Spotify hits 15m users

Spotify, the music streaming service has now reached over 15m active users and over 4m paying users.

Though Spotify are not in Apple's league with iTunes, they are gaining ground and if they can continue to grow and get traction with paying users (and the licensing authorities don't put their pricing up) they may actually succeed and keep going.

Radio Bhutan: Mary Vincent Interviewed by Dasho Paljor Jigmie Dorji on Patient Outcomes & Environmental Monitoring System

Mary Vincent Interviewed by Dasho Paljor Jigmie Dorji at Radio Bhutan in Thimphu on the Global Health Research Foundation 'Patient Outcomes & Environmental Monitoring System' (Mobile Health and Environment Apps)

Mary Vincent Radio Bhutan Interview by Dasho Paljor Jigmie Dorji on Patient Outcomes & Environmental Monitoring System 2012 from Mary Vincent on Vimeo.

BT installs a lot of WiFi

BT has installed 500,000 (HALF A MILLION) WiFi access points in London and the Olympic Park in Stratford to cope with the number's of users on site. When spectators are leaving one game and the next set arriving there can be up to 300,000 people on the site and that's a hard peak to cope with. Operators (Everything Everywhere, O2 and Vodafone) are offering their customers free access to around 4,000 of the WiFi access points to off-load the mobile networks which will be creaking under the loads. BT has installed around 3,000 miles of fibre and the network is carrying about 60GB/s (i.e. around 480Gb/s). BT has installed around four times the capacity that was available at the Beijing games.

LOCOG bans mobile hotspots

Visitors to any of the Olympic events can bring smartphones and other devices, but are not allowed to bring mobile hotspots or 3G hubs, these are prohibited along with many items (you'd usually expect) and are listed here. Though difficult to police this is probably just to avoid WiFi interference as it's really difficult to maintain healthy signals when there are lots of random devices transmitting. There are also possibly security implications as any WiFi traffic going through the official access points can be logged, while random 3G access points would require tapping at the 3G network, which isn't so easy. Policing (if it happens) will probably be reactive when someone complains they cant access WiFi when they should be able to. Then searching out rogue hotspots is relatively easy and they can be quickly located and shut down (and anybody using a rogue 3G hotspot can be ejected and banned from future events).

Qualcomm drops Mirasol

Qualcomm has decided not to continue developing the Mirasol colour e-ink display solution, though it will license the technology to other parties. Mirasol uses a MEMS display that uses low power and can produce both static displays suitable for reading and if required video (though higher power is required in that mode as the display only uses power when the image changes). One major advantage of Mirasol is that it performs well in outdoor conditions under sunlight. Qualcomm originally purchased Iridigm Display in 2004 for $170m and subsequently purchased Pixtronix for $175m in January 2012 to strengthen the Mirasol technology. Qualcomm is still going to utilise Mirasol for niche applications but will adopt a licensing model for general use.

The Green Grid (TGG) announces Climate Savers Computing Initiative (CSCI) Will Move Under The Green Grid Brand

On July 19, 2012, The Green Grid (TGG) announced that the Climate Savers Computing Initiative (CSCI) will move its programs and membership under The Green Grid brand to build on TGG’s success in improving resource efficiency in information technology and data centers. 
TGG and CSCI will fuse their separate but closely aligned resources together to accelerate the implementation of energy efficiency and sustainability within the IT and communications industries. 
As the global authority on resource efficient information technology and data centers, TGG
focuses its efforts on business computing ecosystems holistically, including all IT, facility and infrastructure systems.
CSCI, the international consortium focused on reducing carbon footprint of information and communications technologies (ICT) through improvements in energy efficiency and power management of devices, has helped the industry reduce its energy usage and CO2 emissions by 41-45M tons per year. With CSCI integrated into TGG, the plan is to cover the entire computing and communications ecosystem – from data centers to personal computers.

Ofcom announces 4G auction

Ofcom the super regulator has published a statement on the forthcoming 4G auction of 800MHz and 2.6GHz spectrum.

The 800MHz spectrum has become available due to the switching off of analogue television services (the digital divide) while 2.6GHz was reserved for future IMT-2000 (3G) services.

The 800MHz spectrum will be auctioned as 2 x 30 MHz blocks (paired spectrum) while the 2.6GHz band will consist of 2 x 70MHz blocks and a 50 MHz single (unpaired) block. This spectrum amounts to an 80% increase on all spectrum allocated to date.

Existing spectrum holders can bid for increased allocations, though spectrum will be reserved for a new entrant (i.e. one that isn't Telefonica O2, Everything Everywhere and Vodafone), this new entrant could be Hutchison 3G (who currently do not have any 2G i.e. sub 2 GHz spectrum.

The 800MHz licensee will have to meet 98% indoor coverage which implies 99.5% outdoor coverage, by 2017. The licensee will also have obligations to cover 95% of the populations of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Ofcom will not reserve any spectrum for low power localised services, though a low power provider can apply for a national license.

Ofcom is reserving spectrum portfolios for a new entrant, these are

Portfolio	800 MHz	1800 MHz	2.6 GHz
1	2 x 15 MHz
2	2 x 10 MHz		2 x 10 MHz
3	2 x 5 MHz	2 x 15 MHz
4		2 x 15 MHz	2 x 20 MHz

EverythingEverywhere have to relinquish 2 x 15 MHz paired spectrum as part of their arrangements with the EU when they combined T-Mobile and Orange. Ofcom have considered the request from EverythingEverywhere as to allow them to ref arm their 1800 MHz spectrum for LTE us independently from this spectrum auction and will announce its results later this year.

Ofcom has published a draft legal document which implements the auction rules, the consultation will close on 11th September 2012.

Ofcom will invite application to bid before the end of 2012 with the auction starting in 2013 and licenses awarded in March 2013.

Winners of spectrum are expected to roll-out LTE services on the new spectrum starting in the middle of 2013 with consumer services being available after that.

Ofcom to start charging Telcos for scarce number blocks

Ofcom, the Super Regulator that looks after telecoms, spectrum, broadcasting and media and now the Post Office has published a statement on "Promoting efficient use of geographic telephone numbers". This is a fundamental change to the way Ofcom issues telephone numbers as it will now charge telecommunications providers for number blocks. This initially only applies to 11 exchanges where numbers are in short supply (these will now have a 5 digit area codes). This change will also mean that in these areas local users will have to dial the full telephone number including the area code instead of just the local part of the code. This is so that 0 and 1 can be used in the local part of the code (i.e. Bournemouth has the 01202 area code and the local part is ABCDEF, currently the A digit can not be 0 or 1 or there would be confusion when dialing numbers starting with 0 or 1 such as 118XXX, by enforcing the area code is dialed, this adds another 200,000 local codes). Smaller providers likely to suffer Many telecoms providers just reserve numbers across all the area codes so if a customer joins their service (whether it's a traditional landline telco or a new VoIP service) customers can just get a local number (many VoIP providers allow customers to select their own number). This has been the way to do things ever since the telecomms market was deregulated by the Communications Act 2003. Now providers will have to pay for these blocks of numbers in these protected area codes and blocks of 100 numbers can be purchased at a time (in unprotected areas allocation normally occurs in blocks of 10,000 which is legacy and due to the fact that providers have to tell all the other telcos what blocks they own and this was done by sending faxes around). This will generally only burden the smaller operators such as VoIP providers who are running on very thin margins and having ot pay for number blocks will directly impact their revenue models. Players such as BT will be affected but the actual percentage costs will be negligible. It's also an issue as this is a retrograde charge so all providers who have numbers allocated in the protected areas will have to start paying for them and since previously blocks were made up of 10,000 numbers those bills could be large. Obviously the networks can return them to Ofcom, but this may be problematic if numbers haven't been issued sequentially from the start of the block as then the provider may have to pay for 100 numbers even though only 1 has been allocated in that 100 block. Future The UK is an anomaly and many countries already charge for number allocations. If this pilot scheme works for Ofcom, it's likely to make this happen for all number allocations and not just for areas which have a shortage of numbers available. This then will have a major impact on the smaller providers. Unfortunately the UK is actually hindered by having such a a well established telecommunications system as many of the processes involved have been around for 10's of years and they are still in operation and very hard to change.

Samsung gets serious with mobile chips

Samsung is buying the mobile chipset division of Cambridge Silicon Radio (CSR) for $310m. This will add Wi-Fi, GPS and Bluetooth chipsets to Samsung's already hefty portfolio as well as 310 employees and the IP. CSR was formed in 1998 and went public in 2004 and was one of the 'blue eyed' technology companies that was ahead of its time and it dominated the world of Bluetooth followed by GPS and WiFi. Unfortunately in recent times its mobile chipsets haven't been doing so well due to lacklustre sales from partners Nokia and RIM and revenues have fallen by 50% over the last 2 years. Samsung get a "worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free, non-exclusive license of CSR's intellectual property rights used in its handset connectivity and location products" which means less royalty payments for them while other handset manufacturers will now have to pay Samsung. Samsung will also get a stronger hold over Apple as they already manufacture the A4 and A5 chipsets, provide some of the retina displays and now own the CSR components used by Apple too. The combined GPS/WiFi/Bluetooth/FM combined chipset market is dominated by Broadcom who control 51% of the market, followed by Texas Instruments (31%), now Samsung play take a bigger role in this $3bn market. Samsung have also taken a 4.9% in the remaining part of CSR.

The Draft Communications Data Bill - why it's posiibly evil

The Government is proposing a new Act of Parliament, currently known as the Draft Communications Data Bill or DCDB, which will effectively give them access to all your Internet activity. The premise behind this is that they want to be able to fight the war against terrorism and other "crimes enabled by Email and the Internet" as Theresa May put it. There are already measures in place allowing the Goverment to get hold of data from ISPs. The most recent piece of legislation follows on from a European directive known as the Data Retention Directive 2002/24/EC which ensures Internet Service Providers (ISPs) or telecommunication providers (telcos) maintain logs for 12 months (of data they already collect). This generally relates to such things as billing records or call records (i.e. who made a call to whom and for how long), but the important but is that ISPs/Telcos only need to retain what they already store and aren't required to log anything new. The Regulation of Investigatory Powers (RIPA) allows the authorities (and this is where it gets nasty) to ask an ISP to store specific data about a customer (without letting the customer know or anyone else know as that's an offence under RIPA too). The 'authorities' covers a wide range of organisations and can be the normal suspects such as the Police or Government angencies and also your local council and other angencies (for example may be investigation benefit fraud). There are other oddities in the Act so if your sending encrypted Emails, you can be asked to surrender the encryption keys and it's an offence not to hand them over and you can languish in jail until you do. The DCDB extends these powers so that ISPs will have to monitor more services and store more information about users. This includes things like emails (who sent an email to who and at what time) and what websites are being visited, it may also extend to VoIP calls (which might originate from say a VoIP phone used by the customer but the service used it not run by the ISP). Most ISPs don't monitor these things and don't actually have the equipment to do so and the Government is proposing to put 'black boxes' into the ISPs' network and they will do the snooping. Currently the Government will pay for the boxes. This sounds reasonably fair but as with everything there are potential issues. There are very companies that have the technology to do this, but there are a few so it's likely that the Government will just use them. This means that they are known systems and they'll be the target of every hacker as they'll be storing a wealth of useful information that will be valuable to someone. Most ISPs are using fast internal networks running at 1 Gigabit per second (Gb/s), some are using 10 Gb/s networks and some even 40 Gb/s networks (and in future networking technologies will increase to 100 Gb/s). The black boxes will work at a specified speed (say currently at 1 GB/s) so if an ISP increases the network speeds, more black boxes will have to be installed in order to keep up with the increased network traffic. Who then pays for more boxes? The Government may try and restrict the ISPs from increasing the network speeds so they don't have to install faster or more boxes. This already happens in countries where their Governments have resticted policies on what customers can view etc. The Government may also want to snoop on web traffic, that's pretty easy when it's normal HTTP traffic as you'd use to visit say The Next Web as the ISP can just put a web proxy and force all web traffic through the proxy and log whatever's been requested and send the request on the the actual site that's been requested by the customer. It may be slightly slower, but the customer wouldn't know that the traffic has been intercepted. However sites also use HTTPS or encrypted HTTP. This is where it gets very nasty as putting a proxy in the middle doesn't work. The web traffic is forced to the proxy and it establishes the encryption protocols to the proxy and the proxy then starts it's own encryption to the desired site. Except that the browser 'knows' that it's not really the remote site as the encryption certificate wont match what the browser's expecting and thus the little padlock that shows that the connection is secure wont be locked and the customer knows the connection has been intercepted. It is possible to fake the secure connection (by installing a Government security certificate) on all the UK browsers, which is difficult but not impossible. This then would match all certificates issued by anyone and thus the proxy could pretend to be whatever site it wanted to and all UK browsers would believe it. However that's a HUGE security risk and anyone managing to break into the proxy could steal huge amounts of valuable data including secure connections to on-line banking and other services. Anyone stealing the Government certificate would also also be able to emulate any secure site they wanted to too. So if the DCDB does become the Communications Data Act, then ISPs may be forced to stiffle technology advances to ensure the Government can keep up with the snooping as well as making the UK a massive target for terrorists attacking the snooping systems themselves.

Candy Labs the new acquisition from Mindy Candy

Mind Candy the parent company of Moshi Monsters has acquired Origami Blue which will become Candy Labs their new R&D division. Origami Blue are a games studio based in Brighton formed by ex-Disney Blackrock studios creatives Edd Smith, Mark Knowles-Lee and James Ovnik to create world-class character animation and innovative experiences. Candy Labs will develop new intellectual property (IP) to allow Mindy Candy to bring out new entertainment in the digital and non-digital arenas. Though Moshi Monsters is huge (and still growing), there are more and more competitors emerging and this will allow Mindy Candy to expand its portfolio and keep themselves in the forefront of entertainment.