked about by the technoweenies.” Those “technoweenies” are also the new celebrities of Davos. During a philanthropy plenary session I attended, Sean Parker, the Napster entrepreneur and the former president of Facebook, nearly ran out of the room after his session had finished as dozens of people tried to corner him.

Some of the most elite parties — a renowned part of the Davos experience — took place in the Swiss chalets of tech celebrities too, including Mr. Parker and Yuri Milner, the Russian billionaire who has invested in Facebook, Zynga and Groupon.

Though Silicon Valley was top of mind, there was also a growing worry about the loss of jobs that often results from new technologies. The new jobs created don’t usually fit the qualifications of the newly unemployed. When cars drive themselves, for example, what happens to the millions of jobs that will inevitably be lost?

Tech drives the economy, but it doesn’t drive employment. “We are a 100-person company and we serve 50 million people. That kind of leverage has never existed before,” said Drew Houston, co-founder of the start-up Dropbox, a service that stores and shares digital files. Mr. Schmidt of Google said, “At Davos the conversation is really about economic growth and the reality is that technological advancement benefits those who are educated but endangers jobs that are routine and automatable.”

“This has been true for two hundred years with technologies,” he added.

Next year as the wealthy and the powerful gather here again to discuss the same topics, the technoweenies among them will have moved society even further forward.

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U.S. government invalidates potent Rambus patent | View Clip
01/27/2012
Reuters – Washington DC Bureau

U.S. government invalidates potent Rambus patent

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The last of three patents that tech licensing company Rambus (RMBS.O) used to win infringement lawsuits against Nvidia Corp (NVDA.O), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ.N) and others has been declared invalid, according to legal documents.

The three patents – collectively known as the Barth patents – pertain to memory chips used in personal computers and are considered to be among Rambus’ most valuable intellectual property.

An appeals board at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office declared the patent invalid on January 24, according to a ruling posted on their website. The previous two were declared invalid in September.

The invalidation is more bad news for Rambus, whose stock shed 60 percent of its value in the weeks after a November 16 court decision in which it lost a $4 billion antitrust lawsuit against Micron Technology Inc (MU.O) and Hynix Semiconductor Inc

(000660.KS).

The Barth patents had been used to accuse a long list of tech companies of infringement, earning Rambus millions of dollars in licensing fees through settlements.

Rambus can appeal the latest decision from the PTO. “We’re evaluating our options,” said company spokeswoman Linda Ashmore.

Rambus’ share price fluctuates sharply on its successes and failures in patent litigation and licensing. The company announced Thursday that it had fourth-quarter revenue of $83.4 million and annual revenue of $312.4 million.

Rambus has aggressively used the three Barth patents to pursue infringement claims against technology companies.

It was met with success in July 2010 when the International Trade Commission, which hears patent litigation involving imported products, ruled that graphics chip maker Nvidia, Hewlett-Packard and other smaller companies had infringed the three Barth patents. Nvidia subsequently settled with Rambus on the issue.

POTENT PATENT

The patents in question were also among six that Rambus used in accusing a long list of companies of infringing in a new ITC complaint filed in early 2011. That complaint was filed against STMicroelectronics(STM.PA), MediaTek (2454.TW) and Broadcom, among others. Broadcom has since settled.

It was unclear if Rambus appealed the invalidation of the first two Barth patents from September, and the company did not immediately respond to a telephone call seeking comment.

Scott Daniels, a partner in the law firm Westerman, Hattori, Daniels and Adrian, LLP, said Rambus was unlikely to win an appeal on the third Barth patent, since it would be appealed back to the examiner, who would be highly unlikely to disagree with the higher-ranking appeals board.

Once appeals are exhausted at the patent office, companies can dispute patent invalidations to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington.

(Reporting By Diane Bartz; Editing by Gary Hill)

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Diabetes: For some misery, for others an opportunity | View Clip
01/30/2012
Giga Om

Diabetes: For some misery, for others an opportunity
By Om Malik

What do they say – one man’s trash is another man’s gold! A growing number of startups are looking at the growing incidence of diabetes as an opportunity to take a fresh approach and reinvent how diabetes patients manage and better co-exist with the disease on a daily basis.

One such startup, Palo Alto-based Glooko today announced that it has received $3.5 million in Series A funding from a group of investors led by The Social+Capital Partnership, a investment firm started by former Facebook executive, Chamath Palihapitiya. Well known Silicon Valley veterans such as Bill Campbell, Google’s Vint Cerf, and Cisco co-founder Judy Estrin are also investors in the company which has previously raised $1 million in seed funding.

Glooko has developed a MeterSync ($40) cable that plugs into most standard self-monitoring blood glucose meters and the Glooko Logbook app for iOS devices that automatically creates a digital logbook of readings, allows users to review daily blood sugar levels, annotate them and share the results with their physician.

Yogen Dalal, Glooko co-founder and chairman explained to GigaOM that the company is going to use the new funds to focus on supporting more meters and develop an Android app in addition to getting more attention in the market place for its offerings. Glooko is not the only company that is seeking to make a mark in the digital health device business. At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2012) there was a noticeable increase in the number of digital health devices.

A growing, global problem

According to the Mayo Clinic, diabetes is a group of diseases that impact how our body uses blood sugar. If you have diabetes, you would have too much glucose (sugar) in your blood and this leads to many complications and serious health problems. It is one of the fastest spreading diseases in the world.

According to American Diabetes Association (ADA) nearly 25.8 million children and adults in the United States of America who are suffering from diabetes. (More stats here at the ADA website.) The situation is equally worse around the world. According to the Harvard School of Public Health, there are 350 million diabetics around the world.

What you need to know

Those statistics might be numbers for you, but for me it is a fact of life. I am one of those millions who have been afflicted by this disease. I have learned to live with it – and medication is only part of the solution. The key to keeping diabetes under check is to exercise, being careful about food intake and most importantly one has to constantly monitor sugar levels. If I don’t, then in a few years it is pretty clear that more serious complications can arise.

How do I keep on top of things? Using a mix of analog and digital solutions. Every time I tested my blood sugar level, I wrote down the reading in a little black book and also in BloodSugar, an iPhone app. I jot down what I eat and when I eat. I monitor my weight on a weekly basis. And at the end of the month, I enter all the data into an excel spreadsheet, which I share with my doctor whenever I see him. This is a painful and arduous process, but I am betting that one (or more) of these new startups will figure out a way to make my life easy.

For instance, Glooko is making it easy for me to take the daily measurement data right out of my diabetes monitor and making it available via their iPhone app and cable. Just like Glooko, I am excited about the upcoming smart logbook app from MySugr, a company based in Vienna, Austria.

The fact that MySugr co-founders Frank Westermann and Frederik Debong are both diabetics is one of the reasons why I feel that they have a proper understanding of the emotional realities of living with the disease. The company has developed a smart logbook (still in alpha) that uses game-mechanics to keep diabetics motivated in taking better care of themselves.

Glooko and MySugr are by no means the only startups. There are many more out there who are working on ways to deal with this growing epidemic. As someone who lives with the reality of diabetes, I can only but welcome your efforts.

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Prize may beam down Star Trek’s tricorder | View Clip
01/30/2012
News Observer – Online

Prize may beam down Star Trek’s tricorder
BY PAUL GILSTER

Imagine a handheld gadget that can be waved at a person to produce a quick evaluation of the subject’s health, and you’ve got Star Trek’s medical tricorder, one of those innovations from the science fiction series that is moving closer to reality.

Qualcomm is putting up seed money for the X-Prize Foundation to study the possibilities in running a $10 million competition. The goal: the invention of a handheld scanner that can use wireless sensors and imaging to diagnose diseases.

The Tricorder X-Prize follows a long history of prize achievements that count among their successes the Orteig Prize, a $25,000 purse that Charles Lindbergh took home for being the first to fly nonstop between New York and Paris.

Prizes are a powerful incentive to technological progress, as we’ve recently seen with the Ansari X Prize, won in 2004 by Scaled Composites for a sub-orbital manned flight. That prize grew out of the example of the Orteig Prize and its huge success in boosting a nascent aviation industry. In all, 26 teams spent more than $100 million in an attempt to win the space challenge and boost private spaceflight.

Get the idea? The amount of such prizes is far exceeded by the research expenditures of those trying to win it.

Can we do the same thing with a tricorder? It’s going to be a long slog to produce the needed sensors and couple them with wireless technologies, but so-called terahertz rays are under scrutiny because they seem ideal for portable sensing and communications. T-rays can detect biological conditions that might flag tumors and other health issues. Current devices using T-rays for medical imaging are expensive and low in power, but new nano antennae promise much stronger T-ray fields and are under active study.

In fact, researchers at Imperial College in London and a Singapore company called A*STAR have produced a terahertz antenna that’s just 100 nanometers across – one-thirty-thousandth the size of other such antennae. We may be in a time when breakthroughs in medical scanning are not far ahead, a revolution that, once played out, could make it easier for doctors to diagnose conditions and produce quicker results than slower and more invasive forms of diagnosis.

This is why the tricorder prize is such a good idea. Prizes work best when the result sought is futuristic but within the foreseeable range of existing technologies. They may take years or even decades to be achieved, but they spur companies and individuals to push existing technology to its limit, in the process uncovering new ideas and spurring an infusion of research money.

Airport scanners, a technology everyone loves to hate, use a wavelength band just below T-rays, one that’s also used in existing medical imaging. , although in devices larger than handheld tricorders. The beauty of T-rays is that while airport scanners can see the potential weapon someone might be concealing beneath his or her clothes, T-rays can penetrate the skin and find the chemical signature of developing conditions.

The tricorder prize winner, when it comes, will use imaging like this coupled with existing and soon-to-be-released smartphone technologies to help you and me diagnose ourselves, possibly heading off dangerous conditions early on. It may eventually include advances in DNA sequencing.

This is a tall order, but have a look at what Virgin Galactic is doing with the technology developed for the Ansari X Prize.

The company will offer sub-orbital spaceflights to the public, an idea that was not in serious consideration before the pioneering flight of SpaceShipOne in 2004.

Prizes push technology forward in sudden jumps, which is why aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin has envisioned a series of Mars prizes to reward innovation in manned spaceflight that could lead to a human presence on the Red Planet.

If we’re lucky, the tricorder prize may fuel the advances in medical high-tech that we’ll be talking about in a few short years.

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Public Sucked Into LightSquared Squabble | View Clip
01/30/2012
Light Reading

Public Sucked Into LightSquared Squabble
Dan Jones

LightSquared got some breathing space Friday as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) granted a public comment period on the carrier’s petition about its rights to use the spectrum licensed to it.

On Dec. 20, LightSquared petitioned the agency about the waiver it issued on Jan. 23 2011 to allow the operator to build an LTE network in L-Band spectrum. The L-Band spectrum is right next to bandwidth used by GPS receivers and some of them would “see” transmissions from the planned network, causing interference.

LightSquared said that the GPS industry had known for eight years that a terrestrial network in the L-Band spectrum was coming from LightSquared or its predecessors. Yet the industry didn’t change the design of their receivers.

“Commercial GPS receivers are not licensed, do not operate under any service rules, and thus are not entitled to any interference protection whatsoever,” LightSquared claimed in its December petition.

The FCC has now opened up a public comment period on this. It will run until Feb. 27 with follow-ups due by March 13.

Why this matters
The FCC move appears to give LightSquared a bit more time for testing before the vultures start to circle. The company is arguing against previous government tests that say the planned network does cause interference with GPS. LightSquared claims collusion with the GPS industry “rigged” the results and says that only the FCC can decide what happens with the spectrum.

LightSquared’s network partner, Sprint Nextel Corp. (NYSE: S), has put its deal with the operator on hold until the interference issue is resolved. Harbinger Capital Partners LP -backed LightSquared, meanwhile, has said that it has enough money to continue operations for the next several quarters.

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BlackBerry Under Siege in Europe | View Clip
01/30/2012
New York Times, The

BlackBerry Under Siege in Europe
By BRIAN X. CHEN

The iPhone has taken a big bite out of the BlackBerry in a market where the older phone once dominated: business customers in North America.

Thorsten Heins, RIM’s new chief, said the company’s focus on security remained an advantage.

Phones like the Galaxy S II, based on Android software, have helped Samsung become the world’s top phone maker.

Meanwhile, in Europe, Samsung is poised to do the same to Research in Motion, BlackBerry’s maker, as a growing number of businesses are buying, or plan to buy, phones using the Android operating system.

Although BlackBerry is a must-have accessory for the growing business class in the developing economies of the world and RIM is adding customers there at a healthy clip, the company faces a problem in its established markets. Businesses are looking for another option besides the BlackBerry.

RIM, Apple and Android phones now equally share the workplace market. In a recent global survey of information workers — people who use a computer or another smart device for at least an hour a day — Forrester Research found that 27 percent of smartphone users said they had an Android phone; 26 percent, a BlackBerry; and 24 percent, an iPhone. “Android and Apple together are eating BlackBerry’s lunch,” said Frank Gillett, a Forrester analyst.

While some companies are cautious about allowing employees to use Android phones in the office because of security concerns, more businesses that let employees bring their own devices have approved Android devices. Apple’s iPhone continues to be popular. Samsung Electronics sold 300 million handsets in 2011, almost all of them Android phones, and became the biggest phone manufacturer in the world. It appears to be in the best position to profit from a shift in the market.

“We’ve seen quite a huge growth of Android in the enterprise over the last 18 months,” said Nick McQuire, research director of enterprise mobility strategies at the International Data Corporation. “We see it as being neck and neck with Apple to be a top mobile enterprise platform in Europe.”

RIM’s answer to the increasing popularity of Android handsets and the iPhone is a new version of the BlackBerry software, called BlackBerry 10. But phones based on the new software system have been delayed several times and are now not expected until late 2012. Thorsten Heins, the company’s new chief executive, said the new software would address the “consumerization of I.T.,” referring to the growing trend of businesses letting their employees choose which devices they bring to work.

Mr. Heins believes that RIM’s advantage in the business market remains the company’s focus on security. He said that RIM regularly speaks to chief information officers, who say they do not like that Android devices and iPhones have become prominent in the work place.

“They are in a pickle. Their pickle is security,” Mr. Heins said in an interview. “When the first big security flaw even happens in one of the large enterprises, you will see this turn around. Wait for the day this happens.”

But waiting is not something people in businesses are doing. I.D.C. recently surveyed business managers and information technology managers at 728 businesses across seven Western European countries and found that Android was the fastest-growing mobile operating system for business customers in 2011.

Chief information officers at big enterprises said they were not yet formally supporting Android, though all of them have said they had plans to do so in the next 18 months. They are probably hesitating because they need to plan security measures to protect corporate devices, Mr. McQuire said.

Still, the general acceptance of Android in European businesses is a harbinger of RIM’s continued struggles. The Tieto Corporation, a European firm that provides information technology services to large companies, said it had seen strong and increasing demand from customers for Android-based business software. Ville Virtanen, an enterprise mobility marketing director at Tieto, said that customers found Android phones to be cheaper and that the software was the least complicated for distributing work-related apps to employees.

And security concerns are being addressed. Some of Samsung’s new phones, like the Galaxy S II, include extra security features for enterprise customers. The newest version of Google’s Android operating system, called Ice Cream Sandwich, has built-in encryption. In October, Samsung introduced a program called Samsung Approved for Enterprise, which includes a suite of tools tailored specifically for businesses.

Apple’s ascendance in the business market with the iPhone and iPad has been especially surprising to many people because the company had shown little interest in catering to the needs of corporate users when it made solely computers. Not long after the iPhone came out in 2007, however, Apple began adding features to the device, like better compatibility with Microsoft’s Exchange, a messaging system that is ubiquitous in big companies.

“Once Apple added those capabilities, the floodgates opened,” said Mr. Gillett of Forrester. “It was very hard for I.T. to look the C.I.O., C.T.O. and powerful employees in the eye and say, ‘You can’t use that device.’ ”

Planet Magpie, a California-based information technology consulting firm, said that employees working for the majority of its 350 clients were using the Apple phone. “A lot of people on BlackBerrys have switched over to the iPhone,” said Robert Douglas, president of Planet Magpie. He said that for many businesses, ditching the BlackBerry has actually decreased costs, because companies no longer have to support the BlackBerry enterprise server, RIM’s proprietary system designed to protect data on devices. RIM’s server, he said, was “always a bit flaky.”

RIM also faces practical alternatives to the BlackBerry enterprise server, like Good Technology, an information technology company that provides security and management tools for iOS, Android and RIM devices.

The wild card in the enterprise sweepstakes is the Microsoft Windows smartphone. Nokia, the giant phone maker, has staked its future on the new software, called Windows Phone 7. Information technology managers are comfortable with Microsoft, and the company has deep relationships with most companies.

The big question is whether Microsoft and Nokia will be ready in time to exploit RIM’s weakness. Windows Phone 7 is shipping on several new handsets, like Nokia’s well-received Lumia 900, and its Windows 8 software for tablets is set to land this year.

Kristen Batch, a spokeswoman for Microsoft, said the company was not ready to announce its plans for business customers.

Waiting is a risk RIM and its new chief executive are willing to take. “I don’t want to launch a product that isn’t ready,” Mr. Heins said. “I want it to be a perfect experience.”

Nick Wingfield and Ian Austen contributed reporting.

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Tilera targets Intel, ARM with 36-core server chip | View Clip
01/30/2012
IDG News Service – New York Bureau

Tilera targets Intel, ARM with 36-core server chip
Tilera claims its 36-core chip outperforms Intel’s Sandy Bridge chips in performance-per-watt
Agam Shah

Tilera on Monday announced availability of its new 36-core processor, which the company says can trump traditional x86 server chips from Intel in performance-per-watt.

The Tile-GX36 is designed for use in servers that handle large volumes of Internet transactions, the company said. The processor helps reduce power and cooling costs in data centers while swiftly executing social media, search and multimedia streaming transactions.

The Tile-GX36 chip will initially ship at clock speeds of 1.2GHz, and draws up to 24 watts of power. The chip can run more operations per clock cycle while drawing less power than some power-hungry Intel Xeon server chips, said Bob Doud, director of marketing.

The Tilera chip has attributes of a general-purpose CPU as it can run the Linux OS and applications commonly used to serve web data. The fast throughput chip has fewer parallelized cores but is faster than Tilera’s 64-core predecessor chip, which shipped a few years ago. A 2U server with eight 36-core chips will draw roughly 400 watts of power, the same as eight Tilera 64-core chips in the box.

“A Gx36 is running at a much higher clock speed … and with a lot more cache it cranks out more work per core, so we end up seeing higher net performance with a 36-core chip,” Doud said.

It’s hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison as chip architectures have their own attributes, analysts said. Low-power processors from ARM and Tilera could be beneficial for fast-moving cloud transactions, while the dominant x86 chips are proven and can handle resource-heavy applications like databases.

Internet transactions are usually processed and served through data centers, and there is growing interest in low-power servers as companies look to cut data-center costs. Tilera chips are already being tested in some servers, and early adopters Hewlett-Packard and chip maker Nvidia are building experimental servers with low-power ARM processors, which are found in most smartphones and tablets today. Tilera, ARM and x86 chips are based on separate instruction sets.

ARM may have more name recognition, but Tilera has a more powerful chip with 64-bit capabilities, Doud said. Current ARM processors are only 32-bit, and ARM has said it expects to make a meaningful impact in servers only in 2014 when it releases its 64-bit architecture.

“We’re riding on some of the buzz around ARM,” Doud said. “It’s beneficial to Tilera. We’ve got the technology now.”

But Tilera will not replace Intel in data centers overnight, and its chips will go through years of testing before making its presence felt in the server market, said Dean McCarron, principal analyst at Mercury Research. It’s difficult for companies to move away from the high server reliability and up time provided by x86 chips.

Early adopters can test Tilera chips on low-priority systems like web servers, which won’t halt data-center operations in case of a crash. But even those tests would last years.

“We’ve seen that pattern not only with non-x86, but x86 products,” McCarron said, citing the example of Intel’s x86 low-power Atom chips, which are being used in experimental servers for tasks like web serving.

“The market for non-x86 has the same kind of requirements where you’re going to have an early adopter that is going to play with it,” McCarron said.

Rival architectures like ARM and MIPS have their benefits on power consumption, but the total cost of ownership needs to be considered before comparing architectures, said Jim McGregor, chief technology strategist at In-Stat.

Having the most power-efficient architecture doesn’t do any good unless companies are willing to invest in software development, which is usually much more costly.

“There are and will always be applications that can justify new architectures for power or performance reasons, but they come with a high price tag for the software support and the risk of being locked-in to a sole source architecture,” McGregor said.

With Intel’s Xeon, there is almost unlimited software support and low total cost of ownership. There is also an alternate chip company in AMD, which is competitive in both price and performance, McGregor said.

But large customers deploying thousands of servers have their own source code are software support is a lesser concern, Tilera’s Doud said. The savings experienced over four to five years matter more, and recompiling code is not that “big a deal,” Doud said.

Common Linux applications, such as the Apache web server, MySQL database and Memcached caching software have already been ported for use on Tilera’s chips. The Tilera architecture supports more than 2,000 Linux packages, and is working on building software support.

“We get no pushback at all,” Doud said. “We have all the key libraries.”

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Snapdragon S4 “Krait” – MSM8960 GPU Benchmark Surfaces | View Clip
01/30/2012
AnandTech

Snapdragon S4 “Krait” – MSM8960 GPU Benchmark Surfaces
by Saumitra Bhagwat

A NenaMark 2 benchmark score for an unknown device based on Qualcomm’s upcoming 28nm Snapdragon S4 “Krait” MSM8960 SoC has just surfaced. The device seems to have 1.5Ghz CPU, a 1024×600 resolution display powered by an Adreno 225 GPU and running Android 4.0.3.

The Adreno 225 GPU scores 54.9 fps in the benchmark. To put things in perspective, a Galaxy S2, powered by the Mali-400 MP4 scores 46.2 fps. The important difference here is that the Galaxy S2 has an 800×480 resolution display, which makes the Adreno 225’s performance that much more impressive while powering a higher resolution display.

What remains to be seen is how the Adreno 225 stacks up against the current king-of-the-hill, the PowerVR SGX543MP2, the custom GeForce GPU in Tegra 3 and other upcoming GPUs such as the Mali T-604 and whatever Apple comes up with in its A6 chip. Given the raw performance offered by these next-gen GPUs, it won’t be long before we get console-quality gaming on our handheld devices.

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Keep Tabs on Fido | View Clip
01/27/2012
Wall Street Journal

Keep Tabs on Fido
A GPS dog collar that lets you keep a digital leash on man’s best friend.
F. Martin Ramin for The Wall Street Journal Styling by Anne Cardenas

Tagg—a GPS tracker that attaches to your dog’s or cat’s collar—makes it simple to keep tabs on your pet’s whereabouts.
Your pets may have trouble checking into Foursquare (have you ever tried pawing a touch screen?), but Tagg—a GPS tracker that attaches to your dog’s or cat’s collar—makes it simple to keep tabs on their whereabouts from any computer or mobile phone. Unlike other pet-tracking devices, which can look like decommissioned Soviet-era spy gear, Tagg’s waterproof transmitter is thin, light and styled to match Fido’s and Whisker’s high-tech lifestyles. With a $7.95-per-month subscription to Tagg’s service (required to use the device), you’ll get notified by text or email if your pet strays beyond a home zone that you define. Then just fire up the Tagg app or log in to Tagg’s website to pinpoint your pet’s location on a map—even get driving directions there. (If you have an old-school mobile phone, you can send Tagg a text message and the service will reply with the address of your pet’s location.) The included docking station recharges the transmitter and lets the system know that your pet is safe at home to conserve battery life. Whether your four-legged friend is tech savvy (how did he get 496 Facebook friends? That are all human?) or a complete Luddite happily burying a bone in the backyard, Tagg makes it a snap to fetch him when he’s lost. $100, tagg.com

—Michael Hsu

IDG News Service – Sales of Android-based tablets more than tripled during the fourth quarter of 2011. But Apple still dominates, even as its market share dropped, according to Strategy Analytics.

Global tablet shipments reached 26.8 million units in the fourth quarter of 2011, a 150% increase from 10.7 million during the same period in 2010.

Consumers are increasingly choosing tablets over netbooks and even entry-level notebooks or desktops, Strategy Analytics said.

Android is picking up momentum, and together vendors backing the operating system shipped 10.5 million units, compared to 3.1 million a year ago. That gives Android a 39.1% share of global tablet shipments, compared to 29% a year earlier.

Apple’s share dropped from 68.2% to 57.6%, according to Strategy Analytics.

Apple shrugged off the much-hyped threat from entry-level Android-based models. It is inevitable that Apple loses market share as more vendors enter the tablet space, according to Neil Mawston, executive director at Strategy Analytics. But its tablet business is still growing at a healthy rate, he said.

Apple shipped 15.4 million tablets during the fourth quarter, up from 7.3 million during the same period last year.

Microsoft captured just 1.5% of the tablet market during the last three months of 2011. The upcoming release of Windows 8 later this year can’t come quickly enough for Microsoft, allowing its hardware partners to start competing more effectively, according to Strategy Analytics.

66.9 million tablets were shipped during 2011, up 260% from 18.6 million in 2010.
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Android tablets closing in on iPad: researcher | View Clip
01/26/2012
Thomson Reuters – Helsinki
Android tablets closing in on iPad: researcher

(Reuters) – Tablet computers using Google’s Android software narrowed the lead of Apple’s iPad on the global market in the fourth quarter, research firm Strategy Analytics said on Thursday.

Global tablet shipments reached an all-time high of 26.8 million units in the fourth quarter, growing 2-1/2 fold from 10.7 million a year earlier, the research firm said.

“Dozens of Android models distributed across multiple countries by numerous brands such as Amazon, Samsung, Asus and others have been driving volumes,” analyst Neil Mawston said in a statement.

Android’s market share rose to 39 percent from 29 percent a year earlier, while Apple’s share slipped to 58 percent from 68 percent a year before.

The tablet computer market grew 260 percent last year to 66.9 million units as consumers are increasingly buying tablets in preference to netbooks and even entry-level notebooks or desktops.

Strategy Analytics said Microsoft had a 1 percent share of the global tablet market last quarter.

(Reporting By Tarmo Virki; Editing by Tim Dobbyn)
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AT&T’s Net Loss Tied to T-Mobile Merger Fees | View Clip
01/26/2012
New York Times, The
AT&T’s Net Loss Tied to T-Mobile Merger Fees
By JENNA WORTHAM

AT&T, the second-largest phone company in the United States, reported a substantial $6.68 billion net loss for the fourth quarter, primarily from the break-up fees incurred as a result of the company’s failed acquisition of T-Mobile USA. During the same period a year earlier, the company reported profit of $1.09 billion, or 18 cents per share.

However, a wave of momentum from iPhone sales and new subscribers nudged AT&T’s revenue up 4 percent during the quarter, with sales rising to $32.5 billion from $31.36 billion a year ago. Analysts expected the company to report $31.95 billion in revenue.

The company added 717,000 post-paid subscribers, the largest boost in five quarters, and a net total of 2.5 million wireless subscribers, which lifted the company’s base to 103.2 million wireless customers. AT&T also said it beat previous records for smartphone sales during the quarter, selling 7.6 million iPhones and 9.4 million smartphones overall.

Rick Franklin, an analyst with Edward Jones, said the report “sets AT&T up well for future wireless data growth and profitability.”

The company also beat results for Verizon, which said on Wednesday that it sold 4.2 million iPhones and 7.7 million smartphones during the same period. AT&T said that 76 percent of its overall revenue growth stemmed from the company’s growth in wireless, wireline data and services.

“We had a tremendous year in terms of execution, and we have excellent momentum across our growth platforms,’ said Randall Stephenson, the chief executive of AT&T, in a statement. “This was a blowout quarter for smartphone sales.”

After discounting charges from the $4 billion breakup fee paid to T-Mobile USA, AT&T’s per-share profit was 42 cents; analysts expected 43 cents a share.

“Looking ahead, we start 2012 with the best visibility we’ve had in some time, and we’re well-positioned to deliver solid results,” Mr. Stephenson said.

Investors seemed initially disappointed by the results, with shares slipping 2.4 percent to $29.50 in premarket trading.
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1 Billion Euro Loss and a Silver Lining for Nokia | View Clip
01/26/2012
New York Times, The
1 Billion Euro Loss and a Silver Lining for Nokia
By KEVIN O’BRIEN

BERLIN — Nokia, the world’s largest seller of mobile phones by volume, said Thursday that it suffered a huge loss in the fourth quarter but reported better than expected sales of its new Windows smartphones, sending its shares soaring.

Nokia said it lost almost €1.1 billion, or $1.4 billion, in the fourth quarter, compared with a €745 million profit a year earlier. Sales at Nokia, based in Espoo, Finland, fell 21 percent to €10 billion from €12.65 billion a year earlier. Operating profit shrank by more than half during the period to €478 million from €1.1 billion a year earlier.

But shares of Nokia rose sharply in Helsinki trading after the company reported that it had already sold more than a million Lumia phones, the first using the Windows operating system, since October. Nokia is currently selling two Windows models, the Lumia 800 in Europe and parts of Asia, and the Lumia 710 in the United States.

“The results suggest a good start for the Nokia Windows Phones,” said Franciso Jeronimo, an analyst in London at International Data Corp. He said that other makers of Windows phones, like Samsung and HTC, were also benefiting from Nokia’s promotion of the operating system. “The massive marketing investment to promote the Nokia Lumia 800 contributed to ship better-than-expected volumes.”

Stephen Elop, the former Microsoft executive who is directing Nokia’s transition from its own Symbian operating system to Windows, said the company planned to widen its aggressive selling of Windows devices, which I.D.C. estimates had only a 1 percent share of the global operating system market in the fourth quarter, far behind the leading operating systems, Android, made by Google, and iOS, made by Apple.

“From this beachhead of more than one million Lumia devices, you will see us push forward with the sales, marketing and successive product introductions necessary to be successful,” Mr. Elop said. The company announced planned to sell a third Windows phone, the Lumia 900, through AT&T Mobility in the United States.

Mr. Elop said Nokia would also start selling Lumia devices in China and Latin America by June. He said the Windows operating system and its associated services, which he refers to as a software-hardware “ecosystem,” are being embraced by operators who want a credible rival to Apple and Android, which together had more than three quarters of the global smartphone operating system market in the fourth quarter, according to I.D.C.

“In the war of ecosystems, clearly there are some strong contenders already on the field,” Mr. Elop said. “With Lumia, we have demonstrated that we belong on the field. Our specific intent has been to establish a beachhead in this war of ecosystems, and country by country that is what we are now accomplishing.”

But as Nokia navigates the transition to Windows, it is suffering financially, as operators abandon or demand price cuts on Symbian models, which still make up the vast majority of the 113.5 million phones Nokia sold in the fourth quarter. In the fourth quarter, the number sold declined by 8 percent from 123.7 million a year earlier. The average selling price of a Symbian phone slid 23 percent to €53 in the quarter from €69 one year earlier.

Sales fell 38 percent in Europe, Nokia’s largest market, and 40 percent in China, its third-largest market, during the quarter. In North America, Symbian sales dived 77 percent to 53 million units from 233 million a year earlier.

Mr. Elop said that Symbian devices were being undercut by lower-priced smartphones. Chinese rivals Huawei and ZTE sell basic smartphones for less than $100.

“In certain markets, there has been an acceleration of the anticipated trend towards lower-priced smartphones with specifications that are different from Symbian’s traditional strengths.”

Mr. Elop said Nokia expected to sell fewer Symbian devices than originally anticipated when he announced the decision to adopt Windows in February 2011. At the time, Mr. Elop predicted Nokia would sell 150 million Symbian devices as Nokia ramped up production and made the transition to Windows phones.

On Thursday, he said Nokia would sell fewer, without being more precise.

Nokia began selling its first Windows model, the Lumia 800, in October in selected markets in Europe and Asia. This month, it began selling Lumia 710 through T-Mobile U.S.A

Analysts are expecting Nokia to rapidly reassert its relevance in the smartphone market, which it had largely to itself before the 2007 introduction of Apple’s first iPhone. Over the next 12 months, Nokia will grow its smartphone market share more than sixfold, to 12.2 percent, overtaking Research In Motion, the makers of the Blackberry, according to I.D.C.

By 2015, Windows and Nokia will be the second-largest smartphone operating system in the world, I.D.C. estimates, with 21 percent, trailing Google’s Android with 47 percent but ahead of Apple, with 19 percent.

“What people are underestimating is how much operators in Europe and elsewhere are beginning to support and push Windows phones,” Mr. Jeronimo said in an interview. “Operators are very afraid of becoming dependent on the Android-Apple duopoly and as a result, they are pushing Nokia devices aggressively on the public.”
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NEC to Eliminate 10,000 Jobs After Loss | View Clip
01/26/2012
Bloomberg BusinessWeek
NEC to Eliminate 10,000 Jobs After Loss
By Kazuyo Sawa and Cheng Herng Shinn

The computer maker forecast a 100 billion yen annual loss, compared with a previous outlook for a 15 billion yen profit, as slower growth globally and in Japan trimmed demand. Photographer: Haruyoshi Yamaguchi/Bloomberg
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NEC Corp. (6701), forecasting its third annual loss in four years, will cut 10,000 jobs as slower global growth reduces demand for its mobile phones, computers and wireless gear.

“As macroeconomic concerns about Europe and developing countries increase, we decided to invest limited resources in lesser business segments,” President Nobuhiro Endo said today in Tokyo.

NEC forecast a 100 billion-yen loss ($1.3 billion) for the year ending March 31, abandoning a previous outlook for a 15 billion-yen profit, the Tokyo-based company said in a statement today. The job cuts equal about 8.6 percent of NEC’s workforce.

About 7,000 of those jobs will be eliminated in Japan, and NEC will take a 40 billion-yen charge for the restructuring, according to the statement. NEC also won’t pay a year-end dividend.

“The job cuts announced today are bigger than expected,” said Yuichi Ishida, an analyst at Mizuho Investors Securities Co. in Tokyo. “This will probably help the company reduce expenses, and we’ll probably see some improvements immediately from next fiscal year.”

Previous Cuts

The computer maker’s shares were unchanged at 168 yen as of the 3 p.m. close of trading in Tokyo, before the statement was released. NEC has lost 31 percent of market value in the past 12 months, compared with a 23 percent drop for Japanese computer maker Fujitsu Ltd. (6702) and a 17 percent decline for the broader Topix index.

Most of the job cuts will come from NEC’s mobile-phone handset business and may begin March 31, Endo said. The reduction is split between full- and part-time jobs, Endo said.

In 2009, the company said it was cutting more than 20,000 employees, mostly in the semiconductor and electronic-component businesses.

NEC, which formed a venture with Lenovo Group Ltd. (992) last year, had 115,840 employees at the end of March, compared with 154,786 in fiscal year 2007, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Lenovo, China’s biggest personal-computer maker, agreed to invest $175 million in the venture to expand in Japan.

NEC’s net loss widened to 86.5 billion yen in the three months ended Dec. 31 from 26.5 billion yen a year earlier, according to the statement today. Sales fell 6.7 percent to 672 billion yen.

“NEC has to focus on its strengths and cut the rest,” said Mitsushige Akino, who oversees about $600 million at Ichiyoshi Investment Management Co. in Tokyo.

To contact the reporters on this story: Kazuyo Sawa in Tokyo at ksawa3@bloomberg.net; Cheng Herng Shinn in Tokyo at hcheng52@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Michael Tighe at mtighe4@bloomberg.net
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Samsung Poised to Win Market Share on $42 Billion Capital Investment: Tech | View Clip
01/26/2012
Bloomberg – Seoul Bureau
Samsung Poised to Win Market Share on $42 Billion Capital Investment: Tech
By Jun Yang

Samsung Electronics , the biggest unit of South Korea’s largest industrial group, will spend as much as 40 trillion won of the group’s total budget, said four analysts.

Jan. 10 (Bloomberg) — David Steel, executive vice president at Samsung Electronics Co., talks about the outlook for voice-controlled televisions and other Samsung products. He speaks with Emily Chang on Bloomberg Television’s “Bottom Line.” Mark Crumpton also speaks. (Source: Bloomberg)

Sony hasn’t made a profit selling TVs in the past seven years. Photographer: Tomohiro Ohsumi/Bloomberg
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Samsung Electronics Co. (005930)’s capital expenditure dwarfs that of competitors and has helped make it the world’s biggest maker of TVs, memory chips and flat-screen panels. Record spending this year may further pressure rivals.

Samsung and its affiliates plan to spend 47.8 trillion won ($42 billion) this year on new product research and upgrading plants, the group said this month. The Suwon, South Korea-based company, which reports full-year earnings tomorrow, spent more than Sony Corp. (6758), Intel Corp. (INTC) and Cisco Systems Inc. combined in 2010, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.

The spending spree will enable the chips and display supplier to Apple Inc. and Sony to build on record sales last year and boost profit that doubled in the five years to 2010. That may leave competing makers, already mired in losses from a glut of commodity chips, even farther behind in their quest to diversify into the higher-margin specialty semiconductors for phones and tablets that have made Samsung so successful.

“We have a Goliath in the technology industry,” said Kim Hyung Sik, a Seoul-based analyst at Taurus Investment Securities Co. “The gap between Samsung and the laggards will keep widening, particularly in memory chips.”

Earnings Forecast

Sales by Samsung Electronics, the biggest unit of South Korea’s largest industrial group, were equal to 16 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, based on figures from the company and the Bank of Korea. The company’s fourth-quarter profit probably rose to 3.99 trillion won from 3.42 trillion won a year ago, according to the average of 28 analyst estimates compiled by Bloomberg.

Samsung Electronics will spend as much as 40 trillion won of the group’s total budget, said four analysts, including Young Park, a Hong Kong-based analyst at Woori Investment & Securities Co. The semiconductor and display businesses will get the most, they said.

The spending amid burgeoning sales and profit contrast with Asian rivals including Japanese chipmaker Elpida Memory Inc. (6665), which was unprofitable for four straight quarters to September and faces a deadline to repay debts. Makers of dynamic random- access memory, the most common chip in computers, lost a combined $14 billion in the past three years, according to Bloomberg calculations.

‘Deep Pocket’

Sony (6758) hasn’t made a profit selling TVs in the past seven years. The Tokyo-based electronics maker is forecasting a fourth consecutive companywide loss this year amid slumping TV demand that’s prompted a restructuring of the business. Last month, Sony agreed to quit a panel-making joint venture with Samsung.

“Samsung’s strategy is to take advantage of its deep pocket and keep widening their lead over rivals,” said Im Jeong Jae, a Seoul-based fund manager at Shinhan BNP Paribas Asset Management Co., which oversees about $28 billion.

LG Group, which includes LG Electronics Inc. (066570) and LG Display Co., said Jan. 13 its companies would reduce expenditures by 15 percent this year, citing slowing consumer spending in the U.S. and Europe as a potential risk. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. (TSM), which competes with Samsung in contract manufacturing of chips, said Jan. 18 it will decrease its equipment budget to $6 billion this year from $7.3 billion.

Samsung v. Apple

In 2010, Samsung had $18.7 billion in capital expenditures, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. In comparison, Santa Clara, California-based Intel spent $5.2 billion.

Apple spent $2 billion in the year ended in September 2010. The Cupertino, California-based company, which more than doubled first-quarter profit and had cash and investments of more than $97 billion, contracts most of its manufacturing to other companies, reducing the need for high capital expenditure.

Samsung shares gained 11 percent last year, compared with a 26 percent jump for Apple and a 53 percent slump for Sony.

Samsung, expected to detail its capital expenditure plan tomorrow, should continue expanding investment and hiring to maintain industry leadership even as the global economic growth slows, Chairman Lee Kun Hee said this month.

Spending in the past has helped the company extend its dominance.

Samsung’s share in the global handset market increased to 22.6 percent from 20.9 percent in the third quarter, while market leader Nokia OYJ (NOK1V)’s share slipped to 27.3 percent from 32.3 percent, according to Strategy Analytics. The Korean company probably will pass Nokia in total mobile phone sales by the end of this year, Taurus’s Kim said.

‘Thrown in the Towel’

With the DRAM chip industry reeling from a glut and falling prices, Samsung is investing more in the semiconductor business to diversify. Apple is Samsung’s biggest customer as well as the biggest competitor in smartphones and tablet computers.

“The Japanese and Taiwanese memory-chip companies have almost thrown in the towel,” Shinhan BNP Paribas’s Im said. “In phones, Samsung and Apple’s dominance will continue.”

Samsung may almost double spending on its logic-chip business, which oversees manufacturing of Apple-designed A4 and A5 processors under an exclusive contract, to a record 8 trillion won this year, according to Hanwha Securities Co. and Korea Investment & Securities Co.

The Korean company has profitably diversified into specialty chips for smartphones, tablet devices and servers. Samsung sells twice as many specialty DRAM chips, where margins are higher, as commoditized chips used in PCs, Shinhan Investment Corp. said in a report in October.

In other businesses, Samsung may spend as much as 7 trillion won to expand production of OLED, or organic light- emitting diode, displays, Tong Yang’s Park said. Demand for screens using the technology is increasing, driven by use in smartphones including the Galaxy devices.

“The most important thing in this industry is to invest early so you can gain dominance and build an entry barrier against competitors,” Park said. “Samsung can do that because they have the financial firepower.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Jun Yang in Seoul at jyang180@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Michael Tighe at mtighe4@bloomberg.net
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KDDI lifts revenue outlook on strong iPhone demand | View Clip
01/26/2012
Dow Jones International News
KDDI lifts revenue outlook on strong iPhone demand
By Kana Inagaki, Dow Jones Newswires

Japanese mobile operator saw 8.2% rise in data revenue on growing smartphone adoption.

KDDI Corp. on Thursday lifted its full-year revenue outlook by 2.6%, benefiting from steady growth in demand for Apple Inc.’s iPhone 4S and other smartphones.

The upward revision by KDDI comes after Apple earlier this week reported its best-ever financial results for its fiscal first quarter, thanks to the popularity of its smartphone and tablet computer.

KDDI, which competes with NTT DoCoMo Inc., said its net profit for the three months ended December dropped 17% from a year earlier to Y54.22 billion from Y65.67 billion. The company attributed the decline to tax adjustments caused by a change in Japan’s corporate taxes and a drop in revenue from voice calls.

Operating profit for the quarter fell 5.4% to Y117.48 billion from Y124.19 billion a year earlier, while revenue increased 5.7% to Y902.13 billion from Y853.42 billion on the back of an increase in data traffic for smartphones.

Average revenue per user–a key industry gauge to determine the long-term growth rate of telecom operators–fell 10% to Y4,470 as revenue from voice calls slid 26%.

Still, revenue from data traffic rose 8.2% as more subscribers switched to smartphones, especially after KDDI started selling Apple’s iPhone 4S. Prior to the Oct. 14 launch, Softbank Corp., Japan’s third-biggest mobile service provider, was the only iPhone carrier in Japan.

In a reflection of solid demand, KDDI increased its revenue target to Y3.55 trillion from an earlier-projected Y3.46 trillion for the full fiscal year through March and raised its sales target for smartphones to 5.55 million units from 4 million units.

The company, meanwhile, lowered its net profit forecast to Y235 billion from an earlier-projected Y250 billion due to the tax adjustments while it continues to forecast a 0.7% increase in operating profit to Y475 billion.

KDDI bases its earnings on Japanese accounting standards.
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In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad | View Clip
01/26/2012
New York Times, The
In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad
By CHARLES DUHIGG and DAVID BARBOZA

SAFETY PRECAUTIONS After a rash of apparent suicide attempts, a dormitory for Foxconn workers in Shenzhen, China, had safety netting installed last May. Foxconn said it acted quickly and comprehensively to address employee suicides.

A SHRINE FOR A SON Lai Xiaodong was killed in a Foxconn factory explosion. His parents have built a memorial in their village.

A JOB TURNS DEADLY Aluminum dust from polishing iPads caused the blast at Foxconn’s plant in Chengdu, left. Lai Xiaodong was among those killed. He had moved to Chengdu, bringing with him his college diploma, six months earlier.

When workers in the cafeteria ran outside, they saw black smoke pouring from shattered windows. It came from the area where employees polished thousands of iPad cases a day.

Two people were killed immediately, and over a dozen others hurt. As the injured were rushed into ambulances, one in particular stood out. His features had been smeared by the blast, scrubbed by heat and violence until a mat of red and black had replaced his mouth and nose.

“Are you Lai Xiaodong’s father?” a caller asked when the phone rang at Mr. Lai’s childhood home. Six months earlier, the 22-year-old had moved to Chengdu, in southwest China, to become one of the millions of human cogs powering the largest, fastest and most sophisticated manufacturing system on earth. That system has made it possible for Apple and hundreds of other companies to build devices almost as quickly as they can be dreamed up.

“He’s in trouble,” the caller told Mr. Lai’s father. “Get to the hospital as soon as possible.”

In the last decade, Apple has become one of the mightiest, richest and most successful companies in the world, in part by mastering global manufacturing. Apple and its high-technology peers — as well as dozens of other American industries — have achieved a pace of innovation nearly unmatched in modern history.

However, the workers assembling iPhones, iPads and other devices often labor in harsh conditions, according to employees inside those plants, worker advocates and documents published by companies themselves. Problems are as varied as onerous work environments and serious — sometimes deadly — safety problems.

Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple’s products, and the company’s suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered reliable, independent monitors.

More troubling, the groups say, is some suppliers’ disregard for workers’ health. Two years ago, 137 workers at an Apple supplier in eastern China were injured after they were ordered to use a poisonous chemical to clean iPhone screens. Within seven months last year, two explosions at iPad factories, including in Chengdu, killed four people and injured 77. Before those blasts, Apple had been alerted to hazardous conditions inside the Chengdu plant, according to a Chinese group that published that warning.

“If Apple was warned, and didn’t act, that’s reprehensible,” said Nicholas Ashford, a former chairman of the National Advisory Committee on Occupational Safety and Health, a group that advises the United States Labor Department. “But what’s morally repugnant in one country is accepted business practices in another, and companies take advantage of that.”

Apple is not the only electronics company doing business within a troubling supply system. Bleak working conditions have been documented at factories manufacturing products for Dell, Hewlett-Packard, I.B.M., Lenovo, Motorola, Nokia, Sony, Toshiba and others.

Current and former Apple executives, moreover, say the company has made significant strides in improving factories in recent years. Apple has a supplier code of conduct that details standards on labor issues, safety protections and other topics. The company has mounted a vigorous auditing campaign, and when abuses are discovered, Apple says, corrections are demanded.

And Apple’s annual supplier responsibility reports, in many cases, are the first to report abuses. This month, for the first time, the company released a list identifying many of its suppliers.

But significant problems remain. More than half of the suppliers audited by Apple have violated at least one aspect of the code of conduct every year since 2007, according to Apple’s reports, and in some instances have violated the law. While many violations involve working conditions, rather than safety hazards, troubling patterns persist.

“Apple never cared about anything other than increasing product quality and decreasing production cost,” said Li Mingqi, who until April worked in management at Foxconn Technology, one of Apple’s most important manufacturing partners. Mr. Li, who is suing Foxconn over his dismissal, helped manage the Chengdu factory where the explosion occurred.

“Workers’ welfare has nothing to do with their interests,” he said.

Some former Apple executives say there is an unresolved tension within the company: executives want to improve conditions within factories, but that dedication falters when it conflicts with crucial supplier relationships or the fast delivery of new products. Tuesday, Apple reported one of the most lucrative quarters of any corporation in history, with $13.06 billion in profits on $46.3 billion in sales. Its sales would have been even higher, executives said, if overseas factories had been able to produce more.

Executives at other corporations report similar internal pressures. This system may not be pretty, they argue, but a radical overhaul would slow innovation. Customers want amazing new electronics delivered every year.

“We’ve known about labor abuses in some factories for four years, and they’re still going on,” said one former Apple executive who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of confidentiality agreements. “Why? Because the system works for us. Suppliers would change everything tomorrow if Apple told them they didn’t have another choice.”

“If half of iPhones were malfunctioning, do you think Apple would let it go on for four years?” the executive asked.

Apple, in its published reports, has said it requires every discovered labor violation to be remedied, and suppliers that refuse are terminated. Privately, however, some former executives concede that finding new suppliers is time-consuming and costly. Foxconn is one of the few manufacturers in the world with the scale to build sufficient numbers of iPhones and iPads. So Apple is “not going to leave Foxconn and they’re not going to leave China,” said Heather White, a research fellow at Harvard and a former member of the Monitoring International Labor Standards committee at the National Academy of Sciences. “There’s a lot of rationalization.”

Apple was provided with extensive summaries of this article, but the company declined to comment. The reporting is based on interviews with more than three dozen current or former employees and contractors, including a half-dozen current or former executives with firsthand knowledge of Apple’s supplier responsibility group, as well as others within the technology industry.

In 2010, Steven P. Jobs discussed the company’s relationships with suppliers at an industry conference.

“I actually think Apple does one of the best jobs of any companies in our industry, and maybe in any industry, of understanding the working conditions in our supply chain,” said Mr. Jobs, who was Apple’s chief executive at the time and who died last October.

“I mean, you go to this place, and, it’s a factory, but, my gosh, I mean, they’ve got restaurants and movie theaters and hospitals and swimming pools, and I mean, for a factory, it’s a pretty nice factory.”

Others, including workers inside such plants, acknowledge the cafeterias and medical facilities, but insist conditions are punishing.

“We’re trying really hard to make things better,” said one former Apple executive. “But most people would still be really disturbed if they saw where their iPhone comes from.”

The Road to Chengdu

In the fall of 2010, about six months before the explosion in the iPad factory, Lai Xiaodong carefully wrapped his clothes around his college diploma, so it wouldn’t crease in his suitcase. He told friends he would no longer be around for their weekly poker games, and said goodbye to his teachers. He was leaving for Chengdu, a city of 12 million that was rapidly becoming one of the world’s most important manufacturing hubs.

Though painfully shy, Mr. Lai had surprised everyone by persuading a beautiful nursing student to become his girlfriend. She wanted to marry, she said, and so his goal was to earn enough money to buy an apartment.

Factories in Chengdu manufacture products for hundreds of companies. But Mr. Lai was focused on Foxconn Technology, China’s largest exporter and one of the nation’s biggest employers, with 1.2 million workers. The company has plants throughout China, and assembles an estimated 40 percent of the world’s consumer electronics, including for customers like Amazon, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Nintendo, Nokia and Samsung.

Foxconn’s factory in Chengdu, Mr. Lai knew, was special. Inside, workers were building Apple’s latest, potentially greatest product: the iPad.

When Mr. Lai finally landed a job repairing machines at the plant, one of the first things he noticed were the almost blinding lights. Shifts ran 24 hours a day, and the factory was always bright. At any moment, there were thousands of workers standing on assembly lines or sitting in backless chairs, crouching next to large machinery, or jogging between loading bays. Some workers’ legs swelled so much they waddled. “It’s hard to stand all day,” said Zhao Sheng, a plant worker.

Banners on the walls warned the 120,000 employees: “Work hard on the job today or work hard to find a job tomorrow.” Apple’s supplier code of conduct dictates that, except in unusual circumstances, employees are not supposed to work more than 60 hours a week. But at Foxconn, some worked more, according to interviews, workers’ pay stubs and surveys by outside groups. Mr. Lai was soon spending 12 hours a day, six days a week inside the factory, according to his paychecks. Employees who arrived late were sometimes required to write confession letters and copy quotations. There were “continuous shifts,” when workers were told to work two stretches in a row, according to interviews.

Mr. Lai’s college degree enabled him to earn a salary of around $22 a day, including overtime — more than many others. When his days ended, he would retreat to a small bedroom just big enough for a mattress, wardrobe and a desk where he obsessively played an online game called Fight the Landlord, said his girlfriend, Luo Xiaohong.

Those accommodations were better than many of the company’s dorms, where 70,000 Foxconn workers lived, at times stuffed 20 people to a three-room apartment, employees said. Last year, a dispute over paychecks set off a riot in one of the dormitories, and workers started throwing bottles, trash cans and flaming paper from their windows, according to witnesses. Two hundred police officers wrestled with workers, arresting eight. Afterward, trash cans were removed, and piles of rubbish — and rodents — became a problem. Mr. Lai felt lucky to have a place of his own.

Foxconn, in a statement, disputed workers’ accounts of continuous shifts, extended overtime, crowded living accommodations and the causes of the riot. The company said that its operations adhered to customers’ codes of conduct, industry standards and national laws. “Conditions at Foxconn are anything but harsh,” the company wrote. Foxconn also said that it had never been cited by a customer or government for under-age or overworked employees or toxic exposures.

“All assembly line employees are given regular breaks, including one-hour lunch breaks,” the company wrote, and only 5 percent of assembly line workers are required to stand to carry out their tasks. Work stations have been designed to ergonomic standards, and employees have opportunities for job rotation and promotion, the statement said.

“Foxconn has a very good safety record,” the company wrote. “Foxconn has come a long way in our efforts to lead our industry in China in areas such as workplace conditions and the care and treatment of our employees.”

Apple’s Code of Conduct

In 2005, some of Apple’s top executives gathered inside their Cupertino, Calif., headquarters for a special meeting. Other companies had created codes of conduct to police their suppliers. It was time, Apple decided, to follow suit. The code Apple published that year demands “that working conditions in Apple’s supply chain are safe, that workers are treated with respect and dignity, and that manufacturing processes are environmentally responsible.”

But the next year, a British newspaper, The Mail on Sunday, secretly visited a Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China, where iPods were manufactured, and reported on workers’ long hours, push-ups meted out as punishment and crowded dorms. Executives in Cupertino were shocked. “Apple is filled with really good people who had no idea this was going on,” a former employee said. “We wanted it changed, immediately.”

Apple audited that factory, the company’s first such inspection, and ordered improvements. Executives also undertook a series of initiatives that included an annual audit report, first published in 2007. By last year, Apple had inspected 396 facilities — including the company’s direct suppliers, as well as many of those suppliers’ suppliers — one of the largest such programs within the electronics industry.

Those audits have found consistent violations of Apple’s code of conduct, according to summaries published by the company. In 2007, for instance, Apple conducted over three dozen audits, two-thirds of which indicated that employees regularly worked more than 60 hours a week. In addition, there were six “core violations,” the most serious kind, including hiring 15-year-olds as well as falsifying records.

Over the next three years, Apple conducted 312 audits, and every year, about half or more showed evidence of large numbers of employees laboring more than six days a week as well as working extended overtime. Some workers received less than minimum wage or had pay withheld as punishment. Apple found 70 core violations over that period, including cases of involuntary labor, under-age workers, record falsifications, improper disposal of hazardous waste and over a hundred workers injured by toxic chemical exposures.

Last year, the company conducted 229 audits. There were slight improvements in some categories and the detected rate of core violations declined. However, within 93 facilities, at least half of workers exceeded the 60-hours-a-week work limit. At a similar number, employees worked more than six days a week. There were incidents of discrimination, improper safety precautions, failure to pay required overtime rates and other violations. That year, four employees were killed and 77 injured in workplace explosions.

“If you see the same pattern of problems, year after year, that means the company’s ignoring the issue rather than solving it,” said one former Apple executive with firsthand knowledge of the supplier responsibility group. “Noncompliance is tolerated, as long as the suppliers promise to try harder next time. If we meant business, core violations would disappear.”

Apple says that when an audit reveals a violation, the company requires suppliers to address the problem within 90 days and make changes to prevent a recurrence. “If a supplier is unwilling to change, we terminate our relationship,” the company says on its Web site.

The seriousness of that threat, however, is unclear. Apple has found violations in hundreds of audits, but fewer than 15 suppliers have been terminated for transgressions since 2007, according to former Apple executives.

“Once the deal is set and Foxconn becomes an authorized Apple supplier, Apple will no longer give any attention to worker conditions or anything that is irrelevant to its products,” said Mr. Li, the former Foxconn manager. Mr. Li spent seven years with Foxconn in Shenzhen and Chengdu and was forced out in April after he objected to a relocation to Chengdu, he said. Foxconn disputed his comments, and said “both Foxconn and Apple take the welfare of our employees very seriously.”

Apple’s efforts have spurred some changes. Facilities that were reaudited “showed continued performance improvements and better working conditions,” the company wrote in its 2011 supplier responsibility progress report. In addition, the number of audited facilities has grown every year, and some executives say those expanding efforts obscure year-to-year improvements.

Apple also has trained over a million workers about their rights and methods for injury and disease prevention. A few years ago, after auditors insisted on interviewing low-level factory employees, they discovered that some had been forced to pay onerous “recruitment fees” — which Apple classifies as involuntary labor. As of last year, the company had forced suppliers to reimburse more than $6.7 million in such charges.

“Apple is a leader in preventing under-age labor,” said Dionne Harrison of Impactt, a firm paid by Apple to help prevent and respond to child labor among its suppliers. “They’re doing as much as they possibly can.”

Other consultants disagree.

“We’ve spent years telling Apple there are serious problems and recommending changes,” said a consultant at BSR — also known as Business for Social Responsibility — which has been twice retained by Apple to provide advice on labor issues. “They don’t want to pre-empt problems, they just want to avoid embarrassments.”

‘We Could Have Saved Lives’

In 2006, BSR, along with a division of the World Bank and other groups, initiated a project to improve working conditions in factories building cellphones and other devices in China and elsewhere. The groups and companies pledged to test various ideas. Foxconn agreed to participate.

For four months, BSR and another group negotiated with Foxconn regarding a pilot program to create worker “hotlines,” so that employees could report abusive conditions, seek mental counseling and discuss workplace problems. Apple was not a participant in the project, but was briefed on it, according to the BSR consultant, who had detailed knowledge.

As negotiations proceeded, Foxconn’s requirements for participation kept changing. First Foxconn asked to shift from installing new hotlines to evaluating existing hotlines. Then Foxconn insisted that mental health counseling be excluded. Foxconn asked participants to sign agreements saying they would not disclose what they observed, and then rewrote those agreements multiple times. Finally, an agreement was struck, and the project was scheduled to begin in January 2008. A day before the start, Foxconn demanded more changes, until it was clear the project would not proceed, according to the consultant and a 2008 summary by BSR that did not name Foxconn.

The next year, a Foxconn employee fell or jumped from an apartment building after losing an iPhone prototype. Over the next two years, at least 18 other Foxconn workers attempted suicide or fell from buildings in manners that suggested suicide attempts. In 2010, two years after the pilot program fell apart and after multiple suicide attempts, Foxconn created a dedicated mental health hotline and began offering free psychological counseling.

“We could have saved lives, and we asked Apple to pressure Foxconn, but they wouldn’t do it,” said the BSR consultant, who asked not to be identified because of confidentiality agreements. “Companies like H.P. and Intel and Nike push their suppliers. But Apple wants to keep an arm’s length, and Foxconn is their most important manufacturer, so they refuse to push.”

BSR, in a written statement, said the views of that consultant were not those of the company.

“My BSR colleagues and I view Apple as a company that is making a highly serious effort to ensure that labor conditions in its supply chain meet the expectations of applicable laws, the company’s standards and the expectations of consumers,” wrote Aron Cramer, BSR’s president. Mr. Cramer added that asking Apple to pressure Foxconn would have been inconsistent with the purpose of the pilot program, and there were multiple reasons the pilot program did not proceed.

Foxconn, in a statement, said it acted quickly and comprehensively to address suicides, and “the record has shown that those measures have been successful.”

A Demanding Client

Every month, officials at companies from around the world trek to Cupertino or invite Apple executives to visit their foreign factories, all in pursuit of a goal: becoming a supplier.

When news arrives that Apple is interested in a particular product or service, small celebrations often erupt. Whiskey is drunk. Karaoke is sung.

Then, Apple’s requests start.

Apple typically asks suppliers to specify how much every part costs, how many workers are needed and the size of their salaries. Executives want to know every financial detail. Afterward, Apple calculates how much it will pay for a part. Most suppliers are allowed only the slimmest of profits.

So suppliers often try to cut corners, replace expensive chemicals with less costly alternatives, or push their employees to work faster and longer, according to people at those companies.

“The only way you make money working for Apple is figuring out how to do things more efficiently or cheaper,” said an executive at one company that helped bring the iPad to market. “And then they’ll come back the next year, and force a 10 percent price cut.”

In January 2010, workers at a Chinese factory owned by Wintek, an Apple manufacturing partner, went on strike over a variety of issues, including widespread rumors that workers were being exposed to toxins. Investigations by news organizations revealed that over a hundred employees had been injured by n-hexane, a toxic chemical that can cause nerve damage and paralysis.

Employees said they had been ordered to use n-hexane to clean iPhone screens because it evaporated almost three times as fast as rubbing alcohol. Faster evaporation meant workers could clean more screens each minute.

Apple commented on the Wintek injuries a year later. In its supplier responsibility report, Apple said it had “required Wintek to stop using n-hexane” and that “Apple has verified that all affected workers have been treated successfully, and we continue to monitor their medical reports until full recuperation.” Apple also said it required Wintek to fix the ventilation system.

That same month, a New York Times reporter interviewed a dozen injured Wintek workers who said they had never been contacted by Apple or its intermediaries, and that Wintek had pressured them to resign and take cash settlements that would absolve the company of liability. After those interviews, Wintek pledged to provide more compensation to the injured workers and Apple sent a representative to speak with some of them.

Six months later, trade publications reported that Apple significantly cut prices paid to Wintek.

“You can set all the rules you want, but they’re meaningless if you don’t give suppliers enough profit to treat workers well,” said one former Apple executive with firsthand knowledge of the supplier responsibility group. “If you squeeze margins, you’re forcing them to cut safety.”

Wintek is still one of Apple’s most important suppliers. Wintek, in a statement, declined to comment except to say that after the episode, the company took “ample measures” to address the situation and “is committed to ensuring employee welfare and creating a safe and healthy work environment.”

Many major technology companies have worked with factories where conditions are troubling. However, independent monitors and suppliers say some act differently. Executives at multiple suppliers, in interviews, said that Hewlett-Packard and others allowed them slightly more profits and other allowances if they were used to improve worker conditions.

“Our suppliers are very open with us,” said Zoe McMahon, an executive in Hewlett-Packard’s supply chain social and environmental responsibility program. “They let us know when they are struggling to meet our expectations, and that influences our decisions.”

The Explosion

On the afternoon of the blast at the iPad plant, Lai Xiaodong telephoned his girlfriend, as he did every day. They had hoped to see each other that evening, but Mr. Lai’s manager said he had to work overtime, he told her.

He had been promoted quickly at Foxconn, and after just a few months was in charge of a team that maintained the machines that polished iPad cases. The sanding area was loud and hazy with aluminum dust. Workers wore masks and earplugs, but no matter how many times they showered, they were recognizable by the slight aluminum sparkle in their hair and at the corners of their eyes.

Just two weeks before the explosion, an advocacy group in Hong Kong published a report warning of unsafe conditions at the Chengdu plant, including problems with aluminum dust. The group, Students and Scholars Against Corporate Misbehavior, or Sacom, had videotaped workers covered with tiny aluminum particles. “Occupational health and safety issues in Chengdu are alarming,” the report read. “Workers also highlight the problem of poor ventilation and inadequate personal protective equipment.”

A copy of that report was sent to Apple. “There was no response,” said Debby Chan Sze Wan of the group. “A few months later I went to Cupertino, and went into the Apple lobby, but no one would meet with me. I’ve never heard from anyone from Apple at all.”

The morning of the explosion, Mr. Lai rode his bicycle to work. The iPad had gone on sale just weeks earlier, and workers were told thousands of cases needed to be polished each day. The factory was frantic, employees said. Rows of machines buffed cases as masked employees pushed buttons. Large air ducts hovered over each station, but they could not keep up with the three lines of machines polishing nonstop. Aluminum dust was everywhere.

Dust is a known safety hazard. In 2003, an aluminum dust explosion in Indiana destroyed a wheel factory and killed a worker. In 2008, agricultural dust inside a sugar factory in Georgia caused an explosion that killed 14.

Two hours into Mr. Lai’s second shift, the building started to shake, as if an earthquake was under way. There was a series of blasts, plant workers said.

Then the screams began.

When Mr. Lai’s colleagues ran outside, dark smoke was mixing with a light rain, according to cellphone videos. The toll would eventually count four dead, 18 injured.

At the hospital, Mr. Lai’s girlfriend saw that his skin was almost completely burned away. “I recognized him from his legs, otherwise I wouldn’t know who that person was,” she said.

Eventually, his family arrived. Over 90 percent of his body had been seared. “My mom ran away from the room at the first sight of him. I cried. Nobody could stand it,” his brother said. When his mother eventually returned, she tried to avoid touching her son, for fear that it would cause pain.

“If I had known,” she said, “I would have grabbed his arm, I would have touched him.”

“He was very tough,” she said. “He held on for two days.”

After Mr. Lai died, Foxconn workers drove to Mr. Lai’s hometown and delivered a box of ashes. The company later wired a check for about $150,000.

Foxconn, in a statement, said that at the time of the explosion the Chengdu plant was in compliance with all relevant laws and regulations, and “after ensuring that the families of the deceased employees were given the support they required, we ensured that all of the injured employees were given the highest quality medical care.” After the explosion, the company added, Foxconn immediately halted work in all polishing workshops, and later improved ventilation and dust disposal, and adopted technologies to enhance worker safety.

In its most recent supplier responsibility report, Apple wrote that after the explosion, the company contacted “the foremost experts in process safety” and assembled a team to investigate and make recommendations to prevent future accidents.

In December, however, seven months after the blast that killed Mr. Lai, another iPad factory exploded, this one in Shanghai. Once again, aluminum dust was the cause, according to interviews and Apple’s most recent supplier responsibility report. That blast injured 59 workers, with 23 hospitalized.

“It is gross negligence, after an explosion occurs, not to realize that every factory should be inspected,” said Nicholas Ashford, the occupational safety expert, who is now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “If it were terribly difficult to deal with aluminum dust, I would understand. But do you know how easy dust is to control? It’s called ventilation. We solved this problem over a century ago.”

In its most recent supplier responsibility report, Apple wrote that while the explosions both involved combustible aluminum dust, the causes were different. The company declined, however, to provide details. The report added that Apple had now audited all suppliers polishing aluminum products and had put stronger precautions in place. All suppliers have initiated required countermeasures, except one, which remains shut down, the report said.

For Mr. Lai’s family, questions remain. “We’re really not sure why he died,” said Mr. Lai’s mother, standing beside a shrine she built near their home. “We don’t understand what happened.”

Hitting the Apple Lottery

Every year, as rumors about Apple’s forthcoming products start to emerge, trade publications and Web sites begin speculating about which suppliers are likely to win the Apple lottery. Getting a contract from Apple can lift a company’s value by millions because of the implied endorsement of manufacturing quality. But few companies openly brag about the work: Apple generally requires suppliers to sign contracts promising they will not divulge anything, including the partnership.

That lack of transparency gives Apple an edge at keeping its plans secret. But it also has been a barrier to improving working conditions, according to advocates and former Apple executives.

This month, after numerous requests by advocacy and news organizations, including The New York Times, Apple released the names of 156 of its suppliers. In the report accompanying that list, Apple said they “account for more than 97 percent of what we pay to suppliers to manufacture our products.”

However, the company has not revealed the names of hundreds of other companies that do not directly contract with Apple, but supply the suppliers. The company’s supplier list does not disclose where factories are, and many are hard to find. And independent monitoring organizations say when they have tried to inspect Apple’s suppliers, they have been barred from entry — on Apple’s orders, they have been told.

“We’ve had this conversation hundreds of times,” said a former executive in Apple’s supplier responsibility group. “There is a genuine, companywide commitment to the code of conduct. But taking it to the next level and creating real change conflicts with secrecy and business goals, and so there’s only so far we can go.” Former Apple employees say they were generally prohibited from engaging with most outside groups.

“There’s a real culture of secrecy here that influences everything,” the former executive said.

Some other technology companies operate differently.

“We talk to a lot of outsiders,” said Gary Niekerk, director of corporate citizenship at Intel. “The world’s complex, and unless we’re dialoguing with outside groups, we miss a lot.”

Given Apple’s prominence and leadership in global manufacturing, if the company were to radically change its ways, it could overhaul how business is done. “Every company wants to be Apple,” said Sasha Lezhnev at the Enough Project, a group focused on corporate accountability. “If they committed to building a conflict-free iPhone, it would transform technology.”

But ultimately, say former Apple executives, there are few real outside pressures for change. Apple is one of the most admired brands. In a national survey conducted by The New York Times in November, 56 percent of respondents said they couldn’t think of anything negative about Apple. Fourteen percent said the worst thing about the company was that its products were too expensive. Just 2 percent mentioned overseas labor practices.

People like Ms. White of Harvard say that until consumers demand better conditions in overseas factories — as they did for companies like Nike and Gap, which today have overhauled conditions among suppliers — or regulators act, there is little impetus for radical change. Some Apple insiders agree.

“You can either manufacture in comfortable, worker-friendly factories, or you can reinvent the product every year, and make it better and faster and cheaper, which requires factories that seem harsh by American standards,” said a current Apple executive.

“And right now, customers care more about a new iPhone than working conditions in China.”

Gu Huini contributed research.
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LTE-Advanced is the future, but no rocket ship | View Clip
01/26/2012
IDG News Service – San Francisco Bureau
LTE-Advanced is the future, but no rocket ship
The newly approved mobile standard is expected to help carriers maintain reliable LTE performance
Stephen Lawson

The 4G network standards approved last week by the ITU may improve the mobile data experience soon, even if consumers don’t actually see the 100M bps mobile speed for which they were designed.

The International Telecommunication Union gave its seal of approval to the two new standards, LTE-Advanced and WirelessMAN-Advanced, at the ITU Radiocommunication Assembly in Geneva last Wednesday. WirelessMAN-Advanced, the second generation of WiMax, is not expected to be widely deployed. But LTE-Advanced, the next version of the Long-Term Evolution standard chosen by most carriers moving to 4G, could start improving mobile networks soon.

What the ITU technically did last week was to certify the two network specifications as IMT-Advanced, or officially 4G (fourth generation). When it originally planned for 4G, the successor to the 3G technologies that started to be deployed early in the past decade, the ITU insisted the next-generation networks be able to deliver 100M bps (bits per second) downstream with high mobility and 1G bps from one location.

After the slower WiMax, LTE and even HSPA+ technologies started to be called 4G, the agency loosened its definition. But its goals for IMT-Advanced stayed in place.

Consumers shouldn’t look for 100M bps when the first carriers start implementing LTE-Advanced, probably later this year. In most cases, it won’t even bring a speed increase like the move from 3G to LTE did. But the new standard should improve the wireless experience, according to industry analysts.

The upgrade to LTE Advanced, which most carriers will do gradually, will basically help them add lanes to a highway, said analyst Monica Paolini of Senza Fili Consulting. Drivers don’t necessarily go faster on a multilane highway, but the additional lanes are needed if more drivers want to go full speed in the future. “Capacity might not be an issue today, but it is going to become an issue pretty soon,” she said.

The LTE-Advanced standard is actually made up of several components, of which service providers can use some or all, said analyst Peter Jarich of Current Analysis. These include aggregation of separate spectrum bands, better integration between small and large cells, the use of four or more antennas in a device, and relay devices at the edges of cells.

Jarich expects most service providers to start out with LTE-Advanced by combining frequencies and adding more antennas. So-called “carrier aggregation” allows an operator to build up a big chunk of spectrum virtually, out of frequencies spread around the spectrum band. LTE already uses MIMO (multiple-in, multiple-out) antenna systems, but only with two antennas per device. LTE-Advanced will allow for four or more antennas, potentially boosting speed and reliability. However, it’s not clear how many antennas may ultimately fit in a smartphone, Jarich said.

Heterogeneous networking is another promising tool in the new standard, Jarich said. It includes mechanisms to make conventional macro cells work better with the smaller cells now being developed to better serve crowded and indoor areas. For example, it could prevent subscribers from being bounced back and forth between large and small cells because of small differences in power between them, he said.

Though all these features may add up to the potential for a true 100M bps mobile service, it’s not clear that carriers could build one or that subscribers even need it. Analyst Phil Marshall of Tolaga Research estimated it would take 50MHz of spectrum to deliver that much speed. To put that in perspective, Verizon Wireless uses just 10MHz each for its upstream and downstream channels today.

With most mobile applications, users couldn’t even see any additional speed beyond 20M bps, said Chetan Sharma, of Chetan Sharma Consulting.

“It’s not like the market is crying for 100M bps,” Sharma said.

Most LTE networks aren’t even heavily loaded yet, because compatible devices haven’t been on the market very long and are still relatively expensive, Marshall said. However, service providers and users may want some of the performance advantages of LTE-Advanced soon, just to preserve or extend the good experience subscribers enjoy now, he said.

“Service providers will rapidly use features of LTE-Advanced that don’t dramatically impact their spectrum or network requirements,” Marshall said. The result may be just the kind of invisible competence that carriers want.

“The speeds will hold better,” Marshall said. “You won’t see as much variation in performance as you move about the network.”
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Obama at Intel: America, make more stuff | View Clip
01/26/2012
CNET News.com
Obama at Intel: America, make more stuff
by Brooke Crothers

President Obama speaking at Intel’s Chandler, Arizona chip plant, now under construction. ‘I’m here because the factory being built behind me is an example of an American that is within our reach…An America where we make stuff and sell stuff all over the world.’

President Obama paid a visit to Intel’s Chandler, Ariz., chip plant today, praising the chipmaker for keeping high-tech manufacturing jobs in the U.S.

Here are some excerpts from his remarks. The event was streamed live at whitehouse.gov.

An America that makes more: “I’m here because the factory being built behind me is an example of an America that is within our reach. An America that attracts that next generation of good manufacturing jobs. An America where we make stuff and sell stuff all over the world…We can’t go back to a economy weakened by outsourcing. And last night in the State of the Union, I laid out a vision of how we move forward. Laid out a blue print of an economy built to last. It’s an economy built on American manufacturing with more good jobs and more products made in America.”

Incentives to create domestic jobs: “This [Intel] project is going to employ thousands of construction workers [and] when this project is finished, Intel will employ about a thousand men and woman making the computer chips that power everything from your smartphone to your laptop to your car. As an American, I’m proud of companies like Intel that create jobs here. We have a huge opportunity to create more high-tech manufacturing jobs in the United States and bring back some of these jobs from overseas but we’re going to have to seize the moment.”

Obama continued. “That starts with changing our tax system. Right now, companies get all kinds of tax breaks when they move jobs and companies overseas but when a company chooses to stay in America, it gets hit with one of the highest tax rates in the world. That doesn’t make sense. Let’s stop rewarding business that ship jobs overseas, let’s reward companies that are investing and creating jobs right here in the United States of America…What we should do is subsidize and give tax breaks to companies that are investing here. High tech manufacturers like Intel. Today my administration is laying out several concrete actions we could take right now that would discourage companies from outsourcing jobs and encourage them to invest in the United States.”

U.S. auto industry: “It starts with manufacturing…Look what’s happened to the auto industry. On the day I took office it was on the verge of collapse. Some people said we should let it die, but we had a million jobs at stake, and I refused to let that happen. And, so, we said to the auto companies, in exchange for help we’re going to demand responsibility. We’ve got to make sure that industry retools and restructures and that’s what they did. Over the last two years, the entire industry has added 160,000 jobs. GM is No. 1 in the world again, Ford is investing in new plants, Chrysler is on the mend.”

Engineering jobs: “Because [Intel is] supporting science and math education, they’re helping to train new engineers. Paul [Otellini] (who is a member of Obama’s jobs council) is chairing a project initiated through the jobs council. We’re looking to get thousands of new engineers all across America. We can use more engineers.”

Note: One of the cranes in the background (see photo above) is the largest land-based crane in the world and can lift up to 4,000 tons.
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Was the battle over AT&T-Mo a fight worth having? | View Clip
01/26/2012
Giga Om
Was the battle over AT&T-Mo a fight worth having?
By Kevin Fitchard

The government scored a huge victory for consumers when it defeated AT&T’s acquisition of T-Mobile, preserving a wireless landscape with four nationwide competitors. Now that the dust has settled, though, there’s a lingering question in my mind: Was the fight worth it? Would we have been better off if the AT&T-Mo saga never happened, or are we better off that AT&T tried and failed?

It’s easy to reach the former conclusion if you tally up the enormous amounts of time, effort and money AT&T, its allies and its opponents wasted fighting for or against the merger. The Hill reported Monday that AT&T alone spent $20.2 million lobbying lawmakers and regulators in 2011. Operators like Sprint, industry associations like the Rural Cellular Association, and numerous public interest groups also devoted considerable resources to oppose the deal before regulators and in the courts. AT&T-Mo weighed down the Federal Communications Commission’s docket for the greater part of a year, and the U.S. Department of Justice spent taxpayer dollars forming its antitrust case against the carriers.

AT&T and T-Mobile could have directed all of that effort and cash building more 4G networks and expanding the ones they already had. Instead, their consolidation drive actually stymied mobile broadband. Cellular infrastructure maker Ericsson on Wednesday reported a huge drop off in North American revenues for the fourth quarter, largely because AT&T and T-Mobile practically stopped investing in their networks while they waited on the merger’s outcome. Instead of fending off the outsized ambitions of Ma Bell, the FCC could have dealt with any number of pressing regulatory issues on its plate.

Still, I would argue that we gained plenty from having fought that fight. Those gains may not be as tangible as a new network or cash in the bank, but here are three reasons why the merger’s failure shaped the U.S. wireless market for the better:

No. 1: We know what to watch for

I think Sprint CEO Dan Hesse summed it up best in an interview last year right before the merger was killed:

When AT&T announced its intention to take over T-Mobile USA, it made me realize the industry has been gradually moving toward being a duopoly and how tenuous the competitive situation is in the U.S. wireless industry. … [Before the merger was announced] I could see this gradual creep in size and market dominance of the big two—growing gradually each year, though not to the extent that it became alarming. But the attempted acquisition of T-Mobile set off all sorts of alarms and had you step back and notice what’s been happening each year for a number of years.

With four nationwide operators it’s easy to reach the conclusion that we have a vibrant competitive market, but the reality is there hasn’t been such a thing as a ‘Big 4′ in the industry for some time. While Verizon Wireless and AT&T have grown considerably in the last five years, Sprint actually shrank in size and T-Mobile’s growth has been fitful.

As Hesse points out, there is now such a gaping difference in size between the No. 2 and the No. 3 operators, that ‘Big 2′ has become a much better characterization of the industry’s top tier. We may not face quite the duopoly that Hesse claims, but there’s no questioning that AT&T and Verizon wield enormous power. It took AT&T trying to swallow up one of the remaining national carriers for many people, including myself, to realize just how lopsided the market had become.

Regulators, lawmakers and a large part of the public now realize that preserving what remaining competition is left in the U.S. wireless market is vital. Just as AT&T can’t buy T-Mobile, Verizon can’t buy Sprint, and either would face stiff opposition if they tried to pick up a smaller regional operator like MetroPCS or Leap Wireless. And AT&T and Verizon now know better than to try.

No. 2: Regulators have grown fangs

AT&T approached the merger with the attitude it was inevitable, and it appeared to be right until the Justice Department filed its antirust lawsuit on August 31. Much to AT&T’s shock, the government’s free-market cops were in no mood to negotiate. They said the deal was simply anti-competitive and had to be stopped.

The FCC appeared docile at first, but began asserting itself after the DOJ stepped in. In November, the FCC recommended the deal be killed and it released a damning report refuting every single claim AT&T made about the merger’s supposed benefits. When a desperate AT&T tried to play the DOJ and FCC against one another, neither agency fell for the carrier’s tactics. Within a month the deal was dead.

After a decade of nearly unfettered consolidation in the wireless industry, regulators took a huge stand against the most egregious anti-competitive deal of them all, showing AT&T absolutely no deference. What’s more, those regulators don’t appear to be returning to hibernation.

The DOJ is now looking into Verizon’s purchase of the cable companies’ unused 4G spectrum. Normally the Justice Department steers clear of deals only involving the transfer of airwaves, leaving licensing matters to the FCC. In a recent interview, John Hane, an antitrust lawyer with Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, said that we may be witnessing the rebirth of much more aggressive DOJ, one that is willing to examine every telecom deal through a trust-busting lens.

No. 3: Dormant spectrum is finally being put to use

Though AT&T claimed that the U.S. is facing a spectrum crisis, the deplorable fact remains that it and many other operators have been hoarding frequencies for years. AT&T, Verizon and the cable companies won their advanced wireless service (AWS) licenses at auction in 2006 but haven’t built a single commercial cell over those airwaves for six years. Clearwire and Sprint have nearly 100 MHz of unused 2.5 GHz frequencies they’ve owned for a better part of decade.

But as AT&T-Mo died, an astonishing spate of license sales followed. Verizon made a deal with the cable providers to buy their SpectrumCo licenses, giving Big Red a goldmine of 4G airwaves over which it will expand its LTE network. AT&T may have failed in its bid for T-Mobile, but it did land Qualcomm’s 700 MHz FLO TV spectrum, which AT&T has also earmarked for LTE. As part of its break-up fee from AT&T, T-Mobile got a healthy chunk of AT&T’s own AWS licenses, which T-Mobile can put to immediate use in expanding its HSPA+ network.

I do agree with the operators that those airwaves won’t be enough. To meet the colossal demand for mobile broadband, the FCC will have to identify and repurpose hundreds of megahertz of spectrum for 4G use. But the carriers have no business complaining about the oncoming data tsunami when they aren’t using the spectrum they already own. But now it looks like they will be forced to use them. If operators now can no longer buy networks from their competitors, they will have to build them.
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Nokia Names Siilasmaa as Chairman to Replace Retiring Jorma Ollila | View Clip
01/26/2012
Bloomberg BusinessWeek
Nokia Names Siilasmaa as Chairman to Replace Retiring Jorma Ollila
By Diana ben-Aaron

Nokia Oyj (NOK1V) nominated entrepreneur Risto Siilasmaa to succeed Jorma Ollila as chairman, signaling that key decisions at the world’s biggest mobile-phone company by handsets deliveries will stay in Finland.

Siilasmaa, 45, is chairman of security software maker F- Secure Oyj (FSC1V@FH), which he founded, and of telephone company Elisa Oyj. Known in Finland as a representative for entrepreneurs and business investors, he joined Nokia’s board in 2008.

Nokia investors lost more than 60 billion euros ($79 billion) in share value after Apple Inc. leapfrogged it with the iPhone. Siilasmaa will oversee Chief Executive Officer Stephen Elop’s efforts to win customers as Apple and Google Inc. expand into new markets.

Ollila, 61, will retire, Nokia said in a statement. As CEO from 1992 to 2006, he transformed Nokia from an industrial conglomerate to the world’s top mobile-phone maker. He has been chairman since 1999. Last year, he replaced hand-picked CEO successor Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo with Elop, a Microsoft executive, to reverse the tailspin.

The fact that Nokia had been eclipsed in smartphones gradually became apparent to shareholders in the three years after the 2007 Apple iPhone introduction. Nokia’s debt ratings were cut last year by Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s on concerns that a turnaround would take too long.

Finnish Startups

An investor in Finnish startups, Siilasmaa may also broker more tie-ups with new companies such as “Angry Birds” maker Rovio Entertainment Ltd.

“I don’t want to leave a fortune to my kids,” Siilasmaa told a panel on startup investment at Aalto University in September. “I want to spend it on startups.”

Siilasmaa started F-Secure, originally called Data Fellows, in 1988 as a student at the Finnish technology institute that is now Aalto University. The company listed shares on the Helsinki stock exchange in 1999, the last major high-tech company to join the stock exchange in the Nordic country.

He owned 39.73 percent of F-Secure as of Dec. 31, according to the company’s website. He has invested in Finnish startups including online shopping portal Fruugo Oy, together with Ollila, and micropayment supplier Ape Payment Oy, and worked with the Finnish government to establish startup incubators.

To contact the reporter on this story: Diana ben-Aaron in Helsinki at dbenaaron1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Kenneth Wong at kwong11@bloomberg.net
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Apple CEO faces first test with cash mountain | View Clip
01/26/2012
Reuters
Apple CEO faces first test with cash mountain
By Poornima Gupta

(Reuters) – Apple CEO Tim Cook has a problem, a $98 billion problem.

Just 18 months ago, Apple’s $46 billion mountain of cash – while huge by most standards – attracted only muted complaints from investors, who did call for a dividend or share buyback, but were mostly happy with the meteoric rise in the stock price.

But with the growing cash balance now a much bigger overhang on the stock, widely considered to be undervalued, investors are clamoring more vocally for Cook to put the money to work.

No one could have foreseen just how quickly that warchest would grow. Indeed, some analysts estimated Apple’s cash holdings would increase to $65 billion at the end of 201l. That it has swelled nearly 50 percent above even those lofty projections is nothing short of awesome.

Apple now has about $104 in cash per share.

But to paraphrase rapper P. Diddy, with more money comes more problems. Apple’s runaway success presents Cook with his first real public test as chief executive officer – figuring out what to do with the money.

Apple’s cash balance is now a quarter of its $415 billion market capitalization and roughly equals California’s 2012-2013 state budget. And even though $64 billion of Apple’s cash is overseas – meaning it will have to pay a hefty tax to bring it into the United States – calls for a dividend on Wall Street grew louder after the company said on Tuesday it was in “active discussions” internally on what to do with the money.

Wall Street is strongly in favor of Apple returning the money to shareholders through buybacks or dividends, even if it is only a one-time deal. But the ultra-conservative company, which typically ignores Wall Street, gave no clues about that during its earnings call on Tuesday.

“They are clearly trying to signal that they are not ignoring the issue,” said Michael Holt, an analyst with Morningstar. “It doesn’t mean that a decision is imminent.”

Others, however, are convinced a dividend will be paid this year.

“With Apple stating that it is ‘actively’ pursuing its options with regards to its cash balance, we believe the commentary may be setting itself up for a cash dividend in FY12,” Ticonderoga Securities analyst Brian White said, raising his target on the stock to $666.

Katy Huberty, an analyst with Morgan Stanley, echoed White’s view, saying: “Apple appears committed to making a decision on cash return in the near-term and we continue to believe a dividend makes the most sense.”

Some big technology companies have started paying a dividend to help allay investor concerns about slowing growth by returning part of their ample cash holdings. Cisco Systems Inc began paying a dividend last year, while Microsoft Corp started in 2003.

FAR TOO MUCH MONEY

Apple stock gained 25 percent in 2011, adding about $77 billion to its market cap and it touched an all-time high of $454.45 on Wednesday. Some continue to bank on a share-price rise to as high as $700.

The company’s core business is throwing off massive amounts of cash every quarter – Apple recorded a $16 billion increase in cash sequentially – in part because of its reluctance to pay a dividend or buy back stock and its limited acquisition history.

The company earned a mere 0.77 percent on its cash and investments in fiscal 2011, mostly due to its preference for safe, but low-yielding U.S. Treasury and agency debt.

This is a tad higher than the 0.75 percent it earned in fiscal 2010, but down from 1.43 percent in fiscal 2009, 3.44 percent in 2008 and 5.27 percent in 2007.

Fiscal prudence has long been part of Apple’s mantra and the Cupertino, California-based company runs a tight ship with total revenue rising 66 percent in fiscal 2011, but operating expenses rising only 37 percent.

For now, Apple’s Chief Financial Officer, Peter Oppenheimer, has veered away from his usual script, which was to tell Wall Street that Apple has always had internal discussions on the best use of its cash, with capital preservation being key.

He characterized these discussion as “active” on Tuesday.

“We recognize that the cash is growing for all the right reasons,” Oppenheimer said, but added he had nothing to announce. “In the meantime, we’re not letting it burn a hole in our pockets.”

Oppenheimer also suggested that Apple might invest in its supply chain or make acquisitions. But Apple has typically preferred to acquire small companies, which has had little or no material impact on its results so far.

Apple’s major expense last year was paying the lion’s share to acquire – along with Microsoft and a few other companies – the patent portfolio of bankrupt telecommunications company Nortel for $4.5 billion.

Apple said it spent $4.3 billion in fiscal 2011 to acquire “property, plant and equipment,” $3.2 billion in “acquisition of intangible assets” and $244 million in “payments made in connection with business acquisitions,” according to its annual regulatory filing.

That is in sharp contrast to rivals such as Google Inc, which is acquiring Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion in cash, and which completed 54 acquisitions during the first nine months of last year alone. The company’s $44.6 billion warchest of cash and investments at the end of December was far lower than Apple’s.

Google has also resisted pressure to announce a dividend or buy back stock.

Apple may do the same in the next few months, said Michael Walkley, an analyst with Canaccord Genuity.

“We believe Apple is likely to announce a dividend during 2012, potentially next quarter when crossing $100 billion in cash and cash equivalents,” Walkley said. “We view this as very bullish for investors, as we believe a new group of investors seeking dividends would invest in Apple and drive shares higher.”

(Reporting By Poornima Gupta; editing by Andre Grenon)
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Ericsson would consider buying Nokia Siemens assets – CFO | View Clip
01/26/2012
Total Telecom Online
Ericsson would consider buying Nokia Siemens assets – CFO
By Nick Wood, Total Telecom

Jan Frykhammar says company has responsibility to shareholders to identify assets that ‘can add value’ to company.

Ericsson CFO Jan Frykhammar revealed to Total Telecom this week that the company would consider acquiring assets from rival Nokia Siemens Networks – provided they were up for sale.

“If they put out assets for sale and there comes official processes, I think our responsibility… is – if we are invited to have a look – [to] look at them,” he said on the sidelines of Ericsson’s fourth quarter results presentation on Wednesday.

“If we see that an asset can add value to our company we consider acquiring it,” he continued, citing recent examples including Ericsson’s $1.15 billion purchase of Telcordia in June 2011 and its participation in the consortium that bought Nortel’s patent portfolio a month later for $4.5 billion.

A GigaOM report on Wednesday also linked the Swedish kit vendor with a move for Canadian WiFi specialist BelAir networks.

However, Frykhammar insisted Ericsson is not specifically planning to buy parts of NSN.

“As a leadership team we do not speculate on consolidation,” he said. “If assets are available we look at them; whether we go and acquire assets, that’s completely different.”

Nokia Siemens Networks in November announced plans to refocus the business entirely on mobile broadband and divest or manage for value any assets that fall outside that remit. The move will see 17,000 jobs cut in a bid to reduce costs by €1 billion.

So far NSN has offloaded its WiMAX business to Skyview Capital-owned NewNet Communication Technologies, and its fixed broadband access division to network specialist Adtran for undisclosed fees.
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Apple Q1 results show why the iPhone doesn’t have LTE–yet | View Clip
01/25/2012
Ars Technica
Apple Q1 results show why the iPhone doesn’t have LTE—yet
By Chris Foresman

Apple released its iPhone 4S without high-speed LTE capabilities amidst a sea of high-profile LTE Android handsets. While technophiles complained about lack of support for the next-generation wireless standard, there are multiple reasons Apple has so far shied away from the technology. Poor battery life and lack of a suitable baseband processor to fit the iPhone’s form factor are two reasons that have been cited by Apple in the past. But the company’s most recent financial results offer another clear reason: the majority of iPhones sold today are in areas without 4G networks of any kind.

The US has one of the only significant LTE rollouts in the world. A few major cities in Canada, Sweden, and Saudi Arabia account for most of the rest of the global LTE network availability. Nearly all of Europe, Asia, South America, Africa, and Australia lack any LTE service outside of tiny test markets.

After looking at Apple’s results for its fiscal first quarter of 2012, there’s no question that the iPhone continues to be a success. The company sold a record 37 million handsets—as much as the two previous quarters combined, including the record 20 million sold in fiscal third quarter 2011. A large majority of those iPhones were sold outside the US.

Comparing Apple’s revenue sources for the past two years, you can see that the iPhone is critical to Apple’s bottom line.
Data: Apple financial resultsWho would an LTE iPhone benefit?
According to fourth quarter 2011 results, AT&T activated 4.1 million iPhones, while Verizon activated 4.2 million. Sprint would not disclose the number of iPhones it activated last quarter, but we feel safe in assuming that number is less than 4 million. Assuming Sprint was able to activate (perhaps a generous) 2 million or so iPhones, only a little over a quarter of iPhones were sold in the US. The other three-quarters, then, are sold in areas with practically no LTE coverage.

Considering the US market alone, only Verizon has LTE service available to most of its customers. AT&T very recently turned on its first round of LTE towers in a few major US cities, though it will be well to the end of 2012 before its LTE network closes in on Verizon’s. Sprint has a large 4G WiMAX footprint, but that is incompatible with the technology behind LTE. The company announced earlier this month that it would begin rolling out LTE in limited markets by the first half of 2012.

Since roughly less than half of US iPhone users would even have the chance of getting LTE reception, at most 15 percent or less of iPhone users globally could take advantage of 4G speeds. Though Apple has been known to occasionally make separate devices for different markets—for instance, you could get an iPhone 3GS without WiFi in China, or an iPhone 4S without a camera in Singapore—the company generally prefers to stick to a single device configuration whenever possible. So far, it just hasn’t been practical to include LTE hardware in the iPhone when only a small fraction of users could benefit from it.

LTE iPhone sooner than later
Still, that doesn’t mean other factors won’t come into play that could bring LTE to the iPhone later this year or early next year. Qualcomm, Apple’s current baseband supplier of choice, has new versions of chips with integrated LTE support coming this year. Similar in design to the chips currently in use in the iPhone 4S and iPad 2, the MDM9615 supports LTE category 3, HSPA+, and EV-DO rev B high-speed wireless networks. It’s also manufactured on a 28nm process, offering significant size and power consumption advantages over existing single or multi-chip solutions.

The MDM9615 is supposed to be available in quantity to OEMs in this first quarter of 2012, so it’s possible that chip could make it into a next-generation iPad expected around March or April, as well as a next-generation iPhone likely targeted for late summer or early fall.

Since the US will still be the only major LTE market throughout 2012, Apple might rely on one of two other possible strategies for LTE adoption. It may make iPhones using the newer Qualcomm chip specifically for the US and perhaps some of the few other LTE markets later this year. iPhones for the rest of the world may still use a chip that only includes compatibility with HSPA+ and EV-DO networks.

Alternately, Apple may hold out for greater LTE adoption among its carrier partners. This is similar to the situation with the original iPhone—that device launched with support for relatively slow 2G EDGE networks in 2007 instead of the faster, 3G UMTS networks more popular outside the US. As the iPhone became available globally, Apple added support for the faster standard in the iPhone 3G one year later. In this scenario, Apple may wait for a third-generation MDM9×25 series baseband chips from Qualcomm slated for 2013.

Though LTE has been seen as a competitive advantage for Android-based smartphones, the iPhone’s lack of LTE compatibility clearly hasn’t slowed down its brisk sales clip. Apple CEO Tim Cook claimed during Apple’s quarterly analyst call on Tuesday that the company could have sold even more iPhones if it could keep up with demand. However, Apple won’t be able to ignore LTE forever, particularly in the US. Where exactly the tipping point lies is uncertain, but we’re betting on sooner rather than later.
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Google’s Superphone Delivers Ultimate Android: Rich Jaroslovsky | View Clip
01/25/2012
Bloomberg BusinessWeek
Google’s Superphone Delivers Ultimate Android: Rich Jaroslovsky

For the last couple of years, Google has reserved the “Nexus” label for smartphones that provide the purest experience of its Android operating system. Meanwhile, Samsung (005930) has used the “Galaxy” brand on its top-of- the-line mobile devices.

So what do you get when you marry the two and put the result on the best 4G network? The Galaxy Nexus, a superphone that is still somehow a little less than the sum of its considerable parts.

The Galaxy Nexus, which costs $299 on a two-year contract from Verizon Wireless, is the first device to ship with Android 4.0, or in Google’s dessert-based nomenclature, “Ice Cream Sandwich.” It is supposed to blend the separate cell-phone (“Froyo,” “Gingerbread”) and tablet (“Honeycomb”) flavors of Android’s operating systems.

The idea is to simplify things both for developers, who otherwise have to worry that apps written for one version of Android won’t run on another, and for consumers, giving them a similar experience no matter what kind of device they’re using. Apple (AAPL), not surprisingly, set the bar here with one operating system — iOS — running iPads, iPhones and iPod Touches.

Lard-Free
The Nexus phone is mercifully free from the proprietary user interfaces and apps that manufacturers and carriers often lard atop Android. And Ice Cream Sandwich brings some welcome enhancements.

Physical buttons are out. In their place are on-screen back, home and recent-apps controls that rotate along with the display when you turn the phone into portrait mode. You can also create folders of apps by stacking them one atop the other, and — as on Honeycomb tablets — summon thumbnail images of open apps with the recent button. If you see one you don’t need, a sideways finger flick dismisses it.

One major innovation isn’t so successful: Face Unlock, which theoretically allows you to unlock your phone simply by holding it up to your face and letting it recognize you. It’s a neat trick when it works, but I repeatedly got error messages telling me I couldn’t be recognized. Take it from me: Few things in technology are as depressing as being rejected by your own phone.

Insecure
Some users, meanwhile, have reported being able to fool the feature by holding up a photo of themselves; even Google (GOOG) warns during the set-up process that Face Unlock is less secure than other ways of protecting your phone.

As for the Galaxy Nexus hardware, it’s handsome without being particularly distinctive. The nicest feature is the big 4.65-inch screen that, typically for Samsung devices, is absolutely gorgeous, with deep blacks and ultra-rich colors. My main complaint was the automatic-brightness level, which is supposed to adjust to ambient light but that I found consistently too dim for my tastes. Eventually, I went into the settings and disabled it.

Under the hood is a dual-core Texas Instruments (TXN) processor, plus a gigabyte of memory and 32 gigs of storage. There are also 1.3-megapixel front and 5-megapixel rear-facing cameras, and it shoots video in full 1080p high-definition. The whole package is still only a third of an inch thick and weighs about 4.8 ounces.

Power Outage
In the U.S., the Galaxy Nexus runs on Verizon (VZ)’s LTE 4G network. LTE is the fastest network technology, and Verizon has the broadest coverage. But there’s a catch: LTE also gobbles battery life. I’ve generally found that Samsung does the best job among LTE handset-makers in managing power. But I’d be tempted to take advantage of the fact that — unlike iPhones — the Galaxy Nexus’s battery is user-replaceable, and carry a spare.

A version of the phone is also in the works for Sprint (S), which will start rolling out LTE this year. A model with 16 gigabytes of storage and using HSPA+ — yet another network technology — is available in other nations where LTE isn’t widespread. Carriers offering this version of the phone include Vodafone (VOD) and Telefonica (TEF)’s O2.

Because of Google’s open-to-all-manufacturers approach, it’s hard for any Android phone to match the seamlessness of an iPhone, Research In Motion (RIM)’s BlackBerry or even devices running Microsoft (MSFT)’s Windows Phone 7. Perhaps that will change after Google takes control of handset-maker Motorola Mobility Holdings (MMI). Until then, the Galaxy Nexus comes closer than anything yet to providing the definitive Android experience.

(Rich Jaroslovsky is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.)

To contact the reporter on this story: Rich Jaroslovsky in San Francisco at rjaroslovsky@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Manuela Hoelterhoff at mhoelterhoff@bloomberg.net.
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H-P Reveals Details Of WebOS Plan | View Clip
01/25/2012
Wall Street Journal – San Francisco Bureau
H-P Reveals Details Of WebOS Plan
By Ben Worthen

Hewlett-Packard took a step towards following through on its promise to make webOS, its operating system for mobile devices, available for free to any programmer who wants to use it.

The technology giant on Wednesday said it would make a program for writing apps that can run on different devices available immediately this way, known in tech circles as open source, and that webOS itself would be available by the end of September.

H-P also laid out certain milestones it intends to hit between now and then, and specified that it would make the software available using the Apache open-source model.

Bill Veghte, H-P’s chief strategy officer, said the timeline would help drive interest in webOS, a widely praised technology that was a commercial failure. “Some people were interested but they wanted to see a timeline, see a license, and see what we were going to release first,” he said.

Veghte also stressed that H-P unveiled its plans for webOS just 47 days after it first said it would make it open source. (Expect a lot of talk about execution and following through on commitments from H-P moving forward, as it looks to be an early theme of new Chief Executive Meg Whitman’s tenure.)

WebOS still has an uphill battle to be relevant, as it trails in market share to several other mobile operating systems. H-P’s move to make it open source is an effort to let developers carve out a niche for it, something H-P was unable to do on its own.

It isn’t yet clear how H-P will benefit from making webOS available this way, even if it does become popular. Veghte said that isn’t the primary concern right now and that it is “too early to tell” how H-P will make money from the effort. Over time, however, he expects a business model to present itself.
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New RIM CEO eyes consumer push | View Clip
01/25/2012
Reuters – Toronto Bureau
New RIM CEO eyes consumer push

The new Chief Executive of Research in Motion Ltd plans to reorganize the company’s marketing in order to do a better job at promoting its products to consumers.

Thorsten Heins told analysts on Monday that reaching beyond the corporate smartphone market to consumers will be particularly important in the U.S. market, where RIM’s BlackBerry smartphone has lost ground to rivals like the Apple Inc’s iPhone.

RIM announced on Sunday that Heins would take over as CEO from founders and Co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie.

(Reporting By Alastair Sharp and Sinead Carew; Editing by Gerald E. McCormick)
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At this past CES, rare demos of Augmented Reality (AR) implementations failed to attract much attention. There are many reasons for the fading interest in AR on mobile devices. Reviewers quote numerous technical problems with “live view” class encoding; 3D scene generation is the major obstacle on par with the inclusion of AR functionality being a daunting task even for the most powerful quad-core SoCs (think Tegra 3).

However, Qualcomm continues to push AR as a viable tool for bringing their Snapdragons to the front scene. At their presentation on CES 2012, they brought no less a character than Grover himself on stage to show off a toy called the Sesame Street Playset, a basic set of toys that works with a table and figurines. There’s a chance that in the demo presented for Mobile Review, the HTC Jetstream (Puccini, for some markets) tablet was used. However, the HTC Jetsream-looking case could be used fo Qualcomm’s prototype of their next generation dual and quad-core Snapdragon/Krait processors:

As much amusing and attractive AR-enhanced Grover may look here, this is just one example of the possibilities that Qualcomm’s Vuforia technology presents:

For marketers, Vuforia can drive brand engagement in entirely new ways. Advertising can literally jump off the printed page. Product packaging can come alive on retail shelves. And once purchased, products themselves can provide enhanced interactivity to provide instructions and drive future sales. See how leading global brands are using Vuforia today.

For developers, Vuforia provides industry-leading technology and performance on a wide range of mobile devices. Vuforia’s computer vision functionality will recognize a variety of 2D and 3D visual targets. With support for iOS, Android, and Unity 3D, Vuforia will allow you to write a single native app that can reach over 400 models of smartphones and tablets.

Vuforia SDK can be downloaded from Qualcomm’s site, so if you are interested to push your product in rare hyper-reality space, you can start your AR project today.

We wrote about using elements of AR in gaming before. Namely, we suggested using Google’s Street View as a scenery for Bethesda’s highly popular Skyrim. Vuforia by Qualcomm could be very a useful tool too.
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LG Optimus LTE smartphone grabs 1 million in sales | View Clip
01/25/2012
CNET.com
LG Optimus LTE smartphone grabs 1 million in sales
by Lance Whitney

LG has sold more than 1 million of its Optimus LTE smartphones.

LG’s Optimus LTE phone is proving to be a hot seller around the world, racking up more than 1 million in unit sales.

Debuting in South Korea last October, the phone grabbed sales of 600,000 units in its native country during the first three months.

From there, the Optimus LTE traveled to Japan to capture sales of 8,500 units in its first day, then to Canada, and finally to the U.S. where it was rebranded the LG Nitro HD, altogether pulling in more than 400,000 in additional sales to take in a cool million.

The phone is currently selling in North America through three of the major carriers, including AT&T.

Dubbed the world’s first HD LTE smartphone by LG, the Optimus LTE offers a high-definition 1280 x 720 pixel (16:9 aspect ratio) IPS (in-plane switching) display. Composed of 2.76 million sub-pixels, the 4.5-inch True HD screen is touted as delivering sharp clarity and a natural color accuracy.

The phone is currently running Android 2.3 Gingerbread but is slated to receive a bite of Ice Cream Sandwich sometime in the second quarter of 2012.

Beyond its screen, the Optimus LTE is powered by a 1.5 gigaherz dual-core processor, offers an 8-megapixel camera with 1080p HD video capture and playback, and includes a 1,830 mAh battery to provide extra life to handle all of the phone’s multimedia features.

Users will also find an HDMI port and support for DLNA (Digital Living Network Alliance) to play content from the phone through compatible TVs and media systems. And of course, the LTE connectivity provides high-speed access in locations that support it.

“With brisk sales for a high-end smartphone, the Optimus LTE reaffirms LG’s leadership in mobile LTE technology,” LG CEO and President Jong-seok Park said in a statement. “The combination of LTE connectivity with LG’s True HD IPS display has resonated with the public regarding the potential of LTE technology.”
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Core suppliers savor bigger Apple pie | View Clip
01/25/2012
Thomson Reuters – Helsinki
Core suppliers savor bigger Apple pie
Tarmo Virki

(Reuters) – Suppliers basked in the reflection of Apple’s glowing results on Wednesday after the company’s gold standard iPhones and iPads flew off the shelves over the holiday sales season.

Apple’s forecast-beating fourth-quarter figures late on Tuesday helped it to beat Google’s Android as the largest smartphone platform in the United States and to regain the world’s largest smartphone maker spot from Samsung.

Apple’s results were spearheaded by sales of the iPhone 4S, which is packed with technology from British chip designer ARM, said analyst Nick James at Numis.

Apple accounts for about 10 percent of ARM’s technology revenues, and for about 35 percent of graphics and video chip designer Imagination’s technology revenues, he said.

“It means people are still driven by performance in terms of having the highest performance, highest functioning devices, and those tend to have quite a number of ARM-based chips in them.”

“It is one of the key things that drove Imagination to come through to the next level,” James added.

Shares in ARM jumped 4.2 percent, while shares in Imagination were 4.1 percent higher at 1030 GMT.

Analyst Didier Scemama at RBS said that although Apple was only one of many ARM customers — the Cambridge-based company supplies virtually every smartphone and tablet with their cheap designs — from a sentiment standpoint there has been a strong correlation between the two stocks.

“(Apple) should help the whole sector today, but especially Dialog Semiconductor and other suppliers,” said a Frankfurt-based trader.

Shares in Dialog Semi were up 3.9 percent.

OVERTAKING SAMSUNG

Samsung became the world’s largest smartphone maker in the third quarter, but analysts said the 37 million iPhones sold in the fourth quarter should easily beat Samsung’s expected sales of around 30 million.

Samsung is due to report on Friday.

Research firm Kantar Worldpanel ComTech said Apple’s share of the U.S. market doubled from a year ago to 44.9 percent in the October to December period, just beating the total for Android smartphones, which slipped to 44.8 percent from 50 percent.

“Overall, Apple sales are now growing at a faster rate than Android across the nine countries we cover,” said Dominic Sunnebo, global consumer insight director at the research firm.

Apple’s iPhone 4S also uses chips from Samsung Electronics, Qualcomm, Toshiba and a host of smaller semiconductor companies, including TriQuint, Skyworks Solutions and Avago Technologies Inc.

In stark contrast to Apple’s success, sales of handset makers using Android, including Motorola Mobility, HTC and Sony Ericsson, have stumbled in the quarter.

(Reporting By Tarmo Virki, Paul Sandle and Harro ten Wolde; Editing by Will Waterman)
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Ericsson Profit Plummets | View Clip
01/25/2012
International Herald Tribune – Berlin
Ericsson Profit Plummets
By KEVIN J. O’BRIEN

BERLIN — Ericsson, the market leader in wireless networking equipment, said on Wednesday that its profit plummeted 66 percent in the fourth quarter amid losses at its SonyEricsson and Swiss handset chip ventures.

The company, based in Stockholm, also said that sales slowed in the United States, partly because of the aborted merger of AT&T Mobility with T-Mobile U.S.A.

Net profit at Ericsson fell to 1.5 billion Swedish krona, or $235.3 million, from 4.4 billion krona a year earlier. Sales rose 1 percent to 63.7 billion krona from 62.8 billion krona.

Sales at Ericsson’s business of managing telephone networks for operators rose 18 percent, helping to offset a 9 percent decline in its biggest business of selling network equipment.

Hans Vestberg, the Ericsson chief executive, said profit fell amid restrained spending by operators in the United States, India and Russia — markets that had been growing quickly.

The company also had to absorb a 1.9 billion krona loss caused mostly by ongoing problems at SonyEricsson, which makes handsets, and ST-Ericsson, a joint venture with the French chipmaker ST Microelectronics.

SonyEricsson, which Ericsson is in the process of selling to Sony, had a loss of €207 million, or $269 million, in the quarter, after an €8 million profit a year earlier.

ST-Ericsson, a Geneva-based unit that makes hardware and software components for cellphones, lost $231 million, more than a $177 million loss a year earlier.

“Our joint ventures had a very bad fourth quarter,” Mr. Vestberg said at a conference with financial analysts in Stockholm. “We are seeing operators being cautious in 2012. If that leads to lower sales, we can’t say at this point. But it may take longer to make decisions.”

Shares of Ericsson fell as much as 13 percent in morning trading in Stockholm.

Hakan Wranne, an analyst at Swedbank in Stockholm, said Ericsson’s struggling joint ventures, plus the U.S. market slowdown, caused the sharper-than-expected decline in profit.

Mr. Vestberg, the Ericsson chief executive, said AT&T and T-Mobile deferred buying network equipment as they sought to merge their businesses. After nine months, the operators abandoned the plan in December amid opposition from U.S. regulators and lawmakers.

“Ericsson had had fantastic, high-margin sales in the United States with Verizon and AT&T,” Mr. Wranne said in an interview. “But those started to shrink in the third quarter and all but went away in the fourth quarter. That was good money in high-margin investment that disappeared in a bigger way than we had expected.”

Ericsson said sales in North America fell 27 percent in the quarter from a year earlier.

Mr. Vestberg, at the conference with analysts, said operators in India virtually halted their purchases of network equipment amid economic uncertainty.

Nevertheless, demand among consumers globally for mobile broadband services and devices keeps growing, Mr. Vestberg said. The only question, he added, is whether operators will still make needed purchases at some point during 2012, or put them off until later years.

“At this point, we cannot answer that,” Mr. Vestberg said.

The loss at SonyEricsson, a venture that Ericsson created with the Japanese consumer electronics maker in 2001, will not affect Ericsson’s plans to complete the sale of its 50-percent stake back to Sony in February, Mr. Vestberg said.

Ericsson in October said it had reached agreement to sell its stake in the venture to Sony for $1.47 billion.

“This will not affect the price,” Mr. Vestberg said, referring to the handset maker’s fourth-quarter loss. He added that Ericsson would probably end up reporting less capital gain from the sale, however.

With ST-Ericsson, the handset component venture, Mr. Vestberg said Ericsson had was reviewing the company’s business strategy and intended to return the venture to profitability “as soon as possible.”

“But it will take some time,” Mr. Vestberg said, without being more specific.
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Apple’s Profit Doubles on Holiday iPhone 4S Sales | View Clip
01/25/2012
New York Times, The
Apple’s Profit Doubles on Holiday iPhone 4S Sales
An Apple store in San Francisco. The new iPhone 4S and the iPad were wildly popular in the last quarter of 2011.
By NICK WINGFIELD

It turns out Apple didn’t need an iPhone 5 to bolster sales.

The company reported on Tuesday that its profit for the holiday quarter more than doubled. And that was largely thanks to sales of the iPhone 4S, which, when it was introduced in October, was greeted with grumbling from pundits and some users for lacking the razzle-dazzle that many imagined an iPhone 5 would bring.

But consumers still came out in droves to buy the iPhone 4S, helping the company sell more than double the number of iPhones for the quarter ending Dec. 31 than it did a year ago, a figure that was also lifted by sales of cheap, older models of Apple’s cellphone.

With the 37 million iPhones that customers snapped up over the holidays, Apple has sold 183 million of the devices since the product went on sale in 2007. Revenue from the iPhone and iPad — neither of which could be bought five years ago — now accounts for 72 percent of Apple’s total revenue, underscoring the transformation of the company.

And although phones based on Google’s Android operating system had been gaining more customers in recent years, Apple has begun to chip away at some of the advantages of these phones, narrowing Android’s lead in the United States over the holidays.

In a conference call with Wall Street analysts, Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, described the customer response to the new iPhone as “breathtaking” and said the company could not meet global demand for the device despite producing a record number of iPhones. “As it turns out, we didn’t bet high enough,” Mr. Cook said.

The supporting act in Apple’s product lineup — the iPad — also had a record quarter, with the company selling 15.4 million of its tablet devices over the holidays, more than double the number it sold during the same period the year before.

After watching competitors stumble for the last two years, Apple faced its first credible competition in the tablet computer category this fall when Amazon introduced the Kindle Fire. The $199 device from the Internet retailer is significantly cheaper than the $499 starting price for the iPad and is closely linked to various Amazon online offerings including its e-book store, movie and music services.

Mr. Cook said Apple’s iPad sales were not hurt by Amazon’s Kindle products, which have less computing power and are missing features like cameras for now. “Customers will buy those and they’ll sell a fair number of units,” he said. “But I don’t think people who want iPads will settle for limited functions.”

The rosy results sent Apple shares soaring more than 7 percent in after-hours trading to more than $450 each. The jump increased the total value of Apple’s shares to more than $426 billion, pushing its market value past that of Exxon Mobil and making it the most highly valued company.

Apple, which is based in Cupertino, Calif., said its net income for the period rose 118 percent to $13.06 billion, or $13.87 a share, compared with net income of $6 billion, or $6.43 a share, a year earlier. Revenue rose 73 percent to $46.33 billion, from $26.74 billion a year ago. Apple’s results were inflated slightly because its 2011 holiday quarter included 14 weeks of sales, rather than the 13 weeks in 2010, because of a change by the company.

The results were better than the $10.08 a share in earnings and $38.85 billion in revenue expected by analysts, according to a poll by Thomson Reuters. Apple had forecast earnings of $9.30 a share and $37 billion for the quarter.

“It almost defies words in terms of the strength across all products,” said Toni Sacconaghi, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein & Company. “Everything about it eclipsed even the wildest expectations of analysts.”

Apple said it sold 5.2 million Macintoshes during the holiday quarter, 26 percent more than it did a year earlier.

The performance of Apple’s iPhone business underscores how the company has thrived in the mobile phone market, even as Google steadily nibbled away at the iPhone’s share of smartphones in recent years with handsets based on the Android operating system.

Not only are Android phones made by a wide array of manufacturers, they have had wider distribution on carrier networks. The iPhone was initially limited to AT&T’s network in the United States and exclusive relationships with other carriers elsewhere in the world.

But the iPhone is now available on the three largest wireless networks in the United States, with the addition of Sprint in the fall. And after it introduced the iPhone 4S, Apple also made its older iPhone 4 available for $99 and iPhone 3GS free with contracts through wireless carriers. Analysts say they think the move expanded the audience of potential iPhone buyers beyond people willing to spend $199 for Apple’s latest model of smartphone.

There are signs that Apple’s strategy helped narrow Android’s lead in the market over the holidays. Nielsen, the audience measurement firm, said in a recent report that 61.6 percent of United States smartphone consumers surveyed in October said they had gotten an Android phone within the last three months, while only 25.1 percent got an iPhone.

By December, though, Android’s lead among people who had acquired a smartphone recently had narrowed to 46.9 percent while 44.5 percent of consumers said they had bought an iPhone, Nielsen said. About 57 percent of iPhone owners in December said they got the new iPhone 4S, while the rest, 43 percent, got older iPhones.

The iPhone 4S was initially derided by some critics for offering little improvement on the iPhone 4, with none of the bold outward design changes that make it easy for cellphone users to brag about owning the latest Apple gizmo. On the inside, though, the product has a better camera, faster microprocessor and a virtual assistant called Siri that lets people dictate texts and do Web searches with voice commands.

Apple said it expects to report earnings of $8.50 a share and revenue of about $32.5 billion during the fiscal second quarter.

Apple’s cash and securities ballooned to nearly $100 billion, an eye-popping sum that is likely to revive calls for Apple to return some of the hoard to investors in the form of stock buybacks and dividends. Peter Oppenheimer, Apple’s chief financial officer, told analysts that the company and its board of directors are “actively discussing” uses of the cash, including potential acquisitions and further investments in the company’s supply chain.

“We’re not letting it burn a hole in our pockets,” he said.
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Yahoo’s Income Drops 5% in Struggle for Market Share | View Clip
01/25/2012
New York Times – San Francisco Bureau, The
Yahoo’s Income Drops 5% in Struggle for Market Share
By NICOLE PERLROTH

SAN FRANCISCO — Investors hoping for any hint of what is next for Yahoo in Tuesday’s earnings announcement will have to wait a little longer. Instead, they got the same old story: more cost-controls and declining revenue.

“No fireworks here,” said Colin Gillis an analyst with BGC Financial. “It was a lackluster quarter.”

The company made no mention of a new strategic direction in what was the first earnings announcement under Scott Thompson, Yahoo’s new chief executive. The announcement was timed just three weeks into Mr. Thompson’s term as chief executive and one week after Yahoo’s co-founder, Jerry Yang, stepped down from the board.

It also occurred as Yahoo’s board underwent a strategic review that began in September that includes selling its Asian assets.

But the company made no mention of the deal in its earnings call with analysts. “The work is ongoing,” Mr. Thompson said in the conference call. “I believe there is big potential at Yahoo, much bigger than the outside world envisions today.”

Yahoo increased its operating income 10 percent from the same quarter a year ago, but reported declining revenue and profit for the second consecutive quarter. The company’s net income in the fourth quarter dropped 5 percent, to $296 million, or 24 cents a share, from the year-ago quarter. Revenue fell 3 percent, to $1.17 billion, excluding commissions paid to Yahoo’s partners. Wall Street analysts had expected 24 cents a share, but slightly higher revenue of $1.19 million, according to a survey of analysts by Zacks Investment Research.

The company has been trying to cut costs and build on its strength in online editorial content. With 702 million monthly users, Yahoo remains the most trafficked news site online. But, as Mr. Thompson acknowledged Tuesday, “the sheer number of users will not get us to where we need to be. We need to improve the quality of customer experiences.”

To that end, the company announced a partnership with ABC to feature ABC News content on the Yahoo home page in October. But the biggest element of that turnaround effort, Yahoo’s display advertising business, fell 4 percent, to $546 million, compared with the same quarter a year ago. Meanwhile, the overall market for display advertising in the United States grew 23.5 percent, to $9.2 billion last quarter, according to eMarketer.

Display advertising had traditionally been one of the company’s bright spots, but Yahoo continues to lose share to Facebook and Google. Yahoo’s share of the online ad market declined 11 percent last year, down from 13.3 percent in 2010. While Google’s share grew to 40.8 percent, from 38.5 percent, and Facebook’s share reached 6.4 percent, from 4.6 percent for the same period, according to eMarketer.

“Getting our display advertising business on the right course is what I spend all my waking moments thinking about,” Mr. Thompson said in the call, though he did not offer any specifics.

Yahoo’s search business also contracted for the quarter. It is operated by Microsoft under an agreement that extends to March 2013. Revenue from search, after payments to Microsoft and others, fell 3 percent, to $376 million.

Mr. Thompson hinted that much of the company’s future innovation might come from the wealth of data it has on its 702 million users.

“The data is very, very impressive,” he said. “If you believe data and great technology and great technologists can begin to predict what’s in a user’s mind, having that data to start from is a huge advantage. You’ll see some interesting, data-oriented experiences coming out sooner versus later.”

Yahoo’s board has faced mounting pressure from activist investors, like Daniel Loeb of Third Point, to unlock shareholder value. The board had initially considered selling a minority stake to private equity suitors. It is now leaning toward a tax-efficient sale of its Asian assets to refocus on its core media assets in the United States where it has long suffered from declining revenue and an exodus of senior sales employees. Yahoo owns a 40 percent stake in Alibaba and a 35 percent stake in Yahoo Japan, valued at approximately $17 billion. Yahoo’s total market value is only slightly bigger at $19.5 billion.

The company is looking to sell its interests in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan in a complicated “cash-rich split” tax deal in which these companies would buy some other operating businesses and trade them to Yahoo in exchange for their own stock.
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Nvidia cuts revenue outlook, citing hard disk shortag | View Clip
01/25/2012
CNET News.com
Nvidia cuts revenue outlook, citing hard disk shortag
by Brooke Crothers

Nvidia has lowered revenue expectations for the period ending January 29, citing the hard disk drive shortage in Thailand.

Revenue for the fourth quarter is expected to be lower than the company’s previous outlook provided with its financial results for the third quarter ended October 30, 2011, the company said this afternoon.

Revenue is now expected to be $950 million, plus or minus 1 percent, compared with original expectations of $1.066 billion, plus or minus 2 percent, provided on November 10, 2011.

“The global disk-drive shortage caused by the flooding in Thailand had more impact on the mainstream GPU (graphics processing unit) segment than anticipated. Shipments by some PC [makers] were reduced. And the higher prices of disk-drives constrained some PC [maker's] ability to include a GPU in their systems,” Nvidia said in a statement.

But it’s not just hard drives that are causing problems, as the company also cited diminished orders for its Tegra 2 chip that powers tablets and smartphones. “Additionally, the Tegra 2 mobile business declined more rapidly than expected, ahead of devices based on the Tegra 3 processor ramping into production in the first quarter of calendar-year 2012,” Nvidia said.

Nvidia will report financial results on February 15.
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Apple ‘Didn’t Bet High Enough’ on Chinese Demand for IPhone 4S, Cook Says | View Clip
01/25/2012
Bloomberg BusinessWeek
Apple ‘Didn’t Bet High Enough’ on Chinese Demand for IPhone 4S, Cook Says

Apple Inc. (AAPL) underestimated the “staggering” demand for the iPhone 4S when it started sales in China this month, Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook said.

“We thought we were betting bold,” Cook said about sales of the device in China on a conference call yesterday. “We didn’t bet high enough.”

Crowds pelted Apple’s oldest store in China with eggs on Jan. 13 when the shop in Beijing’s Sanlitun district failed to open on the first day of sales for the iPhone 4S. After Beijing police sealed off the area to remove more than 500 people, Apple announced that it would suspend sales of iPhones at all stores in Beijing and Shanghai “for the time being” to ensure safety.

With sales halted at its China retail outlets, Apple is now offering the iPhone in the world’s largest mobile phone market through its online store, carrier partner China Unicom (Hong Kong) Ltd., and authorized resellers. The company’s online store in China is currently sold out of the iPhone 4S.

Chinese demand for the handset is “off the charts,” Cook said on the call.

Apple, based in Cupertino, California, this month moved closer to expanding its distribution in China through a second carrier partner when regulators approved specifications for a device that would run on the network of China Telecom Corp. (728), the nation’s third-largest wireless carrier.

Cook declined to answer questions about when a second carrier would be added in China.

‘Key Partner’

“China Unicom continues to be a very key partner,” he said on the call. “I’ve got nothing to announce today on an expansion there, but as I’ve consistently said, China is an extremely important market for us and we continue to look at how to grow it further.”

Apple announced yesterday that quarterly profit more than doubled to $13.1 billion in the period that ended Dec. 31 on surging demand for the iPhone and iPad.

The company sold 5.6 million iPhones in China during the first nine months of last year, making it the No. 4 smartphone vendor in the country in the third quarter, according to Stamford, Connecticut-based research company Gartner Inc.

To contact Bloomberg News staff for this story: Edmond Lococo in Beijing at elococo@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Michael Tighe at mtighe4@bloomberg.net
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LG Electronics Rises on Optimism of Profits From Handsets: Seoul Mover | View Clip
01/25/2012
Bloomberg – Seoul Bureau
LG Electronics Rises on Optimism of Profits From Handsets: Seoul Mover
By Jun Yang and Shinhye Kang

LG Electronics Inc. (066570), the world’s third-largest maker of mobile phones, rose the most in more than a month in Seoul trading amid optimism that its handset business may have returned to profit.

LG advanced 4.1 percent to 77,100 won at the 3:00 p.m. close, the highest level since Dec. 21. The benchmark Kospi index rose 0.1 percent to 1,952.23.

LG, whose handset unit has lost money for six straight quarters, said in November it plans to raise 1.06 trillion won ($940 million) in a rights offer and will invest more than half the proceeds in turning around the unprofitable mobile-phone business. LG’s shares dropped 35 percent over the past 12 months, while its rival Samsung Electronics Co. (005930) gained 14 percent.

“The current share price is pretty low compared to other tech stocks,” Kim Woon Ho, a Seoul-based analyst at Hanwha Securities Co., said by telephone “We’ve been telling investors to reduce holdings of other stocks and buy LG lately.”

The handset division probably returned to profit in the fourth quarter, Kim said. Sales at the air conditioning business will start picking up in the first quarter, while other technology companies typically report slower sales in that period from the previous quarter, he said.

The Seoul-based company will report fourth-quarter earnings.

Samsung Electronics Co. continued its advance today, closing at record 1.114 million won in Seoul.

Hynix Semiconductor Inc. (000660), which supplies memory chips to Apple Inc., rose 1.9 percent to 27,450 won. Apple yesterday reported quarterly profit that more than doubled after a record 37 million iPhones were sold in the fiscal first quarter.

To contact the reporter on this story: Jun Yang in Seoul at jyang180@bloomberg.net Shinhye Kang at skang24@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story: Michael Tighe at mtighe4@bloomberg.net
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One-time charge pushes AMD’s solid results for fourth quarter into the red | View Clip
01/24/2012
VentureBeat
One-time charge pushes AMD’s solid results for fourth quarter into the red
Dean Takahashi

In its first full quarter under a new CEO, Advanced Micro Devices reported solid fourth quarter operating income, but a one-time charge threw it into a loss.

AMD reported a loss of $177 million, or 24 cents a share, compared with 14 cents a year ago. Revenue was $1.69 billion, compared with $1.65 billion a year ago.
Rory Read (pictured), left the No. 2 job at AMD customer Lenovo to take the position as chief executive of AMD at the end of August.

Analysts expected the company to report a profit of 16 cents a share on revenues of $1.72 billion. The results included a $209 million non-cash impairment charge for the change in value of Globalfoundries, the manufacturing company that AMD spun out as a separate company.

On a non-GAAP basis, not counting the charge, AMD reported fourth quarter net income of $138 million, or 19 cents a share, and non-GAAP operating income of $172 million. Besides the one-time impairment charge, AMD reported restructuring charges of $98 million related to cutbacks in the fourth quarter.

In a statement, Read said he was encouraged by the success of AMD’s line of Fusion processors, which combine a microprocessor and graphics on the same chip. To date, AMD has sold 30 million accelerated processor units (APUs), or combo chips.

AMD is the perennial underdog to Intel. This morning, AMD’s market value was $4.55 billion, compared with $136.51 billion for Intel.

About a year ago, AMD’s highly respected CEO Dirk Meyer left the top job after a dispute with the board. On Meyer’s watch, AMD outwitted Intel in server chips with the 2003 launch of its Opteron server microprocessors, and he also settled antitrust litigation with Intel, extracting a $1 billion from the bigger company. But Intel bounced back strong in both server chips and laptops chips, and AMD’s market share hovered around 15 percent to 20 percent.

While Intel shifted its focus into low-power chips, AMD bet heavily on combining graphics and microprocessors in the same chip. It launched that family of chips last year under the Fusion name, but Intel also matched it with a less-capable but adequate combo chip dubbed Sandy Bridge. Meanwhile, AMD has been sparring back and forth with Nvidia to provide the fastest graphics processor, a title that AMD says it now owns.

Read now has AMD readying its slate of chips for the introduction of Windows 8, the new operating system from Microsoft that is expected to hit the market later this year.
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A bird’s-eye view of T-Mobile’s new spectrum trove | View Clip
01/25/2012
Giga Om
A bird’s-eye view of T-Mobile’s new spectrum trove
By Kevin Fitchard

With their planned merger officially dead, AT&T is in the process of handing over T-Mobile’s consolation prize, which includes a grab bag of airwaves T-Mobile will use to bulk up its 4G network. AT&T’s official transfer application popped up on the Federal Communications Commission website over the weekend, revealing for the first time the specific licenses T-Mobile would gain. For those of you who don’t want to dig through the arcane documentation, GigaOM reader and spectrum policy wonk Andrew Shepherd has prepared a map that shows exactly where T-Mobile picks up new airwaves and how much.

T-Mobile didn’t get new spectrum nationwide but it certainly got some valuable licenses in key cities. What’s more, Shepherd found that AT&T had fork over all of its AWS holdings in some pretty valuable markets, including Boston; San Francisco/Oakland; Washington, D.C.; Houston; Baltimore; Atlanta; San Diego; Seattle; Kansas City, Mo.; San Jose, Calif.; San Antonio; and Salt Lake City. While those losses must sting AT&T, the operator was very careful about which markets it chose to relinquish.

AT&T is launching its LTE over both 700 MHz and AWS frequencies, and in all of the biggest cities, AT&T only gave up spectrum where it had enough 700 MHz backfill to get at least a decent-sized LTE network up and running, Shepherd said. In some big cities AT&T will only have enough 700 MHz to launch networks half the size of Verizon’s current LTE setup. But AT&T will be able to boost its capacity considerably when it moves to LTE-Advanced, incorporating the new 700 MHz spectrum it bought from Qualcomm. In the biggest markets such as Chicago, AT&T wouldn’t part with any of its AWS licenses even though it had other spectrum to fall back on.

As for T-Mobile, it made out like a bandit in some of the nation’s most important cities, giving it between 60 MHz and 80 MHz of combined AWS and PCS airwaves in many of the markets involved in the transaction. That will allow T-Mobile to expand its HSPA+ 42 Mbps footprint in some areas and add more 4G capacity in others.
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Mexico’s antitrust commission votes on Televisa-Iusacell partnership | View Clip
01/25/2012
Dow Jones Newswires – Mexico City
Mexico’s antitrust commission votes on Televisa-Iusacell partnership
By Anthony Harrup, Of Dow Jones Newswires

Tie-up would provide money for Iusacell to expand its business and give media company Televisa an entry into mobile market.

Mexico’s antitrust commission said Tuesday it reached a decision on the proposed partnership between mobile phone operator Grupo Iusacell and broadcast and media company Grupo Televisa SAB, but has several weeks to notify the parties involved before making its decision known.

In April 2011, Televisa agreed to invest $1.6 billion for a 50% stake in Iusacell, one of the smaller of Mexico’s four mobile-phone operators. The deal would provide money for Iusacell to expand its business and give Televisa, which also provides Internet and phone service through its cable businesses, an entry into the mobile market.

The Federal Competition Commission, or CFC, said in a statement late Tuesday that its five-member commission reached a decision, but that members are barred by law from making it known until the sides are notified, for which it has until Feb. 7. Spokesmen for Iusacell and Televisa said the companies didn’t have any information on the resolution.

In recent days, Iusacell expressed concern that the commission was planning to reject the tie-up between Televisa, the country’s biggest TV broadcaster, and Iusacell, which is controlled by businessman Ricardo Salinas Pliego who also controls the country’s No. 2 broadcaster TV Azteca SAB.

Iusacell said last week that it planned to file charges against CFC President Eduardo Perez Motta and would seek to stop him from voting on the partnership on grounds that he had made known opinions against the partnership ahead of time. In the end the company didn’t file the charges.

Perez Motta said last week that he had yet to make his decision and that his vote would be based on “my appreciation of the impact of the transaction on competition conditions and free access to markets, without responding to pressures from any player.”

He rejected assertions that he favored Telcel, the Mexican mobile phone business of billionaire Carlos Slim, which has about 70% of the country’s mobile subscribers. Iusacell has about a 4% mobile market share.

Televisa and TV Azteca, meanwhile, control between them virtually all of the commercial free-to-air broadcast television in the country, while Telmex, Slim’s fixed-line company, has been refused government authorization to launch its own television service. Telmex has about 80% of the country’s fixed phones lines.

Given Iusacell’s small mobile market share, a rejection or conditional approval of the Televisa-Iusacell deal would likely involve considerations about the television market as technological developments lead to convergence of the different media and communications offerings. Iusacell has a similar mobile market share as NII Holdings Inc. unit Nextel Mexico, and the CFC had previously cleared Televisa to buy a stake in Nextel–a deal Televisa eventually pulled out of.
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Google to Update Privacy Policy to Cover Wider Data Use | View Clip
01/25/2012
New York Times – San Francisco Bureau, The
Google to Update Privacy Policy to Cover Wider Data Use
By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

Google said Tuesday that it would revise its privacy policies and terms of service, to make them shorter and more readable and to change the way Google can use information that users provide.

To alert users about the changes, which take effect March 1, Google plans to undertake its biggest notification effort ever via e-mail and announcements on its various sites, according to a person briefed on Google’s plans.

Though the announcement comes two weeks after Google was hammered by critics for the way it integrated Google Plus posts into search results, Google said that it had been working on the new policies for a long time and that recent events had nothing to do with the timing.

Still, the biggest change in the new policies goes to the heart of privacy concerns about Google’s new search feature. Google Plus posts that appear in search results are only from people whom Google users have chosen to follow on Google Plus and who have shared specific items with them or made them public. But critics said that it violated users’ privacy because when people posted on Google Plus, they did not know that the posts would show up in search results.

The new privacy policy makes clear that for people logged into a Google account, Google can use information shared on one service in other Google services.

“If you’re signed in, we may combine information you’ve provided from one service with information from other services,” Alma Whitten, Google’s director of privacy for product and engineering, wrote in a company blog post. “In short, we’ll treat you as a single user across all our products, which will mean a simpler, more intuitive Google experience.”

The change will also allow Google to do other useful things, Ms. Whitten wrote, such as letting a user know she might be late for a meeting based on her calendar and current location, or correcting the spelling of a friend’s name in a Google search.

Last year, Google settled with the Federal Trade Commission over privacy misrepresentations it made related to Buzz, a social networking tool. It agreed to start a privacy program, submit to audits and pay a fine for any future misrepresentations. One watchdog group, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said this month that it thought Google’s new social search tool violated that agreement.

Google also shrank and rewrote its privacy policies and terms of service — documents that on many Web sites are known for being too long, convoluted and bogged down by legalese. Google’s main privacy policy, which had more than 70 separate documents for various products, will now cover 60 products in one document. A dozen, like Wallet or Chrome, will still have separate privacy policies. The terms of service are also consolidated and explain legal terms.

Between now and March 1, as Google notifies users of the changes, they will be able to view and compare the old and new policies.

Google’s new efforts build on changes it made to simplify its privacy policy in 2010. Other companies, like Facebook, have also tried to shorten their policies, as industry regulators demand clearer and more concise statements.

Google emphasized that its core privacy guidelines will not change. For instance, it does not sell personal information or share it externally except in the case of a valid court order, and it allows data liberation, which means Google users can export information to other services.

The changes come a week after Google unveiled an ad campaign in United States newspapers, magazines, Web sites and subways to educate people about privacy. The campaign had already been running in Europe, where Google has faced more criticism and investigation of its privacy practices.
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Verizon, others, invest in video tech company Skyfire | View Clip
01/25/2012
Thomson Reuters – Helsinki
Verizon, others, invest in video tech company Skyfire

(Reuters) – The venture arm of Verizon Communications Inc (VZ.N) and others have invested $8 million in video technology company Skyfire, which plans to expand into European and Asian markets.

The other investors are Lightspeed Venture Partners, Matrix Partners and Trinity Ventures.

California-based Skyfire, best known for its mobile browser, helps operators handle the surging demand for video on cellphones. It has now raised a total of $30.8 million, the company said in a statement on Wednesday.

Data growth on mobile networks is expected to rise almost 30-fold during next five years as consumers increasingly watch video on wireless devices.

“Wireless operators around the world are facing an explosion in mobile data on their networks, driven largely by mobile video,” Andrew Verhalen, general partner at Matrix Partners, said in a statement.

“Skyfire is well positioned with solutions for operators that can expand network capacity by over 25 percent, as well as generate incremental revenue.”

(Reporting By Tarmo Virki; editing by Andre Grenon)
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Here’s why Obama is visiting Intel | View Clip
01/25/2012
CNET News.com
Here’s why Obama is visiting Intel
by Brooke Crothers

Artist’s rendering of the $5 billion new chip manufacturing facility and support buildings to be built at Intel’s site in Chandler, Ariz. President Obama will visit the site on Wednesday.

On Wednesday, President Obama is due to visit an Intel plant in Arizona. Here’s why.

Obama aims to highlight manufacturing in America–one of the State of the Union’s themes–and it’s hard to find a better example of that than the world’s leading chipmaker. Intel is now one of America’s foremost manufacturers, boasting some of the most sophisticated manufacturing facilities in the world, many of them sprinkled throughout the U.S.

Its development fabs (fabrication plants) in Oregon are the most cutting-edge of its leading-edge factories and have already received one presidential visit, in February of last year.

Obama’s Wednesday visit–as part of his Made-in-the-USA theme–will highlight Intel’s high-volume manufacturing facilities in Arizona (see chart below).

In Chandler, Intel will make its next generation of 14-nanometer (nm) processors that will be its most highly-integrated and power-efficient to date. Those chips–many of them a so-called SoC or system-on-a-chip–will power future ultrabooks, tablets, and smartphones.

And an often overlooked aspect of Intel’s manufacturing might is its strategic relationship with Boise, Idaho-based Micron Technology. Those two companies formed Intel Micron Flash Technologies (IMFT) in 2006 and operate two U.S. plants, one in Utah and another in Virginia.

The manufacturing technologies used at those plant are world class, too. Flash chips from those plants go into Intel and Micron solid-state drives and, who knows, IMFT chips may someday find their way into Apple MacBooks, iPads, or iPhones.

And all of this is good for exports. “Semiconductors are America’s top exporting industry and with three quarters of semiconductors being designed and manufactured here and 82 percent of our sales outside the U.S.,” said the Semiconductor Industry Association in a statement in October of last year.

Intel chip fabrication plants (fabs) in the U.S.:

•Oregon, Hillsboro: D1X (development), microprocessors, 14nm*, starts 2013

•Oregon Hillsboro: D1D (development), microprocessors, 22nm, started 2003

•Oregon Hillsboro: D1C (development), microprocessors, 32nm/22nm, started 2001

•Chandler, Arizona: Fab 42, microprocessors, 14nm, starts 2013

•Chandler, Arizona: Fab 32, microprocessors, 32nm/22nm, started 2007

•Chandler, Arizona: Fab 12, microprocessors/chipsets, 65nm/22nm, started 1996

•Rio Ranch, New Mexico: Fab 11X, microprocessors, 45nm/32nm, started 2002

•Hudson, Massachusetts: Fab 17, chipsets, 130nm, started 1998

•Lehi, Utah: IMFT** fab, flash memory, 20nm, started 2007

•Manassas, Virginia: IMFT fab, flash memory, 25nm, started 2006

*nanometer
**Intel Micron Flash Technologies, owned 49 percent by Intel, 51 percent by Micron Technology
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Why Apple TV is finally starting to matter | View Clip
01/25/2012
Giga Om
Why Apple TV is finally starting to matter
By Ryan Lawler

Hidden somewhere in Apple’s earnings call is this little snippet: According to CEO Tim Cook, the company sold 1.4 million Apple TVs during the holiday quarter. That’s notable because it’s about half of the devices that Apple had sold in the entire year prior, and one-third of the 4.2 million sold in total. In other words, sales of the second-generation Apple TVs are accelerating nicely after a (somewhat) slow start.

That’s worth noting for a few reasons:
1.Apple is clearly outselling the competition. Apple TV might be a hobby, but it’s already the top-selling device in its class. The next-best-selling Roku streaming boxes have sold 2.5 million units over the past three years, compared to Apple’s 4.2 million units in about half the time.
2.There’s pent-up demand for the mythical “iTV.” Apple is expected to introduce a connected TV soon — possibly later this year — and Apple TV’s sales show that users are already interested in the company’s user interface and services that would likely be available on it.
3.Users want Internet connectivity and access to streaming content on their TVs but might not be willing to buy a new set to get it. Last week, I wrote about how the latest batch of connected TVs from manufacturers like Sony, Samsung, Vizio and others probably won’t convince consumers to upgrade in the near term, but software improvements are likely to come soon. In the meantime, Apple TV is a good stopgap for those not quite ready to jump on the connected TV bandwagon.

All that said, let’s put things into perspective: The Microsoft Xbox 360 sold nearly a million units in one week alone during the holiday quarter. The Apple TV is far from a mass-market device, but its sales numbers show that even in a relatively small market, Apple dominates the competition.
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Motorola Pledges to Take More “Smart Actions” in 2012 | View Clip
01/25/2012
All Things Digital
Motorola Pledges to Take More “Smart Actions” in 2012

After already promising it will introduce fewer new phones this year than last, Motorola said on Tuesday that it is doubling down on some of the bets it made last year.

In particular, Motorola plans to continue investing in so-called “smart actions” — rules designed to make it easier for novice users to make their phones act the way they want them to.

For example, if a phone is consistently running low on battery, the phone recommends settings to improve battery life. If a user misses several calls in a row, the phone can suggest turning up the ringer.

All of those options were there, Motorola says, but required users to know the exact control panels and settings that needed to be tweaked.

“You need to be a geek to do that,” Senior VP Alain Mutricy said in a briefing with reporters.

Motorola also plans to expand the Razr line introduced last year, and will continue investing in the Webtop software that allows phones to connect to laptop-like docking stations. The phone maker has already introduced the Razr Maxx — a new, high-end version of the Razr with a more capable battery.

While not going into details about new devices or the company’s soon-to-be-reported earnings, Mutricy said that Motorola is focused primarily on the high end of the U.S. market, particularly as carriers upgrade to high-speed 4G LTE networks.
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Qualcomm Atheros’ Skifta Kicking Off the Connected Home Trend | View Clip
01/25/2012
Bright Side of News
Qualcomm Atheros’ Skifta Kicking Off the Connected Home Trend
by: Anshel Sag

Qualcomm Atheros’ Android app known as Skifta is billed as a media shifting platform for entertainment driven consumer electronics. So, basically a platform for moving your content for almost all consumer electronics today. The app’s actual motto is ‘May your stuff be with you’ which we find kind of amusing and yet very concise.

The application itself has been available for quite some time on the Android Market, but up until now there hasn’t been much in terms of development for Skifta. Now, though, QA is introducing a wireless adapter development kit as a first component of this platform. This adapter is designed to help manufacturers offer consumers a way to retrofit their non-DNLA and non-UPnP devices to their home networks in order to enable Skifta usage.

How Skifta works is pretty simple. You download the application onto your Android phone or tablet and simply connect to your WiFi network or 3G and select a source of the media content. This media content can be music, videos or pictures and can essentially be played almost instantly on any device inside the selected home network. This is enabled through DLNA and UPnP which enable you to easily stream media to and from certain devices which have DLNA and UPnP functionality built into them. These devices are generally internet connected or at least connected to your home network.

Skifta also has the functionality of enabling remote media playing through 3G/4G connectivity. This is the part that really makes Skifta useful for many users and may likely make it a much more powerful app in the future with more 4G devices and networks coming online this year.

This feature in conjunction with the channels feature of Skifta really could make Skifta the de-facto media accessing app on the Android marketplace. They also plan on adding apps like Pandora and Spotify into their already existing channels like Facebook, Flickr and ShoutCast among many others.

Right now, though, there are a lot of applications, like Polkast, out there trying to do the same thing as Skifta and there will likely continue to be until someone grabs hold of the market or if Google simply undercuts everyone by integrating one of these apps into Android itself. Some apps do require to have a server client running on your computer at home, but Skifta also requires those devices to be powered on in order for their content to be played back remotely. Skifta does offer a server option for your computer as well in the event that your computer doesn’t quite work right with the app or you don’t know how to configure it correctly.

Dan Rabinovitsj, SVP & GM of the Networking Business Unit, indicated to us that Skifta will likely find its way into the iOS market as well, enabling both Android and iOS users to easily access and play back their media to anywhere from anywhere.

He also told us that Qualcomm Atheros plans on offering a Pro version of Skifta with even more expanded functionality while keeping the free version still free in its current state.

© 2009 – 2011 Bright Side Of News
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A group of South Korean users of Apple Inc.’s iPhone sued the company in a local court, claiming it invaded their privacy by allowing the smartphone to collect location data without their consent.

About 27,000 people joined a class-action suit against Apple’s South Korean unit and headquarters, seeking 1 million won per person ($930) in damages, according to a notice posted online by Mirae Law, which represents the plaintiffs. The suit was filed in Changwon, south of Seoul, where the law firm is located.

Apple was fined by South Korea’s telecommunications regulator on Aug. 3 and ordered to encrypt location data of people using iPhones to address privacy concerns. The company also came under scrutiny of regulators around the world after an April report by publisher O’Reilly Radar said iPhones record information about users’ whereabouts, adding to legal disputes the company is involved in over patent infringements.

Apple was fined 3 million won for collecting such data even when some users turned off location-recognition features on their iPhones, the Korea Communications Commission said Aug. 3. Google Inc., which did not gather data in the same way, was not fined and only ordered to make the information unreadable, it said.

Earlier this year, Apple was sued in the U.S. by two iPhone and iPad users who claimed the devices secretly collected information on their movements.

“I’m an iPhone user myself, so when I first heard about this in the media, I reviewed the legality of the matter based on Korean law,” Kim Hyeong Seok, an attorney for the plaintiffs, said by telephone before the suit was filed. “I concluded it was clearly illegal.”

Steve Park, a Seoul-based spokesman for Apple, declined to comment on the case.

Apple’s iOS 4 operating system for the iPhone and iPad tracks and stores the movements of people using the devices, according to a report published in April by O’Reilly Media, a Sebastopol, California-based publisher that organizes technology trade conferences.

Snaptracs announced the launch of Tagg The Pet Tracker, an advanced pet tracking system equipped with GPS and wireless capabilities, enables pets to stay in touch with their owners.

Tagg The Pet Tracker is the first product from Snaptracs, a newly formed, wholly owned subsidiary of Qualcomm. The Tagg pet tracking system uses advanced GPS technology to enable pet owners to know where their pets are and be notified if they wander off.
Tagg provides peace of mind for any pet parent by providing them access to their pet’s whereabouts via a mobile phone, mobile device or computer.

Hundreds of thousands of pets go missing every year, and according to the National Council on Pet Population Study and Policy, only 15 to 20 percent of lost dogs and only two percent of lost cats are ever returned to their owners.

Tagg The Pet Tracker is a purpose-built solution that uses a sophisticated combination of GPS and wireless technology to monitor a pet’s location and quickly notify the owner via email and/or text if the pet leaves its Tagg zone, the area where it spends most of its time – typically the home, yard and adjacent areas.

The Tagg tracker is designed for dogs and cats over 10 lbs. and is a small, lightweight and durable device that attaches securely to an existing collar. Built to withstand all the running, digging and jumping of a pet’s busy day, the tracker is meant to be worn at all times, even while swimming.

The long-lasting battery can last up to 30 days, but actual battery life will vary based on usage patterns. Convenient features have been built into the compact, stylish and comfortable tracker, including battery recharge notifications and a trip button, which allows pet and owner to take walks, car rides or travel without sending an alert.

“We created Tagg because we understand that pets are an important part of today’s family. As pet owners ourselves, we were inspired to design a purpose-built solution that provides owners the peace of mind that their pet is where it is supposed to be,” said Dave Vigil, president of Snaptracs.

“A lost pet is something no owner wants to experience, and we are proud to have developed a simple-to-use and affordable tracking system that will help reunite pet and owner quickly if the pet wanders off.” Vigil added.

Tagg The Pet Tracker service is provided on the Verizon Wireless network, giving pet parents reliable access to tracking information via its nationwide coverage.

Google’s $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola Mobility underscores the shift in the mobile market toward Apple’s vertically integrated business model

Since its introduction, Apple’s iPhone has been a wide sales success, allowing the company to compete for the role of top smartphone maker in a handful of years. Aside from the design, capacitive touchscreen, and intuitive user interface, Apple has proven that to compete in the mobile space, the chances of success improve when the entire experience is integrated. That means not just solid hardware and software design, but a mobile app and media ecosystem as well as patents to protect your efforts.

Monday’s news of Google purchasing Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion underscores this shift, as another big player, namely Google, is in position to adopt such vertical integration. Google will effectively enter the hardware market with the Motorola Mobility acquisition, although it’s possible it will choose not to alienate its hardware partners and later divest Motorola while retaining the many patents it gained from this deal.

That’s unlikely, though, because the mobile market is shifting away from the platform licensing model as the top companies are instead looking to replicate Apple’s business model, something my colleague Darrell Etherington thinks won’t happen for Google, even after the Motorola deal.

Outside of Google and Apple, take a close look at the rest of the who’s who in mobile and you can see the shift:

• Research In Motion. The company has always had an Apple-like approach, never licensing its BlackBerry OS to other companies. Instead, RIM integrated its hardware and software to build a popular brand, which it supplemented through closed services such as BlackBerry Messenger. That sounds like Apple, but a huge missing piece was an integrated mobile app store that provides easy one-stop shopping. RIM eventually added a store, called BlackBerry World, in April 2009 with 200 initial apps. Twelve months later, the company bought the QNX operating system and shows no signs of licensing it.

• Palm and Hewlett-Packard. Like Apple and RIM, Palm controlled both the hardware and software of its devices, although it did license the Palm OS to Sony for several years. There was never a Palm OS app store, however, causing consumers to find their own third-party apps either directly from developers or independent stores that aggregated software titles. Palm eventually replaced the Palm OS with webOS, didn’t license it, and was snapped up by HP for $1.2 billion in 2010. HP now sells webOS hardware, doesn’t license the platform—although it says it’s open to the idea—and runs the webOS App Catalog for software sales. The company is rumored to be working on a music store and launched a movie store for webOS in July.

• Samsung. The company is poised to become the next smartphone king on the back of Android phones, but it’s hedging its bets with its own Bada platform, which is reportedly outselling Windows Phone 7 handsets. Samsung’s efforts to create media stores for e-books, music, and video content helps make Samsung Android devices more appealing, but those stores could be leveraged by the company’s Bada phones. That would give Samsung its own ecosystem to supplement the platform and the hardware it builds.

• Microsoft. Licensing platforms is a core business model for Microsoft, which previously developed Windows Phone for hardware manufacturers to build around. Palm, HP, HTC, Samsung, and many others used Windows Phone to get in the smartphone game prior to Apple’s 2007 entry. Microsoft continued this approach with its new Windows Phone 7 software, but added a mobile app store and penned a huge deal—reportedly $1 billion—for a flailing Nokia to rely on WP7 for smartphones going forward.

Google’s planned buy of Motorola Mobility is about patents and the war of mutual destruction in the mobile space. We get that, but it’s also about connected TV and carriers and how the convergence of broadband and data will change our lives. And so I found myself thinking about how, if Google wants to use Android as a way into the home, Motorola’s home automation, set-top box and broadband gear businesses now gives Google a platform from which to jump.

The mobile phone is poised to become our interface with the digital world, including the devices that control our lighting, in-home music and even home temperature. Don’t believe me, ask Qualcomm’s Paul Jacobs or the folks at Sonos or anyone building Android or iPhone remotes for cable. Even Sanjay Jha, the CEO of Motorola Mobility has absorbed a bit of this thinking in some of his comments over the last few years.

So even as the world wonders if Google knows what it wants to do with Motorola’s home businesses, which include baby monitors, Bluetooth headsets and cable gear, it has the potential to make waves with consumers and especially with service providers.

This puts Google back in the home automation market.

Motorola Mobility clearly has been working on the home automation space for awhile. It purchased the startup 4Home last December. 4Home’s software enables home owners to access information — from digital media to energy info, home security and health data — across devices, and remotely and is used by Verizon in home automation/energy management pilots in New Jersey.

On the Google/Android side, Google has been looking to use Android as the layer to connect home devices, from connected light bulbs to other devices. So while, Google killed its separate home energy software PowerMeter earlier this year, it could end up back in the home automation game, this time with Android. And if Android is the dominant layer, Google didn’t really need PowerMeter, which was aimed at utilities. Android and Motorola’s 4Home software is aimed at carriers, a relationship Google is more familiar with, especially on the wireless side.

Wait, we’re buying our gear from Google?

However, on the wireline side Google may still have some fears to lay to rest. The company, which used to be ISPs’ favorite whipping boy (until they moved on to hating Netflix) will soon find itself owning through Motorola Mobility a large portion of the set-top box market as well as some of the gear inside the cable plants. According to Multichannel News this deal has created some strange new bedfellows in the service provider world:

In any case, the deal has shifted dynamics in the industry quite significantly: “Comcast overnight has become a huge customer of Google, and Comcast has no way out of that in the short run,” the executive said.

This sort of convergence may have been unintentional, but it’s also something that should be expected as broadband, not only brings people closer together, but also forces our networks and devices to merge. So soon Google will have not only have close relations with wireless carriers because of Android, but also wireline ISPs that have traditionally been cooler to the search giant.

Will it help wireline carriers keeps consumers in a pay TV world, or help ISPs deliver differentiated home automation services so they can forestall the process of becoming dumb pipes? Or might Google look at the unexpected businesses it picked up with its patents and dump them like I dump that insanely pink lipstick color I get whenever I get my “free gift with purchase” at the makeup counter?

The operator said it reached a mutual decision with RIM not to offer a WiMax version of the PlayBook tablet IDG News Service Sprint has decided not to offer a WiMax version of the BlackBerry PlayBook, the company said Friday. Slideshow: “We apologize for any inconvenience but the BlackBerry 4G PlayBook Tablet that was announced in January for summer availability will no longer be coming to the Sprint network,” Sprint said in a statement.

The operator currently offers a Wi-Fi-only version of the tablet. A customer could connect that device to a Wi-Fi hotspot that uses WiMax on the back end, such as the Mifi, and connect to Sprint’s WiMax network that way.

Sprint said it was a mutual decision between the operator and Sprint not to offer the WiMax PlayBook.

RIM said it will focus on LTE, the 4G technology more widely adopted, instead of WiMax. “RIM has decided to prioritize and focus its 4G development resources on LTE,” it said in a statement.

“Testing of BlackBerry 4G PlayBook models is already underway and we plan to enter labs for network certifications in the U.S. and other international markets this fall,” it said.

RIM said in February that it would make PlayBooks that run on LTE and HSPA+, technology used by both T-Mobile and AT&T. RIM said it planned to launch the tablets in the second half of this year. It did not mention its HSPA+ plans on Friday.

The PlayBook has some unique features but has struggled to overcome some weaknesses, namely that it doesn’t include key native apps including e-mail. Users must connect their BlackBerry phone to the tablet to use e-mail. It faces stiff competition from the likes of the iPad and Android tablets, both of which had head starts on the PlayBook.