Author: Serkadis

On Wednesday, Google flipped the switch to provide data compression in its Chrome beta for Android, which can speed up your browsing experience while also using less mobile broadband capacity. You actually have to enable the experimental function on your Android device first — here’s how to do it — before seeing the results.

Since sharing that information, I’ve been using the data compression function on my Galaxy Note 2. It feels like a slight speed boost to me: Google is using SPDY web connections, compressing images to the WebP format and removing unnecessary page data such as information on blank space. But it’s difficult to quantify how much faster or how much data I’m saving.

It turns out that Google has a little flag in Chrome to show exactly how much broadband savings the compression feature brings. I found out about it by watching Google’s Mobile Web Thursday’s video for developers.

To see your data savings once the experimental compression feature is active, simply type chrome://net-internals in a Chrome browser tab. On the left side of the page that appears, you’ll see a number of options; tap the one for Bandwidth and you’ll get a handy little tablet showing the data savings for the current browser session as well as for all time.

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Apple (AAPL), Google (GOOG), Microsoft (MSFT) and other leading technology companies spend millions each year lobbying Washington, and now Samsung (005930) is learning that it too needs to grease the wheels a bit more actively if it hopes to compete with top rivals in the U.S. According to regulatory filings analyzed by Bloomberg, Samsung boosted its lobbying spend to $900,000 in 2012, up 500% from $150,000 in 2011. Rival Apple spent twice that amount in 2012 and Google spent a whopping $18.2 million. Samsung’s lobbying expenses will likely rise even faster in 2013 as it continues to battle Apple in court.

Today, the world’s largest social network announced a sweeping overhaul to major UI motif News Feed. Photos are bolder — as are advertisements — and white space more generous. But the big change is uniformity, as Facebook offers a fairly consistent visual experience across devices. That’s a claim Google can’t make.

Still, Facebook looks lots more like Google+ — or will once changes roll out to everyone. That’s a good thing. Clutter creep long defines the Facebook user experience, something its rival avoids. Well, so far. But the larger social network isn’t copying Google+ so much as acting out of necessity. All that clutter in the browser overwhelms smaller device screens, particularly smartphones. To get similar UI across devices, something had to go — and come, too.

Four for One

Puffier photos will matter more on smartphone or tablet and in ways more meaningful, engaging friends, family and coworkers on the go. Presentation of other content, such as events, maps and news, is bolder, too. Emphasis on what matters most, what engages users, is smart focus, and where Facebook tried and failed before — well, if clutter measures misery.

To give up clutter, Facebook increases complexity, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There are four new News Feeds:

• All Friends is self-explanatory — everything friends share
• Following serves up news from Liked pages and followed Friends
• Music is part of Facebook’s push to become what MySpace once was to artists
• Photos feeds pics from Liked pages and, obviously, those that Friends will share

More News Feeds increases complexity, while also breaking up the flow of information. Google+ is more flexible by letting users create Circles of people that matter to them. Facebook takes tighter control for many reasons. Among them:

• Familiarity. People are used to News Feed. Something like Google+ Circles would be too radical for many users.
• Platform. Presumably, the social network would need to make radical back-end changes to offer an even more-flexible News Feed.
• Advertising. Facebook ads tend to be highly contextual based on user activity. The different categories, but Music and Photos particularly, are easily curated for marketing purposes.

One for All

Uniformity, and less clutter with it, is the big thing here — and not just to the 1-billion-plus users. Facebook wants to increase advertising revenues. Less clutter distracts from ads and uniformity makes placing and selling them much easier across platforms. Facebook doesn’t want to sell ads that appear just in desktop browsers, particularly as mobiles’ use grow.

Late last month, Facebook ended weeks of rumors by formally announcing acquiring Atlas Solutions from Microsoft. The social network plans to bolster ad management services for desktop and mobile, but the latter is an increasing priority — and for good reason.

During fourth quarter, Facebook reported 680 million mobile monthly active users, exceeding those on the desktop for the first time. That’s stunning 57-percent year-over-year increase, by the way. Mobile ad revenue rose to 23 percent of all advertising, up from 14 percent in third quarter.

The eyeballs Facebook wants to reach most increasingly look to mobile devices. From the perspective of where users want to be and where the ads need to be to reach them, uniform motif across devices is the right approach. Some investors agree. In late-day trading, Facebook shares are up more than 4 percent to $28.64.

Many Stories

Something else: During today’s announcement, CEO Mark Zuckerberg referred to the revamped Facebook as a “personalized newspaper”, with the users and their friends essentially the publishers. What would a newspaper be without advertising? The social network will provide plenty.

Interestingly, Google, which depends on advertising for the bulk of revenue, does nothing really to monetize its social network. Google+ isn’t anywhere as uniform across devices, nor are uncurated Circles as effective storytelling. Facebook’s redesign is all about telling stories — the people that matter most to you.

The two social networks now both use strong card-like motifs — Google+ even more so after design tweaks introduced yesterday. But based on Facebook demos, I see a much more contextual experience that’s visually more appealing — and accessible. Whether or not the storytelling is compelling depends on many factors — and how the News Feeds work in practice, rather than just demo, is high among them. At first blush, I’m impressed.

Facebook plans on rolling out the changes over many weeks. You can sign up for the waitlist here.

Houston, Texas is the favorite hosting location for the world’s most popular web sites, according to Pingdom, which has mapped the hosting universe using the top 1 million sites. The Pingdom survey found Houston was the clear winner, hosting 50,598 of those top million sites, followed by Mountain View, Calif. (29,594 sites), Dallas (24,822) and Scottsdale, Arizona (23,210).

Why are these locations ranked so highly? Not surprisingly, the top cities track with the locations of major hosting companies.

An example: Houston is the home to multiple data centers hosted by SoftLayer Technologies, which houses more than 100,000 servers across its infrastructure (see Who’s Got the Most Servers? for more). Because SoftLayer is a “host of hosts,” popular sites hosted by large providers like HostGator and Site5 also map to Houston. Hosting’s not the only game in town, as dozens of the world’s largest energy companies also host their infrastructure in the Houston area, much of it at CyrusOne.

Mountain View is home to Google, which operates many of the world’s most widely used web services, including hosting offerings like Blogger and Google App Engine. The numbers for Mountain View may also reflect some of the many sites hosted in data centers in adjacent Silicon Valley hosting hubs, like Sunnyvale and Santa Clara.

Dallas is home to more than 50 data centers for many of the world’s leading hosts, including Rackspace, SoftLayer, CI Host, Colo4Dallas, Savvis and Terremark/Verizon, as well as major hosting buildings such as the INFOMART and 2323 Bryan (the Univision building).

Scottsdale is the location of domain registrar GoDaddy, which is also one of the world’s largest shared hosting providers (for a closer look at the company’s operations, see Inside Go Daddy’s Phoenix Data Center). Scottsdale is also home to a major multi-tenant data center for IO.

While most of the top 20 cities in the Pingdom survey are familiar to followers of the data center industry, there are some that aren’t immediately obvious. Brea? That would be Brea, California, which is where DreamHost houses some of its operations.

For more including a map and photo, see the post over at Pingdom. For additional coverage, see Houston Hosts More than 50K of the Top Million Websites at The WHIR.

TouchPal, a versatile software keyboard long available for Android and iOS devices is now on the big screen: Microsoft Windows 8 computers. On Thursday, CooTek, the company behind the software announced its new Windows 8 touchscreen support.

The free keyboard software is meant to speed up input while also making it easier to type, doing so with an on-screen keyboard that can be configured and resized. Word prediction is also a feature. And fans of the Swype keyboard interface used by many mobile keyboards will be happy to see gesture-based typing. You can trace out words by sliding your finger from letter to letter using the TouchPal Curve function:

There’s certainly nothing wrong with the default software keyboard that Microsoft includes with Windows 8, but it’s nice to see some third-party options in the market. Even better: some of the better functions found in mobile device keyboards are making their way onto larger displays to help improve the typing experience.

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The Street has called for Apple (AAPL) to launch a low-end iPhone that will help it attack emerging markets, but it also continues to panic over what might happen to the company’s margins once the new phone launches. Barclays Capital is the latest firm to revive the Apple margin conversation and it lowered its price target on Apple shares to $530 from $575 in the process. In a recent note picked up by ValueWalk on Thursday, Barclays analysts argue that Apple must somehow prove to investors that margins will not dip below 35%.

Continue reading…

Now that it’s spent some time trying to navigate the gap between churning out PC accessories and actual, honest-to-goodness gaming computers, the folks at Razer have seen fit to look for some experts for guidance. To that end, Razer announced earlier today that it has appointed entrepreneur and former VoodooPC founder Rahul Sood to serve as advisor to the company’s board of directors.

While Sood’s recent turns as GM of Microsoft’s Bing Fund angel fund/incubator and as head of Microsoft’s new global startups group have a strictly entrepreneurial bent, he’s no stranger to the sorts of issues that Razer (and CEO Min-Liang Tan) are facing. If anything, he seems like a natural fit for the role given his own experience crafting a business out of game-centric hardware — his first venture, VoodooPC, operated as a high-end gaming PC boutique of sorts before being acquired by HP in mid-2006.

His recent endeavors have taken him away from his roots as a champion of PC gaming performance, but Sood still seems to look at the PC gaming space with some degree of fondness. In a statement released by Razer earlier today, Sood noted that he saw the company as “the spiritual successor to [his] previous work at VoodooPC,” a sentiment he first expressed publicly after spending some time with Razer’s pricey Blade gaming laptop last year.

Frankly, Razer could use a bit of guidance. After carving out a name for itself as a proprietor of popular gaming mice and keyboards, it’s relatively newfound zeal for peculiar computers took some by surprise. While the Blade gaming laptop soon gained a rabid following for its no-compromise approach to gaming portables, the company is now looking to make another splash with its Razer Edge gaming tablet. Tablets and high-end gaming are two things that have arguably never gone well together, and Sood’s experience bringing these sorts of enthusiast devices to market could be a big boon for Razer.

My joy at receiving Nexus 7 32GB HSPA as a day-after-Christmas present turned to deep disappointment just two weeks later. Google replaced the device, and a second runs down the battery in about 15 hours, whether sitting idle or actively used. Near as I can tell, and others share my problem, Android 4.2 is root problem. My woes with the replacement tablet started with the point-two update, while others suffering similar misery report troubles with 4.2.1. Google really needs to fix this problem. Fast.

I wasted many hours troubleshooting. The prescribed fix is restore and reset, which I’ve done about a half-dozen times. No change. Perhaps the cellular radio drains the battery fast. I removed the SIM. No change. Maybe one of my apps keeps Nexus 7 from going idle. I restored and set up with my wife’s Google account. No change. The battery app consistently lists the “screen” as top consumer, which suggests something prevents the tablet from going idle. Last night, I charged up. Nine hours and thirty-minutes later, there is 45 percent charge. At that rate, I’ll set a new record: 16 — maybe even 17 — hours to zero. What a lucky day this is.

Battery Drains When Off

My story starts with the returned tablet, which developed problems almost immediately after updating to Android 4.2.1. I observed unusually high battery drain when idle, considerably more than the 8GB tablet reviewed last summer. I got such good life, I didn’t think about it. Definitely days. Stated standby in Google product marketing is 300 hours, 8 hours used. I easily got as good or better.

I never found out how much with the first 32 gigger, because the tablet got so little screen time before dying. Being busy the week after Christmas, I let Nexus 7 sit idle for three or four days, only to find the screen dark when looking to use it. My 8GB model never burned down the charge that fast. I plugged in, charged up and didn’t worry. This time, I turned off the device. Two days later, the tablet wouldn’t turn on. WTH? Plugging in revealed a dead battery. While off!

On January 11, I posted to Google+ asking if anyone knew if the 3G radio somehow remained on even when the device was off and explained: “The last two times I turned off the tablet after using. Both times, the second this morning, Nexus 7 wouldn’t turn on. Black screen…all attempts to resuscitate my device have failed. I’m unhappy returning it; being new and not much used”.

I called Google Play customer support, which after hearing my problem and troubleshooting efforts, quickly processed a return. I received an email with link to order a new device at no charge, but got a $299 temporary authorization placed on my credit card (in case the defective unit wasn’t returned). The replacement arrived two days later, and I shipped back the old one. Battery life returned to being exceptional.

Replacement Tablet Troubled, Too

But that changed after updating to Android 4.2.2. which started rolling out to Nexus devices on February 11. On Sunday February 17, I asked on Google+ if any one else had problems with battery drain:

Yesterday, I awoke to find the tablet dark, about 18 hours after charging. Nexus 7 wouldn’t respond even after an hour on the socket. So I tried USB port on Surface Pro, which stirred some life. I later plugged into electrical and charged. This morning, I awoke to the battery drained again, well, nearly. Just 5 percent. This is highly abnormal. I did update to Android 4.2.2 either Thursday or Friday, I don’t recall which.

If you check the online forums, many posters warn never to let Nexus 7 run down the battery, because restarting the device can be rather difficult.

The failed troubleshooting started. Two days later, I lamented: “For my purposes, the device is ruined. Battery life is consistently 15 hours or less no matter how little or much used. Sitting idle, unused, battery burns down in 15 hours. Gone are days of stand-by time”.

While I had searched online for anyone else having problems, not until the weekend just passed did my efforts produce something enlightening and disappointing: Google Group discussion about Nexus 7 battery problems. The first post is November 18. Android 4.2 released five days earlier.

Nexus-shared Misery

Not only was I not alone, but other Google device owners had problems with Android 4.2 and 4.2.1, too. Some struggled with Galaxy Nexus as well. Muhammad Mulla posts about the 8GB Nexus 7:

I have found that after the Nexus 7 OTA update to Android 4.2, my battery is draining a lot more quickly. There is also a square shape appearing on the side of the unlock screen. The battery drain issue is the most concerning, however. Previously the screen would be the highest power consumer, as it should be. Now, since the 4.2 update, battery drain is showing as 51 percent for Android OS, Google services as 13 percent and the screen as 9 percent. I am finding time between charges to be much shorter with similar usage.

Strange, for me, screen time increased with discharging problems. He, like me, runs stock Android, unrooted. “I am having exactly the same issue, in fact mine is draining even when ‘sleeping’”, Paul Apted responds. “If I leave the Nexus in sleep mode at night, in the morning it has gone through 40 percent of the battery. On other forums a reset is suggested”.

That didn’t work for me, while other posters report success.

“After a factory reset my standby usage was better, but after about a week it went bad again (mostly ‘Android OS’)”, Joel Luth posts. Then he states what I also observed: “We’re chasing multiple causes for the standby battery drain. Some of us see Android OS as the big consumer, others Play, Maps, Google Services, whatever. What helps one person may not help others because they have a different root problem”.

December-vintage Devices

While different Nexus device users report similar battery-drain problems, there is little consistency what the device shows as the biggest consumer. Charge-to-zero times vary, as well. I should feel lucky. DionJL says his “tablet rubs through a full charge in under 11 hours with no use”.

On my replacement Nexus 7, battery doesn’t discharge when turned off. Helen Ochej reports same kind of problem I had with my first 32GB model, which is same purchase vintage as hers:

I’ve had my Nexus 7 since December 2012. I don’t use it every day, so I turn if off when I’m done with it. After several days of not using it, I find the battery totally discharged. The first time this happened, I recharged it, but had to reboot to get it to display. It just doesn’t seem to hold a charge very long when it is not used every day. I’m disappointed when I pick it up when I’m going out, only to find it totally dead.

There are plenty more posts like these, lots of troubleshooting stories and modest success. Poster mrsi reports battery problems after updating to Android 4.2 — resolved by what I consider drastic action: “If you go to settings -> apps -> swipe to show ALL -> then select ‘google play services’, you can hit DISABLE. This asked me whether I wanted to uninstall the updates to this app — I said yes. Viola. My Nexus 7 now lasts 72 hours again on standby”.

Evan Selinske “Got my Nexus tab on Xmas — worked great for two days while I ignored the prompts to update. After doing so, the battery drain was immediate and dramatic”. He observed Google Play services as “running constantly no matter what I did so I ignored all the dire warnings and disabled it. Result: After one day (it’s early, I know) all seems peachy. Except of course for the effing update in the first place”.

I haven’t tried that one yet.

Report from Google+

Last night I posted again to Google+ about my battery woes, asking who else might have them. Brian Fagioli has “battery drain on WiFi Nexus 7 since 4.2.2”. Kevin Gault is “running into the same battery drain on my GNex after going to 4.2.2. With so many having battery drain issues, I’m thinking it is more an issue with the OS than the hardware”.

At this point, I get about 5 percent of the standby time that Google marketing promises. That’s unacceptable. Nexus 7 is pretty much useless to me now. I can’t sell it for enough, not wanting to pass on the problem to someone else. I may see if Google Play will issue a refund. Whichever, something is not right here.

Over the past four years, TV makers have shipped about a billion television sets. If you combined them, that would be equivalent to a single TV set with a 330-million-square-meter screen, according to IHS, a market research company. That is about the same size as the country of Norway. Of course, no one knows what screen size those sets have, but it’s still a fun (if unscientific) stat. As for me, I am about to move and so I am getting rid of all the screens in my house except for four: MacBook Pro (Retina), iPad (Original), Kindle Paperwhite and iPhone5. Everything else is going to eBay.

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If you wanted to find the “homes” of the world’s top web sites, the United States would be a good place to start given that 43 percent of the top 1 million sites are hosted there. But according to data released Thursday by Royal Pingdom the top city for hosting is Houston, which hosts a little more than 5 percent of the top sites. How did one of every 20 web sites end up in the Bayou City?

My first guess was that Houston has a lot of data center space, but data from Telegeography shows the city has roughly 400,000 square feet of retail co-location space in the entire metropolitan area, which is a far cry from the 3 million square feet the San Francisco Bay area has, or even the 1 million that Austin, Texas has. So now, I’m frankly stumped.

Houston is home to 50,598 of the top million sites (as measured by Alexa), and it’s followed by Mountain View Calif. at No. 2 and Dallas at No. 3. In total, those million websites are hosted in almost 8,000 cities — 7,936 to be exact, so it’s possible that there’s one near you. But, as the chart below shows almost a quarter of the web’s sites are located in the top 10 cities.

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3D printing company Shapeways had a banner 2012 — it locked up a $6.2 million Series B last year in a round led by Lux Capital, and established a full-blown factory in Long Island City. And it’s hoping to make the process of designing and printing physical knickknacks even easier this year.

The plan? To inspire developers to create a slew of new design apps that hook into Shapeways’ printing and shipping workflow. To that end, the company officially released a new dev portal and REST-based API to developers and 3D-printing buffs earlier today.

For the uninitiated, Shapeways is essentially the cross between a 3D printing firm and a consumer-facing marketplace. Artists and designers who upload the digital blueprints for their wares to Shapeways can simply have them printed and shipped to them for their personal enjoyment, but they’re also able to set up shop and list the finished product(s) alongside a slew of others in hopes of making a sale.

The new API features some much-needed modifications like finer-grain controls when uploading models and the ability to generate real-time prices for models regardless of the materials and finishes desired, but the release speaks to a greater focus on apps as a means of creation.

“Apps are now a first-class entity on Shapeways,” said representative Elisa Richardson, who also noted that the company has plans to better showcase those apps going forward.

While the new API was only formally released this morning, Shapeways teamed up with a handful of developers during a private beta period to get a feel for what was possible using the API. The early results are rather nifty — a web app called MixeeMe allows users to design tiny Mii-esque avatars that can be printed and shipped, while TinkerCad acts as a full in-browser object-design tool that hooks into the API to pass along completed designs for printing.

With the API (and the apps that will eventually tap into it) Shapeways is clearly pushing to bring 3D printing to the mainstream. Part of its approach is to play up its consumer-facing side — Richardson also noted that the team is dedicated to showcasing the company’s “marketplace and manufacturing platform” with this launch. Not a bad move, especially considering that Shapeways has been treating some of its sellers rather well.

Shapeways notes on its official blog that the platform’s 8,000 shop owners made “nearly $500,000 in profits” last year, and CEO Peter Weijmarshausen told Forbes recently that he expects to see the first Shapeways millionaire some time next year. That said, Shapeways isn’t without competition — players like Cubify have marketplaces of their own (though arguably Cubify’s main focus is on selling its own 3D printers), and upstarts like Azavy are gearing up to throw hats into the 3D-printing ring.

As I wrote last week, the energy innovations of the future will need today’s machines. A young startup called Gridtential Energy is another example of this trend, and over the past three years has been quietly developing a better lead acid battery using chip and hard-disk drive manufacturing processes.

Cheap, low-performance lead acid batteries are commonly used to start gas-powered cars — you know, that battery that sometimes goes dead when you leave your lights on. But higher performance, better quality lead acid batteries are also used in devices like forklifts, wheelchairs, and golfcarts. That’s the first market that Gridtential wants to tackle, CEO Christiaan Beekhuis told me in an interview this week. Down the road the company wants to sell its batteries to power grid operators for applications like storage for a solar energy system.

Using a grant from the California Energy Commission, Gridtential was recently able to prove that several aspects of its lead acid battery are superior to the standard lead acid batteries currently on the market. The company’s batteries have twice the energy density (amount of energy they can store per volume) and also can cost between 50 to 90 percent less when used in bulk over time in a battery bank.

After achieving this milestone Gridtential recently raised a seed financing round of a little over $1 million led by The Roda Group, an investor in Berkeley, Calif. that has also backed startups in energy like algae fuel maker Solazyme and Internet firms like Ask.com. The company plans to raise more money down the road as it gets closer to commercialization.

IT machines

One of Gridtential’s core innovations is that it’s using manufacturing processes from the semiconductor and hard disk drive industry. Traditional lead acid batteries are made using lead plates with the active battery material pasted or printed onto the plate, which can make the layers thick and over time they can become detached from the plate. Gridtential is using the modern manufacturing techniques of the IT industry to create a thin layer of active material and have it bonded to the plate.

Beekhuis tells me that the manufacturing process makes the battery more robust (lasts longer), have a lot thinner active layer, and also makes for a lighter battery. The thin layer also means that the battery can charge and discharge with a higher efficiency, so it loses less energy to heat. In addition the Gridtential battery can be charged and discharged more than a regular battery, and can be charged and discharged to 80 percent of its capacity. In contrast basic lead acid batteries are more commonly charged and discharged closer to 40 to 50 percent of their capacity in order to make them last longer.

Beekhuis joined Gridtential in 2011 to help the team commercialize the technology. Previously he founded solar software company Fat Spaniel, which was sold to solar inverter maker Power-One.

Gridtential was founded by Peter Borden and Michele Klein back in 2010, and both entrepreneurs hail from Applied Materials. Borden developed solar manufacturing processes for Applied, and joined Applied after the chip manufacturing giant bought a processing company he founded. Klein developed energy storage technologies at Santa Clara University, and was a Senior Director at Applied Materials’ venture arm. Gridtential has just a handful of employees currently.

The startup, which is based in San Jose, Calif., plans to use the recently raised seed round to build, install and test alpha units of its batteries in real world settings. Commercial deployments aren’t expected until 2016.

Eventually when Gridtential wants to deploy its batteries commercially, the company can be fabless and can work with IT manufacturers on production. That means scaling up the technology can be a lot less expensive than building their own custom machines. For example, Gridtential has been working with Intevac, which is a major supplier of hard disk drive surfaces, on producing battery plates.

Other companies that are also using IT machines for production include thermoelectrics maker Alphabet Energy, and battery companies Imprint Energy and Seeo. In a year when funding for energy startups is very constrained, many of the new technologies that will emerge from the cleantech world will have to be built on standard low cost machines.

Still, building a battery startup from scratch is a very difficult thing to do. Another startup developing a better lead acid battery called Firefly Energy, which had raised funding from Khosla Ventures and the Quercus Trust, went bankrupt a couple years ago.

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Here’s a roundup of some of some of this week’s headlines from the network industry:

Mellanox launches Open Ethernet initiative.  Mellanox Technologies (MLNX) announced the “Generation of Open Ethernet” initiative, an alternative approach to traditional closed-code Ethernet switches. Mellanox, a high-speed networking specialist, says the program provides customers with full flexibility and freedom to custom-design their data center in order to optimize utilization, efficiency and overall return on investment. With open source networking and SDN trends, Mellanox Open Ethernet is a framework to eliminate proprietary software and encourags the development of an ecosystem environment focused on building Ethernet switch software to move innovation forward. It is supported on Mellanox’s 10/20/40/56GbE switches, with forward compatibility to future Mellanox Ethernet solutions. “The current landscape of proprietary Ethernet switches limits the foundation of compute and storage clouds and Web 2.0 infrastructures. We are excited to facilitate change and to lead the new generation of Open Ethernet that will enable a more open and collaborative world,” said Eyal Waldman, president, CEO and chairman of the board of Mellanox Technologies. “Mellanox Open Ethernet allows users to gain control of their network and data center, and to achieve higher utilization, efficiency and return on investment, and will enable our customers to add differentiation and competitive advantages in their networking infrastructure. We have been seeing wide and strong support for this initiative from our partners and users, and expect to see a growing community around our initiative.”

ADARA introduces Meta Controller.  ADARA Networks announced the introduction of the Ecliptic Meta Controller, a layer 1-7 controller, designed to address existing gaps within the Software Defined Networking (SDN) space. The controller enables the implementation of SDN for both service providers and enterprises of all sizes. It can implement and manage supervisory programs such as SDN controllers, cloud software, hypervisors and network hypervisors. This alleviates the need for multiple management systems and communication delays. The Ecliptic Meta Controller is available as software only for a fully virtualized solution, or software on either purpose-built or third party COTS Appliances. “As bandwidth demand from the network continues to increase, theere is a pent up need to strengthen network communication and create a smarter network,” said Eric Johnson, Chairman and CEO of ADARA Networks. “While SDN continues to gain steam, there are major gaps that exist in all common SDN approaches, architectures, products and capabilities. Through our work with our partners, ADARA has designed and engineered the Ecliptic Meta Controller to help address these gaps, which include the lack of a coordinated network and cloud computing orchestration and the absence of a responsive and robust operation in a production environment, among others.”

Cisco selected by St. Andrews Hospital.  Cisco (CSCO) announced that St. Andrews Hospital in Australia has selected Cisco Medical-grade Network (MGN) to develop the foundation for its digital future. The Cisco MGN is designed to support any application and any device. It enables an agile, flexible and dynamic networking environment.  The hospital has also implemented Cisco IP voice to facilitate communication and collaboration between surgeons, healthcare workers and patients. With its partners KPMG and Data Mobility Voice, St. Andrews Hospital deployed the network including Cisco Catalyst 3750-X Series Switches in the core, distribution and edge to support IP telephony and digital theatre environments. “With rapidly changing trends in point-of-care health services, real-time consultations with specialists and e-health records, we need to ensure that our intelligent network platform can support these new technologies.  It had to be highly secure, resilient, robust, with high redundancy capabilities and able to meet the Hospital’s future business requirements,” said Peter Cooper, Director: Engineering & Support Services, St. Andrews Hospital.

A fast LTE network isn’t very useful if there aren’t devices to use it. That obvious point may be why Reliance Industries (RIL) is set to “shake up the Indian telecommunications market” according to the Times of India. The publication’s sources say that RIL is close to striking a deal with Samsung for a low-cost, entry-level handset with LTE support.

The article, which I found by way of Sammy Hub, suggests that Samsung has agreed to create an entry-level smartphone priced at or near $100, the cost of which can be financed at no interest. This puts the target price near that of a Samsung 3G phone in India. Cheap voice, text and data plans for the LTE phone would then begin as low as as low as Rs 100 ($1.83) per month, although that’s likely a very limited plan.

But the development may have broader implications as well, with one Times of India source suggesting a bigger role for Samsung:

“Samsung will not be just another vendor to RIL supplying handsets as it was when Reliance Infocomm was launched in 2002. They are seeking a much broader role. A possible joint venture could also be in the offering.”

If true, that could give Samsung an even more prominent foothold in the populous nation and make it more difficult for both other LTE Android handset makers as well as Apple, to build up market share in the country. It’s still too early to make that call, however, as RIL isn’t expected to officially launch the LTE network until late this year (although a soft launch is expected in Mumbai and Delhi by mid-year.)

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Austin is ranked sixth out of U.S. cities when it comes to mobile download speeds, based on data collected by Root Metrics, the company that provides crowdsourced cell phone coverage maps. Averaged across the four national carriers Austin download speeds reach 12.3 Mbps, which is pretty zippy for the host of SXSW. Of course, with 25,000 people expected to converge on the Texas capital starting tomorrow for the interactive festival, those speeds will fall precipitously.

As most people are aware, more users mean slower speeds on cellular networks, as there are only so many airwaves available for cellular transmissions and only so many bits that equipment vendors can cram in to those hertz. While Wi-Fi offload will help, as will bringing in more cell towers, the truth of the matter is the network will be stressed. Unfortunately, stressed networks also mean your battery will drain faster, so pack that extra battery.

But how stressed? That’s the question GigaOM and RootMetrics wants to answer. When a tech savvy population toting the latest mobile tech hits a 4G city with good speeds, what happens? So the company is asking attendees to download its app (as a bonus once it’s downloaded you not only send information to RootMetrics about your experience, but you also get the coverage maps that can come in handy when you hit a dead zone) and tweet their service quality to @rootmetrics with the hashtag #SXSW.

So grab the app on iOS or Android, and go out there and party like it’s SXSW. We’ll publish the results afterward, so you can see exactly what happens when cell networks meet the geek hordes.

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I know that death awaits me somewhere in the shadows up ahead, moving fast along the floor or dangling from a ledge, embodied by a player who has better aim or is sharper with a bladed weapon.

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Colocation provider Telx said this week that DBR360’s public and private cloud solutions will be available at the NJR2 and NJR3 data center facilities located at the Telx campus in Clifton N.J. DBR360 will offer its Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to leverage Telx’s high-density of networks and interconnection services for both new and existing clients.

The Telx’s Clifton datacenter campus encompasses its NJR2 data center facility at 100 Delawanna Avenue and the soon to be completedNJR3  flagship facility. The Telx Clifton campus is a managed, carrier-neutral, secure environment for enterprises, digital media and bio-pharm companies, financial services, network providers and carriers. The expanded campus provides Telx and DBR360 customers with access to an end-to-end cloud and network infrastructure service for IT organizations with enterprise cloud performance.

“Uniting a robust network infrastructure into the cloud served is a natural fit for Telx’s high density network interconnection services,” said Anthony Lobretto, vice president of engineering and technology solutions, DBR360. “Most cloud providers offer network connectivity limited to access over the internet. Many of our customers require private networks that provide greater levels of performance, security and integration with their existing corporate networks. Oftentimes the network aspect of cloud computing is overlooked.”

“Partnering with DBR360 on this endeavor further illustrates Telx’s role as a cloud enabler. The breadth of network and cloud service providers within our facilities is a distinguishing advantage,” said John Freimuth, Telx’s General Manager of Cloud and Enterprise Solutions. “Some clients have preexisting relationships with carriers, and the flexibility of our network combined with the customized solutions offered by DBR360, allows us to mirror our customers network architecture to their specific needs within our facility.”

DBR360 is a managed service provider that integrates advanced networking technologies and virtualization infrastructure into private and public cloud solutions. DBR360 is headquartered in Fairfax, VA.