The DECT Forum, the international association of the wireless home and enterprise communication industry, is pleased to announce the availability of CAT-iq White Papers. The White Papers – part 1 “voice” and part 2 “data” – outline the current status and the future profile descriptions of CAT-iq – the technology of choice for voice and data applications.

CAT-iq stands for Cordless Advanced Technology, Internet and Quality, and is the global technology initiative from the DECT Forum, designed for IP-voice services in the next generation networks. CAT-iq focuses on high quality wideband Audio VoIP as well as low bit-rate data applications. The CAT-iq profiles are split between voice and data services, with CAT-iq 1.0 and CAT-iq 2.0 providing features to support key voice enhancements, and CAT-iq 3.0 and CAT-iq 4.0 providing features to support data.

CAT-iq is firmly positioned as a key broadband access technology. CAT-iq has the unique opportunity to continue cordless telephony’s conquest of huge segments of the world’s population, and introduce data services into homes complementing those offered by WLAN and Bluetooth. When reach, standby and talk time, cost and of course voice quality are paramount, CAT-iq is the technology of choice. The Certification process for CAT-iq 2.0 will start in September 2010, enabling market deployment of a new generation of products of various manufacturers before the end of this year.

“The White Papers – part 1 “Voice” and part 2 “data” – provide a comprehensive and detailed portray of the CAT-iq technology and its profiles. With first CAT-iq 2.0 products being available still in 2010, the White Papers will feed the growing interest in CAT-iq as a leading global wireless technology”, says Daniel Hartnett, Chairman of the CAT-iq Working Group within the DECT Forum.

The White Papers are publicly available on the DECT Forum’s CAT-iq website

The DECT Forum, the international association of the wireless home and enterprise communication industry, is pleased to announce that CETECOM ICT Services GmbH (Germany) and Nemko AB (Norway) have been appointed first CAT-iq 2.0 test laboratories.

The CAT-iq 2.0 certification program is on track and will start in September, enabling the market launch of CAT-iq 2.0 products before the end of 2010. The DECT Forum has appointed CETECOM and Nemko as Qualification Laboratories to assess and test products submitted by applicants in accordance with the test plan and the other procedures required by the CAT-iq 2.0 Qualification Program allowing products to be certified according to the specification. In addition to meeting the requirements for CAT-iq certification, both laboratories are accredited by their national accreditation bodies as being compliant with the standard ISO/IEC 17025.

“With the appointment of CETECOM and Nemko as the first test houses for CAT-iq 2.0 certification we are confident that we have selected the most experienced and reliable partners”, says Daniel Hartnett, Chairman of the CAT-iq Working Group within the DECT Forum. “With these appointments, the certification of CAT-iq 2.0 can start in September 2010. I am expecting market launch of certified CAT-iq 2.0 products before the end of this year.”

“We are very pleased to be selected by the DECT Forum as a certified test house for the CAT-iq 2.0 certification”, says Andreas Ehre, Head of Business Development, CETECOM ICT Services Germany. “Our long expertise in global testing and certification services in communication technologies – including our role as qualification test laboratory for CAT-iq 1.0 certification – guarantees that we will be able to meet the strong demands of the DECT Forum and the entire wireless communication industry.”

“Nemko services include full testing and certification of wireless telecommunications products“, says Frode Sveinsen, Chief Engineer, Nemko Norway. “Our laboratories are all highly recognized in their respective markets. We are pleased that Nemko as a test house will be part of the deployment of the CAT-iq technology from the very beginning.“

Google is reportedly prepping an audio ad platform that will be integrated into its upcoming streaming music service. That’s according to MediaPost, which reports that the 10, 15 and 30 second audio ads will support the music service.

That service, reportedly coming as soon as November, will sell music online and notably stream purchased music — and music stored on home computers — to Android mobile devices. That makes it a competitor not only to iTunes but also to streaming services like Pandora. Google’s music service will be linked with its search platform and may even include YouTube.

The inclusion of audio ads in such a service isn’t surprising, as MediaPost points out. Back in February 2009, Google dropped its broadcast radio ad program to focus on streaming audio ads.

The quest for connectivity continues to drive Consumer Electronics (CE) manufacturers to enable their products with Wi-Fi technology. The next 5 years will see an increase in the number of Wi-Fi-enabled devices, from over 500 million in 2009 to nearly 2 billion in 2014, according to In-Stat. Devices leading the pace of adoption include Blu-ray players/recorders, e-readers, and digital televisions.
 
Some of the research findings include:

• Mobile devices with Wi-Fi will still dominate shipments.  In 2013, shipments of mobile phones with embedded Wi-Fi are projected to exceed ¾ of a billion units.
• E-readers Wi-Fi attach rates will increase from 3% in 2009 to 88% by 2014. 
• 29 million digital picture frames will be shipped in 2014; 53% will be Wi-Fi-enabled.

Specifically, this research provides a five-year forecast for Wi-Fi CE devices, and CE device shipments and Wi-Fi attach rates, segmented for: 
Gaming Consoles 
DTVs
Set-Top Boxes
Personal Video Recorders
DVD and Blu-ray Players 
Media Adapters 
Printers 
Multifunction Peripherals 
Handheld Games 
PMPs
Digital Cameras 
Portable Camcorders and IP Network Cameras
PDAs
Mobile PCs 
Portable CE Devices 
Cellular Handsets 
Routers, Residential Gateways, and Standalone Access Points

Virtualisation and connectivity have allowed a rebirth of hosted solutions. Today’s incarnation – cloud services – seek to provide large enterprises as well as small or medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) with scalable, affordable and secure access to applications and infrastructure over public or private networks.

Lack of IT staff, high-cost IT resources, consumer adoption of social networking hosted solutions, a move towards simplified enterprise network environments, remote working, mobility and capital limitations are driving the technology industry towards cloud services. However, traditional channels to market and legacy vendors in the space provide large barriers to adoption for cloud solutions.

This report presents a five-year worldwide enterprise cloud services forecast by channel to market. This approach allows communications service providers (CSPs) and vendors to understand their unique positioning in the market and plan for future growth in the eight regions of the world.

Enterprise cloud services: worldwide forecast 2010–2015 by Analysys Mason answers the followingquestions:

• What is the global opportunity for cloud services for CSPs, vendors and registered IT partners?
• What is the large enterprise versus SME opportunity for cloud services?
• What is the opportunity for cloud services in developed Asia–Pacific, Central and Eastern Europe, Central and Latin America, emerging Asia-Pacific, the Middle-East and North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, North America and Western Europe?
• Which key technology areas – applications and infrastructure – are leading the way into cloud services?
• Which application and infrastructure vendors are thought-leaders for cloud services?
• What are the market drivers for cloud services?

Although slow progress best describes the fate of wireless HD chip vendors in 2010, the five-year outlook is for a robust triple-digit growth rate of wireless HD video-enabled products through 2014 according to In-Stat.  The number of shipments is projected to rise from the current levels of less than 1 million to nearly 13 million by 2014.


Some of the findings include:

• Alternative video transmission technologies, WHDI, WirelessHD, and WiGig Alliance, are vying for a dominant position.  Among the differentiating factors are whole-home range, price, and performance issues, single source, and time-to-market issues. 
• WHDI and WirelessHD chip ASPs will both fall over 25% annually through 2014. 
• WirelessHD, is championed by chipmaker SiBeam and backed by NEC, Panasonic, Samsung, Sony, Toshiba, and LG.   
• WHDI (backed by AMIMON) and WirelessHD (backed by SiBeam) device shipments will both grow at triple-digit annual percentage rates through 2014.   
• WiGig Alliance members include: Broadcom, Dell, Intel, LG Electronics, Microsoft, NEC, Nokia, NXP, Panasonic, and Samsung. 
• Strong competitive technologies include various flavors of Wi-Fi, Intel’s Wireless Display (WiDi) initiative, and Sony’s TransferJet.

Recent In-Stat research “Wireless HD Video Technology:  WHDI and WirelessHD Establish Market, While WiGig Establishes Specification”, explores the three key wireless HD video transmission technologies of WHDI, WirelessHD, and WiGig Alliance. The report tracks the annual penetration through 2014 of all three technologies into 14 different applications within the following product segments:

• Consumer Electronics
• Personal Computers 
• Mobile Phones 
• Industrial/Medical applications

Despite all the hype around mobile apps, only a minority of consumers download them on a monthly basis. Research released this week based on a survey of more than 25,000 European adults shows that only 4 per cent of all mobile users and 15 per cent of smartphone users download apps at least once per month.

According to Forrester, the researcher which carried out the survey, the fact that 21 per cent of all European mobile users consider apps to be an important feature when choosing a new mobile handset highlights a large gap between the limited actual usage of apps and consumer awareness.

This limited usage is primarily due to the combination of two factors: identified as the small number of exhaustive offerings available, and the fact that only recently shipped smartphones come with native application stores embedded.

The exception to this rule, unsurprisingly, is Apple, with 64 per cent of European iPhone users downloading apps on a monthly basis. But while the numbers look impressive — more than five billion downloads and $1bn paid to developers in the two years since the launch of the Apple App Store – Forrester analyst Thomas Husson expects that the limited number of paid apps means it is likely that a significant number of independent developers have not recouped their investments.

Husson notes that the recent launch of Apple’s iAd platform is a way for Apple to maintain attractiveness, allowing third parties that provide free apps to develop sustainable business models. But he also notes that in the longer run – with around 80 would-be application stores available worldwide as of June 2010 – few players will be able to address the key factors that will make them a success.

In this respect, Husson argued that the market opportunity for app stores is somewhat overhyped, and said players should be looking at sources of inspiration other than Apple to provide a unique user experience. “Expect successful players to look at Amazon.com and Facebook, which provide open platforms with unique social, personalization, and recommendation features, rather than to copy and paste Apple’s model,” Husson said. Indeed, we can expect the concept of app stores to expand to other connected devices and platforms.

Successful market players will be those capable of creating a viable business model for third parties and developers; providing third parties with marketing and merchandizing tools; and those offering a wide choice of payment and pricing options along the lines of in-application billing, operator billing, and subscription models.

According to a new research report from the analyst firm Berg Insight, the installed base of smart electricity meters in Europe will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 17.9 percent between 2009 and 2015 to reach 111.4 million at the end of the period. Providing consumers with detailed information about their electricity consumption the new generation of meters give customers control over energy costs and create financial incentives for energy savings. Moreover smart meters constitute the core building blocks in future smart grids that will incorporate a wide range of technologies related to renewable generation, distribution network optimisation and energy conservation.

The report identifies France, Spain and the UK as the next countries in Europe where smart metering will become introduced, following major rollouts in Italy and the Nordic region. “In the past year, EDF, Endesa and Iberdrola – three of the absolutely largest electricity network operators in Europe – have launched large-scale pilots in France and Spain, respectively. Next year, these deployments will evolve into nationwide rollouts in these countries”, said Tobias Ryberg, Senior Analyst, Berg Insight. “On top of that, the UK’s largest electricity and gas retailer British Gas has launched the first major smart metering project for residential customers in the country. These developments in combination with rollouts in several other European countries will drive strong market growth over the next five years.”

Mark Mulligan, Vice President, Research Director at Forrester Research had posted in interesting posting about a research done by Forrester about the digital music services industry.
Here starts his blog.

I’ve been covering the digital music space for over a decade now and in that time I’ve seen a lot of services and devices come and go. I’ve also seen a lot of lessons learned and there is clearly more choice of high-quality music services and products now than at any stage before. And yet there is one major Achilles' heel which continues to cripple the market: poor service-to-device journeys. We have great services and we have great devices. But we have very few great service and device combinations. Pitifully few companies put anything like enough focus on the service-to-device journey (or if they do, they execute poorly). Just as much effort needs to be invested in ensuring services are fully integrated and optimized for supported devices as in building the services and devices themselves. Otherwise: great device + great service = poor experience.

So, in the Consumer Product Strategy team at Forrester, we decided to do something about this problem and created a new methodology that will help product strategists build winning service/device combinations.  We call it the Convenience Quotient of Music Experience. For those not familiar with Forrester’s Convenience Quotient, it is based on a very simple equation:

Convenience = benefits – barriers.

We’ve launched the methodology in a new report entitled ‘Which Device Offers The Best Music Experience?’ (And I’ll answer that question in just a moment).

In total, we applied 35 scores across a series of barriers and benefits, all of which were designed to assess the quality of the music experience across the service and device. Our benefits ranged from a good out-of-the-box experience, through music access, to device functionality. Barriers captured issues such as intrusive rights protection, interruptions to service availability, and technology challenges.

Read the complete blog.

China accounted for 37% of all new broadband Internet subscribers added worldwide in the first quarter of 2010, according to new statistics from iSuppli. And with the country's rapid growth set to continue, the analyst firm is urging vendors to work on a long-term China strategy or risk missing out on a highly lucrative market.

The company did not provide full subscriber figures for Q1, but said that China saw sequential growth of 57% during the quarter, making it the fastest growing global market. Based on figures from April and May, the second quarter will likely see "the blistering growth" continue, iSuppli added, predicting that new additions for that quarter will hit 5.5 million.

iSuppli forecasts that China will be home to 183.9 million broadband subscribers by 2014, up from 103.2 million in 2009.

Ratliff pointed out that growth in China is being driven at least in part by a government stimulus plan that will see $22 billion injected into the rollout of fibre access networks in the country by the end of 2011; the project will cover the establishment of over 80 million fibre broadband ports. Naturally, the analyst firm predicts that Chinese vendors such as Huawei, ZTE, Shanghai Bell Alcatel, and others will be the main beneficiaries of the stimulus programme and of broadband growth in China. But there is still an opportunity for foreign players. iSupplis recommends that Western vendors partner with local Chinese companies or deepen their existing ties with the top domestic vendors.