Mereja

Author: David Meyer

  • Can mobile roaming and net neutrality reform save Europe?

    In case you hadn’t noticed, Europe is in trouble. The Eurozone crisis, which is far from over, has laid bare the economic and even social divisions between north and south. Polling shows internal support for the EU is at an all-time low of just 41 percent. The European project needs a boost.

    Might lower mobile roaming charges and a net neutrality guarantee help save the day? It may sound absurd, but that is indeed the gist of a major speech given this morning by Neelie Kroes, the EU’s digital chief.

    “Relevant”

    Kroes, who is also a vice-president of the European Commission, has already been the driving force behind the lowering of mobile roaming costs within the EU (a project begun by her predecessor, current justice commissioner Viviane Reding). This does have real relevance to the promotion of the single market – if you want to make citizens of the various EU member states feel as one, removing barriers to their free movement is a pretty good start.

    She has also been consulting about the potential need for guaranteed net neutrality, and what that guarantee might look like. Up until now, though, he’s appeared very cool on the need for change.

    But now Kroes wants to eliminate roaming premiums and set net neutrality (in some form) in stone, all in the name of European unity. Quick context primer: the European Parliament elections are next year, and EU authorities are petrified that the Parliament will suddenly be filled with parliamentarians who want the EU to be dissolved or downgraded.

    From today’s speech, which was largely directed at Malcolm Harbour MEP, the chair of the Committee on Internal Market and Consumer Protection:

    “You and I share the stake in this debate, so tell me: will join me in building something special between now and the European elections? I want us to show citizens that the EU is relevant to their lives. That we made the digital rules catch up with their legitimate expectations.

    “I want you to be able to go back to your constituents and say that you were able to end mobile roaming costs. I want you to be able to say that you saved their right to access the open internet, by guaranteeing net neutrality. I want you to be able to say we took real action on cybercrime and other threats.”

    Kroes does have a point: the capping of roaming charges has been an unequivocal vote-winner. When many people see Europe (with some justification) as needlessly bureaucratic, no-one can argue with the benefits of cutting the telcos down to size on what are mostly unjustified roaming charges. Most people also see an open internet as a good thing, although the benefits are less tangible — most people don’t appreciate what the alternative might look like.

    Battleground revisited

    But Kroes’s new plan is nonetheless highly ambitious. Let’s leave net neutrality aside for a moment – her position on that has always been quite mysterious and there are no new details to hand as to what she might now be proposing.

    On the roaming front, the current plan for lowering charges involves annual steps on the ladder, with each step taking place at the start of a July (just in time to please holiday-makers travelling around the continent). The last rung is scheduled for July 2014, and Kroes is now promising a whole new reform package that will be delivered “around Easter 2014″: ahead of July, and ahead of those crucial elections. And that new package will involve eliminating roaming costs entirely, not just minimizing them as the current package does.

    The plan that’s already in place is quite complex: not only are roaming costs being capped, but carriers are also due to be forced to decouple their roaming tariffs from their domestic tariffs, so that people who are (quite reasonably) selecting their carrier on the basis of their domestic offerings don’t get locked into those carriers’ roaming deals as well. This second, structural part of the reform is designed to stimulate a new generation of mobile virtual network operators that specialize in offering cheap roaming deals.

    In other words, the major carriers already loathe Kroes, and now she’s potentially preparing to add insult to injury – we don’t know how much insult yet, as the speech didn’t contain any detail, but she did say she was talking about “a radical legislative compromise”, whatever that means.

    As Kroes closed her speech:

    “So if you believe in the single market; if you believe in a strong Europe that makes a practical difference to each citizen’s life — then Believe. In. This. This is the opportunity to stand up and be counted. I will fight with my last breath to get us there together.”

    Get ready for fireworks.

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  • Google Glass makes me want a smart watch

    I just tried Google Glass for the first time today – not for very long, just for a few minutes, but long enough to gain some first impressions beyond those of others that I’ve read. And unlike my colleague Eliza Kern, who was won over by the possibilities for voice-controlled photography, I actually came away from the experience less impressed with Glass than I previously was.

    Let’s leave aside things like weight, fit and girth – it’s very clearly a beta product and all these things will improve (they’re not too bad to start with, anyway). But there are fundamental problems with the concept, and they are “why” problems that particularly stand out when you compare the Glass concept with that of the smart watch.

    Efficiency, please

    First off, let me reiterate and flesh out a pet gripe of mine that’s highly relevant to the way I view this comparison: I think there’s way too much duplication of functionality between smartphones and tablets. I get why that is – they use the same operating systems in order to simplify developer efforts – but the result is often inefficient. Twitter, Facebook, email… there’s not much of a compelling reason to pick one mobile form factor over the other.

    If you’re going to have two communications devices, then, why not split their duties according to suitability? One option I’m considering is to get a cheap Nokia Asha phone for voice calls, SMS and WhatsApp, and to then pair it with my iPad Mini for more graphically intensive tasks: this would maximize phone battery life while giving me more screen real estate for the apps that require it.

    But what if I could push those more basic tasks across to another device that makes more out of them? What if I had the combination of a tablet and something easier to access than a phone… something wearable.

    Use cases

    motoactv_mr7_notificationsYes, I realize the battery-life-maximization element goes out the window here – and that may be a major medium-term problem for both Glass and the smart watch concept – but let’s take that out of the equation for now. For me, one of the biggest selling points of Google Glass is its ability to make it easier to see essential, bite-sized information: text messages, tweets, incoming caller identity and so on. This kind of functionality has been on smart watches for some time, though none have appealed to me until now (that might be a design thing).

    Then we have geolocation, which is probably the most important addition to the mobile canon since cellular connectivity itself. True, it is slightly easier to watch a map through a heads-up display than by glancing at a wrist-borne device, so Glass has the edge here. But that kind of use case tends to imply a device that is constantly on, making the limitations of current battery technology a major barrier for both device types.

    What’s more, the real promise of Glass for navigational purposes would lie in augmented reality – overlays, in other words. And that was perhaps my most surprising realization on trying Glass for the first time: the minute size of its screen makes it useless for the most interesting augmented reality ideas. For this form factor to really fly, it would need to utilize larger transparent screens as “lenses”, so that it could properly mediate your visual world. Again, the power usage implications are significant.

    Where Glass really does have the smart watch form factor beat is on voice – not voice commands (I’ll get back to that in a moment) but voice communications, phone-style. Glass’s audio capabilities are based on bone conduction, so only the user can really hear what’s going on. Conversations generally need to be private, both for the protection of those talking and to avoid annoying nearby people, so a voice-enabled smart watch would have to be paired with something like a Bluetooth headset – hardly ideal.

    But what about photos?

    Then we have Glass’s voice-operated camera, the factor that Eliza found compelling and something that just flat-out wouldn’t work on a watch. For me, this feature is simply not much of a draw. For a start, I usually carry a good compact system camera with me. But I also don’t like the idea of verbally telling my glasses to take a photo – it’s only slightly faster than whipping out a phone, and it also means looking like I’m talking to no-one in particular.

    And that is perhaps the biggest problem with Glass: even once its designers get past the visual tool factor, its use will still appear contextually odd. There will always be people who are fine with that, in the same way that Bluetooth headsets continue to be a thing, but it’s a hugely limiting factor when it comes to mass appeal. It may make sense when you’re driving, but most people don’t want to look like they’re talking to themselves as they walk down the street.

    I realize that all of this comes down to the user. Some people want to take photos more easily; I don’t really care much about that. I want simple information, presented to me in a way that’s an improvement over my current smartphone setup; others might find this functionality unappealing. Each to their own — there is clearly not going to be a one-size-fits-all solution in the wearables space, not in the same way that smartphones have achieved near-universal appeal. (Incidentally, if Google Glass were a fully hands-free experience, which it isn’t, it would be very useful for certain specialists, such as surgeons and mechanics.)

    There are some things that Glass, or something like it, could potentially be able to do much better than any alternative device. For me, augmented reality is at the top of that list, but Glass can’t really deliver without a monumental revamp. And that pretty much sums Glass up for me: intriguing, but I can’t see it doing what I’d want it to do anytime soon. A new generation of smart watches is a much likelier prospect in the short term and, after today’s Glass experience, that promise suddenly seems much more exciting.

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  • GoEuro takes on the challenge of multi-modal European travel

    GoEuro is one of a handful of companies that are trying to make multi-modal travel search – that is, being able to search at once across modes of transport including air, rail, bus and car – a reality. What’s more, like fellow Berlin startup Waymate, GoEuro is trying to accomplish this feat across national borders. The complexity of the data involved is staggering, not to mention the difficulty of acquiring that data in the first place.

    But GoEuro is doing it. The service has now launched – right now it’s optimized for those in the U.K. and Germany, but the goal is to make GoEuro’s coverage as comprehensive as its name suggests.

    Will it extend beyond Europe? According to GoEuro CEO Naren Shaam, the company is open to licensing its technology to operations in Asia and South America. The U.S. market is an unlikely prospect, though – that country simply doesn’t have a well-enough-established bus and train network for GoEuro’s technology to have an impact.

    So, what’s in GoEuro’s box? As mentioned above, you can search across multiple modes of transport in one go, with the results being ranked according to criteria of your choosing: speed, cost and convenience, with departure and arrival times “in the pipeline” according to Shaam. It’s all a bit like Kayak or Skyscanner, only for more than just flights.

    Naren ShaamIncidentally, the cost of the car journey is based on GoEuro’s estimate of fuel expenditure and so on, and clicking on that option also brings up affiliate links for the major car rental firms. Throughout GoEuro’s service, the emphasis is on sending customers to the transport operators’ websites to make final bookings. Waymate is trying to handle all bookings on its own site – a more ambitious goal, but one that makes it much harder to get the operators on board.

    And getting them on board is a big deal – wrangling disparate data is one thing, but partnerships constitute the other side of the coin. Shaam told me the train companies, which are largely monopolies in Europe, were the worst. “We have enough train companies in our system now, but as a young entrepreneur when you have zero train companies, that’s when they’re the hardest to get,” he said.

    Data from train companies is also way more complex than that for air routes – GoEuro’s systems have to have up-to-the-minute information relating to 25 airports, but also for 9,000 train stations… and that’s just for the UK and Germany. The complexity of bringing all that data onto a single platform is why, Shaam noted, GoEuro was lucky to have raised $4 million in its seed round a few months back.

    With Waymate also having launched last month, we now have two test cases to watch for their success or otherwise in this multi-modal booking space. No-one has managed to pull it off before, but a success story would be a huge win for consumers. Perhaps, with data complexity becoming more manageable these days, it’s an idea whose time has come.

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  • HowDo’s maker-oriented micro-guides can now be embedded on the web

    The DIY micro-guide platform HowDo, which we last covered back in October last year, has just launched on the web. It was previously only available on iOS.

    HowDo is an intriguing little startup. Based in Berlin, the company’s platform offers a very simple way to create instructional storyboards: you just take a series of photos with your phone, make a slideshow out of them with a voiceover, and post the result. It’s very much geared towards the maker movement although, as I noted last year, the same mechanism could also plausibly find an application in citizen journalism.

    And now it’s on the web too. You can’t create HowDo guides on the desktop — that’s still an iOS app-only task — but you can now embed them in blogs or websites, or search through profiles from the browser. It was previously possible to view HowDo guides on the web, but only if someone had sent you a link, and even then the guides were in no way interactive.

    In keeping with the original app, HowDo’s web player interface is quite simplistic: you can click forwards and backwards through the frames, and that’s it. It’s enough to do the job, though, and I can see it working well in the context of Tumblr or Pinterest embeds.

    In terms of users, HowDo won’t say much beyond “tens of thousands”, though that’s fair enough – it’s targeted quite a specific market at launch, and iOS specificity is another limiting factor. An Android version is planned, but development hasn’t started yet. At least making the guides more easily viewable by those outside the HowDo community should help the platform grow.

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  • Google’s EU antitrust settlement proposals won’t be enough, competition chief suggests

    When Google offered a series of concessions in order to settle its search-related antitrust investigation in Europe, some of those whose complaints had kicked off the whole affair were quick to dismiss Google’s proposals. And now it looks like the European Commission itself will also tell the U.S. firm to go back to the drawing board.

    Google is accused of surreptitiously favoring its own services in its search results, locking advertisers onto its platform and scraping content from rival, subject-specific search engines. To settle the Commission’s investigation, it proposed labelling links to its own services, letting websites opt out of having their content show up in Google’s specialized search, and taking some of the lock-in out of its ad contracts.

    On Tuesday, according to a Reuters report, EU Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia told European parliamentarians that it was a near-certainty that Google would have to revise its proposals. Referring to the extended period that Google’s rivals have been given to formally respond to the proposals, he said: “After, we will analyze the responses we have received, we will ask Google, probably, I cannot anticipate this formally, almost 100 percent we will ask Google: you should improve your proposals.”

    When those proposals were formally revealed in March, Foundem – a British vertical search and comparison site that’s part of Microsoft’s anti-Google FairSearch organization – was quick to issue a comprehensive counter-argument (PDF warning). This more-or-less came down to Foundem saying Google’s proposals wouldn’t change the alleged inherent bias in its search rankings.

    The European consumer protection organization BEUC also noted that the proposed concessions wouldn’t stop Google from manipulating its natural search results. In the U.S., by the way, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) cleared Google of so-called “search bias”.

    The European Commission had originally set a deadline of May 26 for responses to Google’s concessions. That has been pushed back to June 27. Apart from giving a pretty clear characterization of the responses the Commission has already received, Almunia said on Tuesday that he had not yet decided whether to press on with a formal antitrust investigation over Android — an investigation that was again called for by FairSearch.

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  • Mystery for the day: Who’s buying ST-Ericsson’s geolocation business?

    In the course of breaking up, sometimes it’s simpler to shed shared assets. Ericsson and STMicroelectronics are in the process of doing just that – having already decided which partner gets what out of their cash-haemorrhaging joint venture, ST-Ericsson, the companies are now seeing what they can get for the leftovers. And in this case, part of that portfolio entails ST-Ericsson global navigation satellite system (GNSS) business.

    The ST-Ericsson GNSS portfolio includes handset receivers for interacting with both the U.S. GPS system and Russia’s GLONASS. On Tuesday, the companies said they had signed a “definitive agreement” to sell the assets and intellectual property surrounding this business. That includes 130 staffers in Daventry (UK), Bangalore (India) and Singapore.

    The deal will apparently “reduce the joint venture’s cash needs by approximately $90 million.” There is, however, one rather important detail that’s missing.

    Who’s buying?

    ST-Ericsson is being almost entirely opaque on this point, saying only that the team has “found a new home at a leading player in the semiconductor industry.” Which leaves us with something of a guessing game.

    The current crop of ST-Ericsson GNSS receivers are part of the joint venture’s NovaThor system-on-a-chip platform, but that’s now been cancelled due to the break-up. And ST-Ericsson has never publicly disclosed its other GNSS customers.

    It may or may not be relevant to note that one of the more recent ST-Ericsson GNSS receivers, the CG1960, has a very small form factor and has been tailored for low-powered applications, such as in smart watches and cameras. With wearables set to be a boom market, this technology could be quite attractive to certain players.

    It’s unlikely Qualcomm is the buyer, as it already has a rich GNSS product portfolio. Samsung has been using SkyWorks in the last year or so. It could possibly be Texas Instruments, which is making a big push into embedded systems, including wearables.

    But really, your guess is as good as mine.

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  • Now desktop users can find out what’s next for Opera, too

    In February of this year, Opera announced a major revamp of its browser portfolio that involved ripping out and replacing some key components – in a nutshell, the innards of Opera’s new browser now resemble Google’s Chrome a heck of a lot more than they previously did. The first version of the browser to make an appearance was that for Android: it came out in beta in March, and arrived in full a week ago.

    Now it’s the turn of Windows and OS X users. Again, this is a beta we’re talking about (although Opera calls it a “Next version”), but it does show off what is to be expected in the full release of Opera 15.

    Those features should mostly be familiar from the Android version, but here’s a quick run-down anyway:

    • Speed Dial – For those unfamiliar with Opera, this pretty much refers to bookmarks. And, like bookmarks, they can now be organized into folders. Speed Dial also seems to give Opera a chance to earn some cash from partners such as Twitter and Facebook, whose services it puts front-and-center in this feature.
    • Discover — This feature is a bit like Google Currents, in that it brings up articles according to the user’s tastes.
    • Stash — This one’s new: a read-later facility designed to reduce the necessity of having tons of tabs open at once. Just click on the heart button to “stash” a page.
    • Search — You can now search from the address bar in Opera, same as in Chrome and co.

    The look of the browser has also been refreshed to make it more platform-appropriate and, of course, there are big changes under the hood. Opera 15 uses the Chromium engine and its “Off-Road” data-squeezing mode – previously known as Turbo – now supports Google’s SPDY protocol.

    The only other major thing to bear in mind for existing Opera desktop users is that the new version doesn’t have an integrated mail service. The M2 mail application has now been hived off into a standalone version, the first release candidate for which can be downloaded from here.

    In a blog post on the new features, Opera web evangelist Bruce Lawson said the decision to split off M2 was made in order to reduce the footprint of the main program, and also because “not all current Opera customers use M2″.

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  • Europe’s quiet Apple antitrust probe takes on 4G dimension, report suggests

    Back in March, some carriers complained to the EU competition authorities over Apple’s channel tactics, such as its alleged use of excessively high sales quotas to make sure carriers’ marketing budgets go disproportionately in the direction of iPhones and iPads. Two months on, and it seems the authorities are quietly probing the issue.

    First off, it’s important to realise that no formal complaints have been made and the European Commission has not launched a formal investigation. However, according to a Financial Times report on Sunday, the Commission has sent a questionnaire to several European carriers, asking them to clarify what Apple asks them to do.

    The article claims the questionnaire asks whether operating groups are forced to buy a certain quota of iPhones, whether Apple dictates how marketing budgets should be allocated, and whether the U.S. firm demands subsidies and sales terms that are at least as favorable as those offered to other manufacturers. Interestingly, it also says the Commission is looking into potential “technical or contractual restrictions on the iPhone 5 that mean it cannot be used on high-speed 4G networks in Europe.”

    The 4G factor

    As I explained in March, there’s a lot standing between where we are now and a full-blown antitrust case – for a start, Apple does not actually dominate the smartphone market in Europe (it has around 25 percent share), making it less likely to be the target of an antitrust crackdown. Simply put: it’s not that hard to jump the iOS ship for Android or some other alternative.

    That said, the questionnaire’s mention of restrictions on the iPhone 5′s 4G capabilities is intriguing.

    The European (GSM) version of the iPhone 5 does have natural limitations as to which LTE networks it can run on, due to the bands it physically supports – it will run on Deutsche Telekom’s 1800MHz spectrum in Germany, for example, but it doesn’t support 800MHz or 2.6GHz LTE, so Vodafone has to sell the iPhone 5 as a 3G device that country.

    However, there have been reports suggesting that Apple’s restrictions extend beyond the strictly necessary. The company apparently heavily vets the LTE networks it will support — even an unlocked iPhone 5 will not run on an unapproved LTE network. The question now is whether this is entirely a technical matter, or whether commercial reasons also come into play.

    Market definition

    I’m waiting for the Commission’s antitrust office to get back to me (my guess at this point is that they’ll say the questionnaire forms part of its regular market-monitoring activities), but, as I have said before, I’m skeptical that this will evolve into a formal investigation. The only basis on which I can see that happening would be the definition of Apple’s platform as a market in its own right, independent of the wider picture that also includes the actually-more-dominant Android.

    If that were to happen, it would be a game-changer — Apple might be forced to allow alternative app marketplaces, for example. But let’s wait and see what happens before we speculate too far down that path.

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  • Meet the cloud that will keep you warm at night

    A company called AoTerra is doing very well indeed on the German crowdfunding platform Seedmatch. At the start of this month it broke the record for the most crowdfunding received so far by a German startup, leading Seedmatch to raise the limit on its round (investors get a share of the startup’s profits) from €500,000 ($648,000) to €750,000. The limit may have to be lifted again: AoTerra hit it minutes ago, and it still has 24 days to go.

    So what makes Dresden-based AoTerra such hot property? The fact that it does just that: heat properties. But these are no ordinary heaters. These are heating systems with servers in them.

    AoHeat ServerAoTerra’s system comprises a server connected to a heat exchanger or heat pump, which is in turn connected to the property’s ventilation system, and a hot water tank. It’s intended for new-build and renovated properties that meet modern energy efficiency standards and, according to the company, efficiency is nearly 100 percent (the company also only uses “green” energy for its devices).

    Each system has a broadband connection and forms part of a distributed, OpenStack-based data center. The result is AoCloud, which offers compute, block storage and object storage (all are currently in beta). Customers can be pretty sure their cloud is as green as it gets, but there are other benefits too – the distributed nature of the cloud should mean low latency, and AoTerra is touting security as a plus too.

    AoTerra is also involved with a couple of Europe-funded projects, namely LEADS (trying to create a “data-as-a-service” model on top of geographically distributed micro-clouds) and ParaDIME (trying to making computing more energy-efficient).

    This isn’t the first time we’ve seen the idea of using waste heat from data centers to heat homes — London’s Telehouse West data center was going to do that, although the local council never set up the distribution network and the housing development never got built due to the recession, and Telus is planning something similar in Vancouver. But what AoTerra has come up with is a step beyond.

    Property owners or developers pay €12,000 for the system (about the same as a normal heating system), but they don’t have any ongoing operating costs – from that point on, they get free heating and hot water. And AoTerra gets out of having to pay for air conditioning, which is a pretty major chunk of the cost of running a traditional data center.

    AoTerra TeamOverall, AoTerra claims, its distributed data center costs the company about a tenth of the normal set-up costs for a data center, with its running costs being less than half and CO2 emissions around a third. The company has only been going for a year, and it already has 20 AoHeat devices with over 200 servers installed. It had a turnover last year of €100,000, and has already signed contracts worth €400,000 this year.

    AoTerra says it’s negotiating €1.6 million worth of contracts at the moment, and has another €3.1 million worth in the pipeline. This year it wants to sell 100 AoHeat devices, and next year 500 – at that point, it would be one of Germany’s biggest cloud providers. They need the crowdfunding investment to grow the team to match demand, they say.

    It’s all very, very clever.

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  • Europe warms to OpenStack

    OpenStack is finally taking off in Europe, it seems. As with most cloud infrastructure, uptake has been somewhat behind the curve here, but it looks like things are changing.

    OpenStack Foundation COO Mark Collier (L) and Executive Director Jonathan Bryce (R)

    OpenStack Foundation COO Mark Collier (L) and Executive Director Jonathan Bryce (R)

    According to OpenStack Foundation Executive Director Jonathan Bryce (pictured at the first OpenStack DACH Day in Berlin on Friday), the last 6 months have seen adoption pick up all over the world. However, it’s a relatively new phenomenon in Europe and Asia, he added:

    “There’s more tolerance for early adoption around this technology in the U.S. We’ve seen that not just in Europe, but in Asia as well. In the last few months we’ve definitely seen people picking it up in other countries, and in some cases it means they’re getting the benefit of all those early adopters.”

    How about numbers? Well, that’s tricky – because OpenStack is open-source, there’s no way of nailing down precisely how many organizations and providers are using it. However, some big hitters are certainly getting publicly behind it.

    Marquee adopters

    CERN, the European nuclear research organization that runs the Large Hadron Collider, is one of them. Although it’s also involved with sort-of-OpenStack-rival (although less so these days) OpenNebula, CERN has been toying with OpenStack for a while and is now in the process of rolling out a 150,000-virtual machine private cloud using the platform.

    Meanwhile, Deutsche Telekom has been involved with OpenStack for over a year now and has been using it to deliver a security service (along with fellow OpenStacker ClearPath) since March this year. This summer it will move more applications onto its OpenStack-based cloud, Kurt Garloff, head of cloud services engineering at the telco, said at Friday’s event.

    And then we have the grand French clouds, Cloudwatt and Numergy, both of which are based on OpenStack.

    Why now?

    According to OpenStack Foundation COO Mark Collier, the technological requirements of European users are the same as those of U.S. users, but the drivers for adoption are often different, “particularly around data sovereignty.”

    “For example, in France there are a lot of companies and policies that create an incentive to have local clouds where the data resides,” he told me, pointing out that the open-source nature of the technology and its resulting widespread take-up by variously-sized outfits meant there were “hundreds of cities where you can get OpenStack.”

    Florian Haas is the co-founder of Hastexo, a professional services company that isn’t aligned with any vendor, but has found itself working a lot with OpenStack (it’s a heavy contributor on the high availability front). He reckons Europe has been a slow cloud adopter due to a combination of legal and privacy concerns and a general “degree of conservatism” but, now that cloud adoption is happening, it’s happening on OpenStack:

    “Of the big four [stacks] we’re not seeing any OpenNebula, although interestingly there are a few German companies here [at LinuxTag] pushing it hard. We’re not seeing any Eucalyptus. We’re seeing a bit of CloudStack and a massive amount of OpenStack.

    “Europe is late to the cloud party, but that creates an interesting situation, which is that much of Europe didn’t go through the AWS uptake cycle. Strangely enough, OpenStack is filling a void, rather than displacing something else.

    “A lot of the people we talk to are actually using OpenStack to essentially reorganize their data center. They might have old-style iron-and-wires data centers, or they might be running on proprietary virtual solutions. They’re now considering public and private cloud, and OpenStack is the default.”

    With this pace of change — everyone keeps talking about the last 6 months — it will be interesting to see how much further things have gone by our Structure:Europe conference in London on 18-19 September, where we will of course be discussing issues such as stack choice.

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  • SAP cloud chief Lars Dalgaard steps down as company consolidates development

    SAP, the legacy business software behemoth that is now definitely, totally, 100 percent A Cloud Company,  just lost the man who made it so. Lars Dalgaard, who joined SAP when the German-U.S. giant bought his company, SuccessFactors, in late 2011, has quit to become an investor. He will stay on as a cloud advisor to SAP, however.

    The news came out Friday as part of a flurry of SAP announcements. Another of those also relates to a departure – that of human resources chief Luisa Delgado, whose responsibilities will be taken on by CFO Werner Brandt – but the big non-quitting-related news is that SAP is consolidating its business to better reflect its newfound cloudiness.

    SAP’s cloud “go-to-market” strategy will now all be under the purview of Bob Calderoni, CEO of Ariba (alongside SuccessFactors, one of SAP’s major cloud buys of the last two years). And development will all be under the control of technology chief Vishal Sikka.

    SAP is pitching this new structure as an innovation accelerator, but does it finally signal a streamlining of the company’s sprawling and often confusing portfolio (a condition I like to call IBMitis)? Yes! And no.

    As Sikka said on a conference call today:

    “We see an opportunity to not only consolidate and streamline the portfolio, but bring incredible efforts… to transform that in the power of the cloud. We will get into areas that are truly unprecedented – applications for new industries that weren’t possible before [such as] healthcare, banking, oil and energy.”

    Which is nice, but – as co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe chipped in – SAP has “a lot of commitments” to its existing customers too, and “we’re a company that stands by our commitments.” This may mean we should expect some redundancy within the portfolio to continue for a while yet, in order to keep those with more old-school SAP systems in place happy.

    As for SAP’s ongoing cloud strategy, co-CEO Bill McDermott promised that Dalgaard’s exit would lead to “zero business disruption”:

    “Our cloud DNA is now embedded across 65,000 minds and hearts and it’s become the soul of SAP. While it’s nice to have one evangelist for the cloud, it’s even better to have 65,000.

    “Lars took us from $20 million in terms of revenue to a $1 billion run rate in the cloud. Now it’s about scale because everything is cloud. No other company has gone through this transition so fast – it literally happened in 12-15 months under his leadership.”

    McDermott added that Dalgaard had been having “open conversations” with him and Hagemann Snabe for some time about his plans to downgrade his role to that of advisor. “This is nicest balance he could find in his personal life and we were happy to accommodate him because we think the world of the guy,” he said.

    Speaking of SAP’s thorough cloudiness, the company also announced on Thursday that it would deliver its products – including, of course, those on the in-memory HANA platform — on VMware’s newly-re-announced vCloud Hybrid Service IaaS platform, as well as vCloud Suite. This will allow for fully managed services on-premise, in the cloud and in hybrid deployments.

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  • Europe wants to be big in chip manufacturing

    Europe is not particularly known as a major hub of the semiconductor world, but – if the European Commission gets its way – it will be. The Commission has launched a major seven-year drive to stimulate investment in the microelectronics and nanoelectronics manufacturing sector, aiming to ramp up to a fifth of global production by the end of the decade.

    The news of the new EU industrial strategy came just a couple of days after the Geneva-headquartered, French-Italian manufacturer STMicroelectronics launched its own three-year project, worth €360 million ($463 million), aimed at creating a European microelectronics design ecosystem based around its fully-depleted silicon-on-insulator (FD-SOI) manufacturing process.

    Some in the industry, such as chipmaker GlobalFoundries, have previously urged European authorities to back electronics manufacturing on the continent in order to counteract the vast influence of Asia and (to a lesser extent) the U.S. in this field.

    Cheaper, faster, smarter

    The European Commission’s strategy, announced on Thursday, is intended to make chips cheaper, faster and smarter. It will concentrate on shoring up three existing electronics clusters, namely those in Dresden (Germany), Eindhoven (Netherlands) and Leuven (Belgium), and Grenoble (France). Connections will also be made with other clusters such as that in Cambridge (UK), which is big in the wireless sector.

    Neelie Kroes“I want to double our chip production to around 20 percent of global production,” Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes said in a statement. “I want Europe to produce more chips in Europe than the United States produces domestically. It’s a realistic goal if we channel our investments properly.”

    As per usual, this isn’t a simple public cash splurge. €5 billion in public funds – 30 percent from the EU with the rest coming from national and regional funds – will go to R&D, in order to help stimulate the sector. Overall, the Commission says, industry has indicated it will stump up €100 billion over the seven years: €15 billion in capital expenditure and €85 billion in operational costs.

    The kind of electronics we’re talking about could be used in desktop and handheld computers, but the main thrust is for embedded systems and “internet of things” devices, from sensors and smart grids to new healthcare technologies. As Kroes said in a speech, “this isn’t about computers.”

    Targeting these areas plays to Europe’s strengths. According to the Commission, Europe already pumps out half of global automotive electronics, 40 percent of electronics used in energy applications, and 35 percent of those used for industrial automation – this will be a reference to the output of companies such as Bosch, which are hugely active despite often being somewhat under-the-radar. Then we also have smaller manufacturers working in high-growth niches, such as health implants and sensors.

    And jobs?

    The purpose of all this is to make Europe less reliant on manufacturers outside the continent, but job creation is also a major factor. The Commission reckons the European electronics industry already employs 200,000 people directly and supports a further million jobs indirectly.

    That said, the Commission also pointed out in its statement that demand for skilled workers in these fields is higher than supply – if this whole strategy is to work, the implication runs, Europe will need to attract more skilled workers. The statement talks of coordinating public efforts across Europe. Perhaps that will mean tweaking immigration rules: something the U.S. tech sector is also heavily vocal about these days.

    Meanwhile, STMicro’s push – called, incredibly, “Pilot Lines for Advanced CMOS Enhanced by SOI in 2x nodes, Built in Europe” (Places2Be) – also takes place in the context of a wider European project, the nanoelectronics-focused ENIAC. In a briefing note accompanying Thursday’s announcement, the Commission insisted that ENIAC and ARTEMIS (another project focusing on embedded computing) had been a success, and that the new drive did not denote failure of those two schemes.

    The Commission said the new joint undertaking would build on “lessons learnt” from ENIAC and ARTEMIS while providing a “simplified funding structure”.

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  • CoolEmAll project tests tools for energy-efficient data center design

    A project called CoolEmAll has revealed prototype tools to aid the design of energy-efficient data centers. The European Commission-funded scheme wants data center designers and operators to test these tools ahead of a full release next year.

    CoolEmAll hopes to come up with a simulation, visualization and decision support (SVD) toolkit, which could be used to simulate data centers while taking various factors into account. These include the types of applications that are being run, different hardware configurations, the intensity of workloads and specific management policies, as well as airflow. This would be represented through dashboards and 3D visualizations.

    The project, which got funding as part of the Commission’s high-performance computing (HPC) drive, also aims to create a set of hardware and thermodynamic models that can be plugged into these simulations. These so-called Data Center Efficiency Building Blocks (DEBBs) will be made available in an open repository.

    The analyst house 451 Research is taking part in the project. According to 451 analyst Andrew Donoghue:

    “Factors such as rising fuel prices, stricter environmental legislation and constrained credit amid the financial crisis are contributing to higher capital and operational costs for data centre owners and operators. The tools and research that will result from the CoolEmAll project will help the data centre industry to meet some of these challenges, and develop more efficient and sustainable facilities.”

    The prototype tools can be downloaded now. CoolEmAll is looking for people to test them, and also to potentially work with the consortium if they have something to offer.

    In the meantime, here’s a video demonstrating the user interface for CoolEmAll’s under-construction Module Operation Platform:


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  • Splinter.me wants to replace your resume and offer career guidance

    There are plenty of startups out there trying to revolutionize the job-seeking or hiring process, from TalentBin and Path.to to Silp, Somewhere and of course, in its own way, LinkedIn. But there may still be space for more.

    Splinter.me will certainly be hoping so. Currently in beta, the Egyptian-Romanian-Belgian startup (welcome to the EMEA region) is trying its own data-centric spin on the subject. Splinter.me essentially wants to replace the resume with information automatically pulled in from the job-seeker’s social networks and any other platforms where information about them may reside.

    Splinter me cofounder Adelina PelteaSo far, so Silp, but Splinter.me wants to then mix up this functionality with not only automated job matchmaking, but also career advice. “We can tell a recruiter, ‘This candidate might fit your job,’ but can also give career advice to the user. We can tell them, ‘Others score higher because they have this skill that you’re missing,’” co-founder Adelina Peltea told me.

    Splinter.me will only launch in full this coming September, but it added a raft of new features this week. One particularly handy feature called Common Connections does what it says on the tin: it tells two “splinters” (users) which connections they have in common. What’s interesting here is that it can find those common connections across third-party platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn, even if those people are not themselves, er, splinters (I can’t quite shake the memories of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles whenever I hear that term).

    What’s more, the company has also added a feature called Splinter Lookup that allows for natural language searching. Echoing Facebook Graph Search to a degree, this function allows users to search for, by way of example, “splinters who use PHP, live in Boston and know Bob Jones”.

    Another new feature, Hubs, provides a repository of information to help job-seekers brush up particular skills, such as web development and gamification.

    It is very early days for this company – it has just 1,200 beta users and so far it only has angel backing. But on the other hand, it does have certain things in its favor beyond the aforementioned features, in particular its (intended) lack of tech-industry exclusivity and the fact that it’s pushing hard in markets such as North Africa and Europe.

    Many of Splinter.me’s key rivals in this space, such as Path.to, are highly U.S.-focused and deal mostly if not entirely with programmers and the like. Which is fine – the U.S. tech scene is a big market – but it does leave other markets to conquer. After that September launch, let’s see if Splinter.me can fill some of those gaps.

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  • Truecaller API lets third parties tap into database of 600M phone numbers

    Remember Truecaller, the Swedish phone directory service we reported on earlier this year? It’s a service for combatting phone scams – the user gets to see who’s calling them, with Truecaller identifying the caller by their phone number. It’s big in India, apparently.

    Anyway, Truecaller now has 600 million partly crowdsourced names and phone numbers in its database, which is quite a lot, and it’s decided to open up this information to third parties that can make good use of it. “Great,” you might think, “what a boon to telemarketers.” But no, Truecaller is rather sensibly hand-picking those developers who get to tap into its newly-launched, 3scale-managed API, and telemarketers are not welcome at all.

    As for potential uses for this reverse lookup service, that’s up to the developer’s imagination. Here’s what Truecaller CEO Alan Mamedi suggests:

    “Among many other scenarios, the Truecaller API could be used to save time in call centres. Each call centre minute is connected to a cost. By using our API, both local and global, call centres can identify who is calling even before starting the call. Win-win.”

    Truecaller’s database is populated by two main sources: traditional phone directory services and users who are willing to upload their address books. This latter source means it can contain numbers that are unlisted, including pay-as-you-go phone numbers. Numbers in the database come with two types of scores: a “spam score” to rate how likely it is that they are associated with telesales or robocalls, and a “true score” to denote importance.

    Importantly, name search will not be a function associated with the API – it will only be available on the mobile app, meaning the API can only be used for reverse lookup purposes.

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  • Cloudbase.io launches shared API to help mobile apps get connected

    Kids these days! There they are, creating all their little mobile apps, yet too many of them aren’t considering the possibilities provided by connections to other apps. That, at least, is the view of Cloudbase.io founder Stefano Buliani, whose London-based backend-as-a-service (BaaS) outfit wants to make it easier to both plug in and cash in.

    As part of reaching that objective, Cloudbase.io has launched a shared API to encourage data-sharing between apps. By way of example, someone coming up with a Foursquare-like idea could decide to use Cloudbase.io to build their application. Cloudbase.io would handle the backend for that app, and the developer could tell the BaaS provider to let other apps access their shared API, allowing those apps to draw on the app’s check-in data and creating opportunities for business deals down the line.

    As Buliani told me:

    “What I found everywhere [as I was promoting] Cloudbase.io was that everybody with a background as a backend developer instantly got it. Mobile developers were questioning the need for their application to be connected to the internet. Most mobile developers are only mobile developers; they’ve never done anything else before – never worked on websites, for example. They had this mentality of building the small game for mobile.

    “The premise for the idea is that we want mobile applications to become platforms. We want them to be able to publish their own layer of APIs, even though it’s hosted on Cloudbase.io. Cloudbase.io becomes invisible in the background. We want to encourage them to be as ambitious as possible and think of themselves as a platform. It’s a chicken-and-egg game of course – what came first, the business or the API? – but we want them to be prepared for it.”

    This perspective is unsurprising coming from Buliani, a developer (he was part of the early Covestor team) who became a management consultant in London’s financial heart before returning to tech. But then again, Cloudbase.io is not the only company trying to help smalltime developers think bigger.

    So what about rivals such as Parse? According to Buliani, there’s a “philosophical difference” between the two outfits.

    “The easiest example is, if you want to build an application on top of Parse you have to register the users of your application within that framework, so your application will have to have authentication. With Cloudbase.io you can have no authentication — it’s entirely up to you,” he said, adding that he was proud of the fact that all of Cloudbase.io’s libraries are open source and available on Github.

    Of course, Cloudbase.io’s new service also crosses over somewhat with the territory of API management specialists such as Apigee and 3scale.

    Cloudbase.ioAs with Parse, it’s free to register with Cloudbase.io and get going. Once the app’s in an app store, users need to start paying – the most basic account costs $11.99 a month, which comes with a gigabyte of data exchange. Above that are professional ($47.99 for 8GB) and enterprise ($119.99 for 20GB) tiers, with the possibility of negotiated pricing for higher volumes.

    Users should take note of how data exchange volume pricing works with the shared API. If the app accessing data from the original, Cloudbase.io-using app is also using the same BaaS platform, it’s that second app that gets charged. If the second app is off-platform, it will obviously be the original app’s developers who get charged (it might be smart to publish the shared API but keep it password protected).

    Incidentally, for those developers who need as much help as possible, Cloudbase.io also partnered up last month with MoSync, a provider of open-source tools for building mobile applications. The idea there is for MoSync to allow the building and compiling of the apps, with Cloudbase.io adding in the connectivity, geo-location and social pieces.

    (And on another note, cloud infrastructure and data-sharing will definitely be on the agenda for discussion at our Structure:Europe conference, which will run in London on September 18-19.)

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  • Brow.si wants to make mobile websites behave like native apps

    Publishers these days have a choice when it comes to mobile: design for the mobile browser, or go the app route. Apps tend to allow greater functionality, but it’s a lot more efficient to create a website that renders well on both the desktop and mobile – hence the so-called “responsive design” movement.

    Now MySiteApp, the Israeli company that previously put out the UppSite tool for converting websites into native apps, has brought out a new service called Brow.si for making mobile websites behave like apps. Brow.si is a multifunctional toolbar that can be easily inserted in a responsive website through the addition of some Javascript. It’s now in public beta, following a two-week closed beta period in which it was already used by a million people.

    Pushing for the web

    Much of this functionality is the sort of thing a publisher can put into a mobile website itself – content sharing through social networks, read-later options such as Pocket, font resizing and so on – but Brow.si aims to make its addition easier.

    It also introduces something that’s previously only been available on apps: push notifications. Without the user having to install anything, they can subscribe to notifications from all the websites they visit that are using Brow.si, and consume that content through the platform’s own reader. Again, users don’t have to create an account for this – they just need to log into a social network (Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn) for sharing purposes, after which Brow.si will know which user is which.

    What’s more, MySiteApp has become a WordPress VIP (see disclosure) feature partner, meaning sites using that publishing platform can easily install the Brow.si plugin. But again, that’s not all: as alluded to above, Brow.si is a platform in its own right, and it aims to help publishers monetize their content.

    Cashing in

    As MySiteApp CEO Gal Brill explained to me, publishers can add so-called “mini applications” that will only show up when the user activates the Brow.si toolbar. When the toolbar is swiped across the screen, it introduces new real estate below it, so the publisher could for example add a mini-app for the content recommendation engine Taboola, or they could even use this new space for traditional ads.

    Mini-apps will be made available through Brow.si’s marketplace, and the company has an open API so third-party developers can help populate that marketplace with their own efforts.

    It’s all very clever, and the simplicity of installation should give Brow.si a flying start. It remains to be seen, though, whether this sort of functionality will help publishers monetize their content on the mobile web. There are many variables at play here, from users’ desire for content-related push notifications (granularity seems to be lacking) to publishers’ desire for differentiated presentation.

    That said, the addition of a new and relatively unobtrusive patch of mobile screen real estate for advertising purposes could turn out to be a welcome development.

    Disclosure: Automattic, maker of WordPress.com, is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, GigaOm. Om Malik, founder of GigaOm, is also a venture partner at True.

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  • SAP to bring in autistic workers as software testers and programmers

    Following successful pilots, SAP will step up its hiring of people on the autistic spectrum, the German business software firm has announced. Working with an outfit called Specialisterne, the company will bring in hundreds of autistic staff around the world to work in fields such as software testing, programming and data quality assurance.

    This is the latest move in what appears to be an interesting new trend. Texas-based CRM firm Alliance Data recently started seeking out workers on the autistic spectrum, as have other IT-related businesses such as the Berlin-based consultancy Auticon. SAP is the first major multinational to adopt similar hiring policies.

    Because autism tends to impair the sufferer’s social abilities, it can be problematic in a work environment. As a result, many sufferers find it difficult to gain and hold down a job. However, the autistic spectrum is wide and many of those with low-level autistic spectrum disorder – such as the recently reclassified Asperger Syndrome – can function in a work setting.

    People with autistic spectrum disorders often display highly focused and analytical behavior and, in the context of software testing and programming, it is these characteristics that companies such as SAP and Alliance Data are finding can work to their advantage. In its statement on Tuesday, SAP said it saw “a potential competitive advantage to leveraging the unique talents of people with autism.”

    According to SAP human resources chief Luisa Delgado:

    “By concentrating on the abilities that every talent brings to the table, we can redefine the way we manage diverse talents. With Specialisterne, we share a common belief that innovation comes from the ‘edges.’ Only by employing people who think differently and spark innovation will SAP be prepared to handle the challenges of the 21st century.”

    SAP has previously piloted its new hiring policies in India, where it worked with Specialisterne – a Denmark-based IT consultancy specializing in employing autistic workers – to hire 6 autistic software testers. It claims the result was a boost in productivity.

    SAP has also recently completed the screening process for hiring 5 autistic workers in Ireland, and is now preparing to take the program global. The company said the global expansion would begin in the U.S., Canada and Germany this year.

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  • Orange’s Flexible Computing IaaS platform spreads to North America and Asia

    Orange Business Services has expanded its Flexible Computing infrastructure-as-a-service product to North America and Asia, targeting multinationals with a presence across those continents and Europe and South America, where the platform is already available.

    As can be expected with that sort of customer base, France Telecom’s business services arm is highlighting global business continuity support as the main reason for choosing its IaaS over the likes of Amazon or Rackspace. As the company’s international cloud chief, Chris McKay, told me, configurability is also a selling point.

    “There are no small, medium or large instances. You pay for what you use, but you don’t have to pay for steps in instances,” McKay said.

    Regarding competition from other telcos, particularly others from Europe such as BT and Deutsche Telekom, he stressed the “industrialized” nature of Orange’s offering – “we provide a catalog for the customer which has granularity of managed services which the customer can choose, from the OS to middleware to applications” – and the fact that Orange manages its own cloud data centers around the world rather than turning to outsourcing in certain locations.

    Orange already has around 500 customers for Flexible Computing, which allows both self-managed and fully managed usage. The platform is based on in-house technology, but McKay said Orange was also looking at “other avenues”.

    “Right now we’re carrying out studies,” he said. “[We will try] possibly OpenStack and a few others for an internal cloud solution at France Telecom in the next four months, where we’re going to evaluate what the right direction is for the future.”

    According to an Orange Business Services statement on the North American and Asian expansion, the company is on track to rake in €500 million ($644 million) in cloud revenues in 2015. It managed €113 million in 2012, which was a third up on the year before.

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  • Benetton teams up with Little Printer creator Berg on connected devices

    Remember Little Printer, the cute connected gadget we reported on about 18 months back? It’s a great collision of old and new: a thermal printer that can push out everything from news snippets to Foursquare check-ins – the kind of stuff you’d normally look at fleetingly on your mobile phone, in updated-retro paper form.

    Well, a month ago the creator, Berg London, pivoted from its original incarnation as a design house to become a product-focused firm, looking to develop devices to run on its Berg Cloud platform and inviting other developers to do the same. And now the company has stepped up that latter ambition by teaming up with the Benetton Group’s Fabrica communication research center to launch Sandbox, a new R&D facility for developing connected products and services.

    Not many R&D facilities run out of a 17th-century Italian villa, but Sandbox will. According to a statement, the facilities in Treviso will be used to prototype “connected objects, spaces and experiences” – just the sort of language you’d expect to hear from such design-centric companies.

    Here’s how Fabrica CEO Dan Hill described the Sandbox mission:

    “Sandbox is a unique opportunity for Fabrica’s researchers to imagine and prototype how these new connected objects and spaces will begin to radically change the way we live, work, play, organise and communicate. Going beyond the hype around ‘smart cities’ and Internet of Things, we are layering these technologies over our wonderful building to create a unique, open demonstrator – to help both us and our clients understand what it truly means to live and work with these exciting possibilities.”

    I’m not sure centuries-old villas restored and expanded by star architects (Tadao Ando, since you ask) are the best representations of normal people’s living or working environments, but it sure does look like a nice place to do R&D:

    Fabrica

    Berg and Benetton are just the founding partners: more will be added in the summer, they say. Everything that comes out of this luxurious collaboration space will use Berg Cloud, however.

    There are quite a few of these platforms gearing up at the moment, all of which aim to make it easier for people to create new types of connected, everyday devices. One of the biggest looks to be LogMeIn’s Xively platform, which counts the muscular ARM as a partner as of earlier this week, but there are other smaller efforts also underway, such as those from Carriots and Electric Imp. This is a very new field, though, so there’s every chance that different internet-of-things platforms will attract different types of developers.

    I think it’s fair to say the more design-minded among those developers now know where to look as they prepare to invent the connected future.

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