Google embraces mobile, makes announcements in a special keynote at World Mobile Congress in Barcelona

Schmidt outlined how Google’s top programmers were now concentrating on mobile as their primary focus; he also pointed to recent acquisitions in the mobile space, notably AdMob. 

Unveiling a new Google mantra - ‘Mobile First’ - Schmidt proclaimed that three unique areas had now converged on the mobile device: computing power, interconnectivity and the cloud: “The phone is where these three all interconnect  and you need to get these three waves right if you want to win.” He highlighted Internet phenomenons such as Spotify, Facebook - and Google itself - as leading the cloud concept across both fixed and mobile. “If you don’t use the power of the cloud you will fail,” he said.

He added that in places such as Indonesia and South Africa Google was now seeing more searches on mobile than via the desktop.

Google programmers joining Schmidt on stage demonstrated the firm’s latest developments, including efforts to merge its speech and image recognition technology; the firm impressed with a preview of an optical character recognition (OCR) tool that was able to recognise and translate a picture of a German menu into English. Google announced that German has now been added to its speech system as its fourth language.

Schmidt also provided an update on Google’s Android platform, which he said was now running across 26 different devices. He said that Android handset vendors were selling  more than 60,000 per day, a figure that has doubled over the last quarter. During an Android demonstration, Google’s Eric Tseng announced that the platform now supports Flash – the full Flash version (10.2) rather than Flash Lite – allowing gaming and movies over handsets. The announcement will give Android devices an advantage over Apple’s iPhone, which does not support the technology.

According an article in telecoms.com

Femtocell technology is experiencing the first signs of maturity, with several tier one operators deploying the technology using a variety of business models.

At present there are nine commercial launches of femto technology worldwide and several ongoing trials, while completed trials are now progressing into deployment plans for several mobile operators.

In the past few months, French operator SFR, Portuguese operator Optimus and Chinese operator China Unicom have commercially launched femtocell services, while Japan’s KDDI and France’s Free have also committed to the technology. Vodafone also relaunched its femto offering under the ‘Sure Signal’ brand, claiming considerable success in the UK which could spearhead the entrance of femtocell services into the European market.

Read the complete article.

M2M Solution will demonstrate its HomeBox gateway for the consumer market at Mobile World Congress, to be held in Barcelona from 15 to 18 February 2010. The HomeBox system incorporates accessories for both security and home automation.
 
M2M Solution’s HomeBox is a complete Plug-and-Play home gateway that is interconnected to a wide range of accessories in respect of both security (camera, door/window opening sensor, motion sensor, remote control or smoke detector) and domotics (power plug relay, window shutter control and heating control). M2M Solution will soon add energy-management accessories (monitoring of electricity, water and gas usage) to its HomeBox, which has been developed over many years of R&D.
 
M2M Solution uses a white-label approach to supply all of the elements required to bring the HomeBox to the marketplace, including hardware, SIM card, server infrastructure, interactive voice response, mobile and web applications, back and front Office HMI, and billing system. The introduction of HomeBox will enable mobile network and service operators to benefit from new sources of revenue. It is also a strategic solution for a market that is constantly looking for new products and services able to provide differentiation and to drive growth.
 
A first commercial launch of the HomeBox has already been planned by Myxyty, the French specialist in smart home systems, which will offer this new solution as a complement to its leading MyAlert range of home-security solutions.
 
M2M Solution’s HomeBox provides a range of benefits, including a real-time alert system (SMS, MMS, email, voice call or fax); the ability to control the system from any mobile phone, PC or Mac; and, also, visualisation of the home via a camera integrated into the HomeBox or additional cameras. Besides, M2M Solution’s HomeBox ensures uninterrupted service operation in case of power outage or internet connection failure – the HomeBox features a back-up battery as well as a back-up GSM-GPRS connection.

Orange is today ramping up its planned roll-out of mobile HD voice services in Europe with the addition of France, Spain and Luxembourg to its 2010 roadmap. Mobile HD voice is the second critical strand in Orange’s HD voice strategy, building on from the highly successful delivery of HD voice services for VOIP in 2006. Following technological developments, Orange has confirmed that its UK customer trial of mobile HD voice will start from Spring and run for three months.

In September 2009, Orange became the world’s first operator to commercially launch a mobile HD voice service in Moldova, announcing plans to bring mobile HD voice to the UK and Belgium in 2010. In addition to mobile HD voice, Orange was also the first operator to launch HD over VOIP, first in France and shortly to be rolled out to Poland and Spain. 

Customers using mobile HD voice services will benefit from the best possible sound quality, including a much richer and natural sound that is capable of conveying emotion significantly better than an ordinary handset. It helps people hear better in noisy environments, providing clearer voice conversations and creating a much closer feeling of proximity between both parties, almost as if callers are actually in the same room. 

HD Voice uses the AMR-WB (Adaptive Multi-Rate Wideband) speech codec.  This provides excellent audio quality due to a wider speech bandwidth of 50–7000 Hz compared to the current narrowband speech codec of 300–3400 Hz.  The AMR-WB delivers significantly enhanced sound quality whilst utilising the same network resources.

Voice services are expected to continue to be the largest revenue generator worldwide, accounting for 69% revenues on a global basis and for no less than 60% in any region in 2014 (Ovum).

As consumer device makers look to make their own smartphones, modules could prove an easy way to bypass wireless R&D, according to Ericsson VP

Embedded radio modules have proliferated into every manner of device from eBook reader, to laptop, to meter readers. It’s only a matter of time before they make their way into the original wireless device, the mobile phone, said Mats Norin, vice president of mobile broadband modules at Ericsson.

“In the close future, you will see handhelds or smartphones with embedded modules,” Norin said. “It’s a way of entering the market with lower R&D costs and a way to get market sooner.”

The wireless handset market has always been built around the dedicated chipset as it has largely been dominated by a handful of global phone makers with the resources to develop and design devices with all of the necessary radio components. But the wireless market of late has welcomed hordes of new device vendors, most of whose areas of expertise lay outside of wireless communications. Rather than build RF divisions from the ground up they opted to implement radio modules, a pre-packaged all in one solution that gave their devices the necessary connectivity without the associated development costs.

Modules started in laptops and laptop PC cards and soon spread to machine-to-machine devices and even eBook readers, but as the handset business is still dominated by the big phone vendors we’ve yet to see a handset with an embedded module. Even Apple, which went out of its comfort zone when it designed the iPhone, used a chipset.

Ericsson has already witnessed the module gravitate to devices they weren’t originally intended for: its embedded laptop module is already in Sony’s eBook reader. And as it develops smaller and lower-power devices, he expects device manufacturers to push the envelope on the form factors for future devices.

Zinwave announced that Catapult Venture Managers, a leading development capital equity investor, joins the syndicate of SEB Venture Capital, Atlas Venture and Scottish Equity Partners (SEP) as a shareholder.  The round was led by Catapult alongside investment from the syndicate. The funds will be used to boost manufacturing throughput following the successful expansion into the US and Asia during 2009 with a rapid growth rate and uptake in these regions. Zinwave will continue to expand sales in these regions, as well as gaining market penetration in the key area of Middle East.

Jonathan Earl, Investment Director at Catapult commented, “We are delighted to join Zinwave’s strong investment syndicate. We believe Zinwave to be very well positioned in a rapidly growing market as a result of its unique wideband product. The company has now generated impressive sales traction, with a reference base of prestigious sites and a number of newly secured sales channels.  We have also been very impressed with Zinwave’s highly experienced management and are confident in their ability to deliver and manage significant further growth.”

Zinwave’s 3000 DAS offers the industry’s only true Wideband Distributed Antenna System (DAS) supporting any service and wireless technology between 136MHz to 2700MHz, irrespective of protocol or modulation scheme.

About Zinwave
Zinwave is a company at the forefront of wireless technology development, pioneering a new approach to in-building unified wireless infrastructure.  With unique patented technologies drawn from world-leading research groups at Cambridge University and University College London, Zinwave is today operated by a management team with extensive experience of international telecoms markets. The company has developed a Wideband Distributed Antenna System that addresses the challenges of providing continuous radio coverage inside buildings for multiple simultaneous services with the same infrastructure and components.