Author: David Meyer

Ubuntu for tablets is almost here. Canonical has just revealed details of the slate piece of its phone-tablet-PC-TV puzzle, and it’s largely about the enterprise.

Yes, Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux has run on tablets before, but the upcoming version is the first to be engineered specifically with touch in mind. The idea is to have one code base running across all screens (more on that later), and a developer preview will come out on Thursday that can be installed not only on Google’s Nexus 7 and Nexus 10 tablets, but also on the Nexus 4 and Galaxy Nexus handsets.

We’ve already seen what the mobile version will look like, and now we know how it will look on tablets. In that form factor, it’s got several features worth mentioning, including voice-control for the heads-up display (HUD), multiple user accounts with full encryption, and the ability to multitask tablet and phone apps at the same time and on the same screen. The tablet can also be used as a thin client in the same way as an Ubuntu desktop can.

Here’s what Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth had to say in a statement, and a video too:

“Multi-tasking productivity meets elegance and rigorous security in our tablet experience… Our family of interfaces now scales across all screens, so your phone can provide tablet, PC and TV experiences when you dock it. That’s unique to Ubuntu and it’s the future of personal computing.”

Unified code

Now, about that single code base. Over the weekend, KDE developer Aaron Seigo launched what was by open-source standards a broadside against Canonical, accusing the London-based firm of “duping” developers by claiming to be using the same code for all versions, but not doing so in practice.

Canonical responded yesterday by insisting the code really would be one-size-fits-all when it’s complete. It went on to say this would hopefully happen by the end of this year, and that the first public release of “the full unified code base” would be in Ubuntu 14.04, in April 2014.

In other words, what you can install on your Nexus this week is far away from being being the finished product.

Enterprise focus

This is partly a consumer play, hence the TV iteration. However, the features Canonical mentioned today should appeal to enterprises, some of which are running Ubuntu on the server and, in the case of a few, on the desktop too.

In general, businesses currently use Microsoft on the desktop, with Apple’s iPad serving as the tablet of choice. If — and it’s a big if — Canonical can find manufacturers to actually make Ubuntu phones and tablets, the idea of developing once across all these form factors will be extremely attractive, particularly with a big question mark hanging over Windows 8′s place in the enterprise.

Of course, by spring 2014 there’s a good chance that Microsoft will have released an obligatory service pack (or ‘Blue’ release, or whatever it will be called) that clears up the OS’s various quirks, effectively giving corporate customers the all-clear to dive in. And it’s quite possible that Windows 8 will also prove to be the consumer success that Microsoft hopes it will be.

But if Windows 8′s enterprise appeal turns out to be more Vista than XP, business customers won’t have many familiar options to fall back on, leaving Canonical in a good position.

A lot can happen in a year.

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EE, the UK joint venture of France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom, has just released its full-year results for 2012. The financials show a fourth-quarter slowdown in new contract customers joining the network, but the big buzz today is about a detail EE left out: the number of 4G subscribers it now has.

Remember that EE is the only major carrier to be offering LTE services in the UK right now. It can do this because it was allowed before anyone else to ‘refarm’ its existing 2G spectrum for 4G – rivals will soon be able to do the same, and an upcoming auction will introduce fresh spectrum for fast mobile broadband. Remember, too, that EE is charging a premium for such services, above what it charges for 3G data.

EE’s 4G network went live at the end of October, so it’s easy to look at the “net adds” for Q4 – the number of people who signed up for an EE contract minus the number that jumped ship – and smell trouble. Net adds were 201,000 for the quarter, down from 313,000 a year previously.

Here’s how Ovum analyst Steven Hartley saw things, as per a statement the analyst house issued this morning:

“EE has everything in its favour for LTE to be a success: a market of high smart phone adoption and data usage but starved of high-speed mobile broadband; an LTE monopoly; rapid LTE coverage deployment; and a wider range of compatible handsets at launch than any other LTE operator. Therefore, unspectacular LTE uptake will be due to brand and pricing.”

Hartley certainly has a point. EE’s branding is… an issue. Everyone was used to the old T-Mobile and Orange brands, then the merger happened in 2010 and they were faced with Everything Everywhere, a disaster in terms of SEO and, may I add as a journalist, headlines. Little more than two years later, it was suddenly EE – an arguable improvement, but not by much.

Similarly, pricing is a problem. It’s a tricky proposition to charge more for 4G when your 4G network is still far from ubiquitous – according to EE’s results, coverage now stands at 43 percent. U.S. carriers have generally been better about this, steering clear of premium pricing at this point, and UK operator Three has already jumped in to say it will do the same.

However, as Matthew Howett, another Ovum analyst, pointed out on Twitter:

Not too surprised EE aren’t yet disclosing 4G sub numbers. Either good or bad it could give critical info to competitors during the auction

— Matthew Howett (@howett) February 19, 2013

As Howett went on to explain, high subscription numbers could overheat the bidding – EE may already have 4G-friendly spectrum, but it wants to buy more and it wants to get away with paying as little as possible. As for reporting low numbers — well, no-one wants to do that.

It may be that EE’s 4G numbers are disappointing, and that would probably have to do with pricing. But, at this point, with only two months’ worth of LTE provision being included in the financials, it’s probably unwise to read too much into the operator’s silence.

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The amount of data carried on mobile networks around the world doubled between the fourth quarter of 2011 and the fourth quarter of 2012, infrastructure firm Ericsson has said.

Ericsson’s figures, which came on Monday as part of an interim update (PDF warning) to its Mobility Report, suggested that the growth in mobile data usage is not slowing down. Bear in mind that the figures don’t even take into account mobile usage over Wi-Fi networks (or mobile WiMax, for what that’s worth), so the real numbers will be even greater if you’re concerned with what people do on their phones, as opposed to what type of connection they use.

Between Q3 and Q4 of last year alone, total data volumes over cellular connections increased 28 percent. Mobile broadband subscriptions also grew by about 50 percent year-on-year, between the final quarters of 2011 and 2012.

No slowdown

Now, 2012 was the year in which LTE became reality in many parts of the world, and faster downloads and uploads will usually encourage more use. That really can’t explain all the mobile data growth, though: Ericsson reckons that the number of LTE subscriptions at the end of 2012 was 57 million – way up from 14 million at the end of 2011, but still small when you look at the bigger picture. Much of this growth has to be down to the increase in subscriptions, not just the type of connectivity they use.

Around the world, there are now 4.4 billion mobile subscribers (with 6.3 billion mobile subscriptions, as one person can have more than one phone or connected devices). That’s nine percent year-on-year growth for subscriptions.

Unsurprisingly, the really big growth in mobile subscriptions these days can be found in China, the rest of Asia-Pacific, and in Africa. During 2012, China saw 30 million new mobile subscriptions, while India saw 11 million, Bangladesh 9 million, Indonesia 8 million and Nigeria 5 million:

Regarding these emerging markets, it’s been said before but it bears repeating: for many people in such areas, their mobile phone is their first computer. The opportunities here are staggering, both for those trying to hawk their services in emerging markets, and for those in such places who themselves want to develop services for local customers and perhaps even the developed world. This trend will shape the future of the web.

It’s also worth reminding ourselves that the mobile world is still not predominantly driven by smartphones – not by a long shot. According to Ericsson’s data, smartphones account for only 15-20 percent of the global installed base for cellphones, and only 40 percent of handsets sold in 2012.

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Amazon has reportedly ended its relationship with a German security company that was accused of having far-right links and mistreating foreign workers at the U.S. firm’s distribution centers.

Hensel European Security Services’s (HESS) methods were the subject of a documentary last week by the German TV channel ARD, which used secret filming to establish how the firm harassed and intimidated foreign workers and also how some of its military-style employees appeared to have far-right allegiances.

The firm itself has strongly denied such links – it noted in a statement that it itself employs many immigrants — but the documentary quickly attracted the attention of Chancellor Angela Merkel and other leading politicians. HESS’s case has almost certainly not been helped by the fact that the acronym it uses was also the name of Hitler’s deputy.

For those who understand German, the program can be watched here:

The documentary alleged that HESS regularly searched temporary staff members’ accommodation and even frisked them after breakfast, to check that they did not steal rolls. On Friday, Amazon said it was looking into the claims, but early on Monday the U.S. company said it had parted ways with HESS:

“Amazon has secured that the criticized security service is not used any longer, effective immediately. As a responsible employer of approximately 8,000 salaried logistics employees, Amazon has zero-tolerance for discrimination and intimidation and expects the same from every company we work with.”

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LG has outed its new high-end Android device, the 5-5-inch Optimus G Pro, a week ahead of Mobile World Congress’s predicted slew of handset announcements.

The Optimus Pro G goes on sale this week in South Korea, carrying Android “Jelly Bean” 4.1.2. According to a release in Korean, it will then make its way to North America and Japan in the second quarter of this year. An LG spokeswoman in London was unable to confirm European availability plans.

So, what are we looking at? Size-wise, the Optimus Pro G is an ever-so-slightly smaller rival to the Samsung Galaxy Note 2 — same thickness and screen size, but 0.9mm narrower and a good 4.4mm shorter. However, LG has made the jump to full HD: with a resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels, the Pro G has a pixel density of 400ppi, versus the Note 2′s 267ppi. It lack’s the Note 2′s stylus, though.

Inside, the Pro G uses a 1.7GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 chipset; a slight step up from the 1.6GHz processor in the Note 2. Incidentally, this is the first outing for the Snapdragon 600, which is a successor to last year’s Snapdragon S4 series (its twin, the sequel to the S4 Pro, will be called the Snapdragon 800).

More pixels and processing power usually mean more power-drain. On this front, LG is touting the “largest battery capacity in its class” at 3,140mAh, but that’s not really much more than the Note 2′s 3,100mAh. LG also hasn’t quoted the device’s weight yet, so it’s hard to see how that compares with the Note 2′s 183g. The Note 2 has an 8MP camera and the Pro G a 13MP affair, but, given the size of a smartphone camera’s sensor, image quality will be more down to the lens and software than the megapixel count here.

Custom tweaks include “an upgraded QSlide” (LG’s answer to Samsung’s multitasking Pop-up Play feature), QuickMemo and a feature called Virtual Reality Panorama, which looks on paper to be precisely the same as Android’s stock 360-degree Photo Sphere function. The Pro G can also record video through both front- and rear-facing camera simultaneously, and it also features wireless charging.

How does this all compare with Samsung’s largest smartphone / smallest tablet? On paper, certainly, this looks to be an improvement on the Note 2, but then again there will probably be a Note 3 this year, also capitalizing on the latest chipsets and quite probably also upping the pixel count. It certainly doesn’t look like LG has done anything particularly groundbreaking here, so the real test of the Pro G’s success or otherwise will be its as-yet-unannounced pricing.

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Is the future of the self-driving car one of full autonomy, or, as car manufacturers such as Ford have suggested, one of part-time autonomy? In the near-term, the latter option seems far saner, and it’s the approach that underpins new research being shown off by academics at the University of Oxford.

The RobotCar U.K. project is using a modified Nissan Leaf, an all-electric vehicle, which is fitted with around £5,000 ($7,750) worth of prototype navigation equipment. That system includes a controller PC in the trunk — which can control every function of the car — as well as cameras in the front, lasers discreetly tucked under the front and rear bumpers, and an iPad for the user interface up front.

In time, the researchers hope to develop an autonomous navigation system that costs just £100.

“We are working on a low-cost ‘auto drive’ navigation system, that doesn’t depend on GPS, done with discreet sensors that are getting cheaper all the time. It’s easy to imagine that this kind of technology could be in a car you could buy,” Professor Paul Newman, the project’s co-leader, said in a statement.

Mapping and learning

The system doesn’t use GPS because the satellite-based system is not accurate enough for the researchers’ needs. Instead, twin cameras keep an eye on the road ahead for pedestrians and so on, while the lasers create a three-dimensional map of the world around the car — this is a similar approach to that taken by Google in its autonomous vehicle research, except far cheaper (Google’s LIDAR unit alone costs $70,000) and less conspicuous.

This is where the car’s part-time autonomy comes in — at least in city environments. As Newman put it:

“Our approach is made possible because of advances in 3D laser mapping that enable an affordable car-based robotic system to rapidly build up a detailed picture of its surroundings. Because our cities don’t change very quickly robotic vehicles will know and look out for familiar structures as they pass by so that they can ask a human driver, ‘I know this route, do you want me to drive?’, and the driver can choose to let the technology take over.”

It’s really a matter of machine learning, the science of probability and good guesswork; and the data the researchers are using comes from the cameras and lasers, but also from road plans, aerial photographs and internet queries. The car needs to learn its environment before it can, metaphorically speaking, take the wheel. (The driver can always take back control by tapping the brakes.)

Check out this video showing car driving through a gradually-updating “semantic prior map” — in other words, all the fixed stuff such as road markings, curb locations and so on, with dynamic objects being mapped along the way:

As for next steps, the team will try to get the system to understand traffic flows and learn how to evaluate best routes.

“Whilst our technology won’t be in a car showroom near you any time soon, and there’s lots more work to do, it shows the potential for this kind of affordable robotic system that could make our car journeys safer, more efficient, and more pleasant for drivers,” Newman said.

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Last year Telefonica started reselling FeedHenry’s cloud-based Mobile Applications Platform to corporate customers in the UK, Germany and Ireland. But since then, the telecoms giant launched its own mobile- and M2M-optimized infrastructure-as-a-service play, Instant Servers. So it’s no surprise to see the two companies solidify their tie-up, as they have done today.

Essentially, Telefonica will start selling FeedHenry’s platform to its European enterprise customers with Instant Servers providing the hosting piece. Technologically, the two platforms are fairly well aligned — FeedHenry uses Node.js for integration with its back-end systems, and the Joyent-based Instant Servers platform uses Node.js SmartMachine virtual machines. Predictably, the two companies talk in their statement about “sharing a vision for cloud computing”.

“We are seeing increased demand from enterprises seeking cloud-based mobile app platforms to reduce up-front costs and time to market,” FeedHenry CEO Cathal McGloin said in a statement. “Corporate IT and app development teams will now be able to build applications for the most demanding consumer and enterprise users to quickly and easily deploy them securely to the cloud.”

FeedHenry, which was a finalist in GigaOM’s Mobilize Launchpad contest back in 2010, is based in Ireland, although it has recently opened an office in England as its European business expands. Spain’s Telefonica is increasingly trying to push into the cloud, as are most large operators.

“The intersection of mobile and cloud is a natural one,” Telefonica Digital Cloud Director Tim Marsden said in the statement. “Our goal is to accelerate the availability of mobile-optimized, cloud-based services for app development and management, giving full access to cloud services like storage, security, caching, and server-side business logic.”

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Before this week, you may have been forgiven for thinking of Opera as a worthy but dull fading player in the browser space. No longer. Not only has the Norwegian firm caused quite a bit of upset by dropping its own engines and frameworks in favor of WebKit, Chromium and V8, but now it’s gone and bought Skyfire for a cool $155 million.

From a consumer app perspective, the two companies have remarkable similarities. Opera’s browsers are best known for using server-side compression as a way of saving on data costs, and Skyfire uses server-side rendering for video, making it a go-to browser for those who really miss Flash on today’s platforms. This deal is doubtlessly about uniting those two strengths, but that’s not its main thrust.

This is really about mobile carriers: about offering them more control over the quality of their services, and about giving them ways to monetize their subscribers’ mobile web usage. And it may just be a push whose time has come. The key there is the carriers’ current shift to software-defined networking (SDN), which in itself is intended to give operators the ability to fine-tune parts of their networks in ways that were not previously possible.

As it happens, Skyfire offers operators a video optimization technology called Rocket, that is supposed to free up capacity – as much as 60 percent, the company claims — at cell sites that are currently feeling the strain of the mobile video explosion. Skyfire also has a toolbar called Horizon that carriers can preinstall on their phones in order to offer customers context-relevant coupons, for example. Mountain View-based Skyfire has three deals with U.S. carriers for the Rocket Optimizer and Horizon (Verizon was a big investor), and is apparently trialling them with ten other operators around the world.

Opera, meanwhile, has its Turbo compression technology, but it also has a mobile advertising platform called Mediaworks and a carrier service called Web Pass, which allows them to offer pay-per-use mobile web access through the browser. Across these two companies, there’s a lot to play with –- in terms of both technology and geographical reach (Skyfire is strong in North America and Opera in the developing world).

As Opera CEO Lars Boilesen put it in a statement:

“Both companies have evolved far beyond their browser roots. Skyfire adds capabilities to our portfolio around video, app optimization, smartphones and tablets, and strength in North America. With video expected to consume over two-thirds of global mobile bandwidth by 2015, and as time spent on Android and iOS apps explodes, we are excited to extend Opera’s solutions for operators.”

In the same statement, Skyfire CEO Jeffrey Glueck (who will hang onto that title while also becoming Opera’s Operator Business Unit EVP) said:

“Opera practically invented cloud compression to improve mobile user experience, and the team at Skyfire is proud to join forces and advance cloud solutions together. Opera’s over 100 carrier relationships, global sales team, and delivery organization can accelerate the global commercialization of Skyfire’s technology. Opera’s Mediaworks advertising unit with AdMarvel, Mobile Theory and 4th Screen Advertising will strengthen Skyfire Horizon by offering mobile operators a complete turnkey solution including ad optimization, ad sales, and rich analytics. The synergies across all the product lines for both companies are tremendous.”

Glueck also wrote a separate blog post that’s worth a read. In it, he expresses excitement about pushing Skyfire’s technology into the developing world, and also gives a nod to the rise of SDN:

“This is a major milestone for our Skyfire family and validation of our vision for cloud computing and network function virtualization (NFV) to solve huge problems on mobile networks, from handling the explosion of video over cell towers, to finding ways for mobile operators to regain relevance and monetize in an over-the-top world. Back in 2007, when Nitin Bhandari and Erik Swenson started Skyfire, the idea that Tier One mobile network operators would entrust the cloud for core network roles was considered bleeding edge. Now it’s a topic everyone is talking about, and Skyfire is making NVF combined with Software Defined Networking a reality.”

So what’s next for the merged companies? For a start, they will over the next year roll out new products for carriers that build on Web Pass with new ways of offering mobile web access, such as “toll-free data” and “ad-supported data”.

And by the way, if you love your Flash video and you’re worried about the future of the Skyfire browser, don’t be – Skyfire will continue to develop and support it.

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There are two main things that can cause a real-time web service to be not-so-real-time: insufficient bandwidth and excessive latency. Bandwidth is an ISP issue, but latency — the time it takes for your computer to contact a server and/or get a response — is largely down to the way the internet is engineered.

So a team of researchers from around Europe, with some help from the European Commission, Alcatel-Lucent and BT, is aiming to revise a standard data-transport protocol to effectively re-engineer how the internet runs — without the need for pricey new equipment.

It’s a tall order, but they’re deadly serious. And from the vendor side, it’s not hard to see why: Alcatel-Lucent wants to slash latency for better videoconferencing, and BT wants to do the same in order to improve its Radianz Cloud platform, which serves the very time-sensitive financial services industry.

The project is called Reducing Internet Transport Latency (RITE). It quietly kicked off last November but the University of Aberdeen, where some of the researchers are based, has only just started making noise about it — largely because the researchers are about to set off for an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) meeting in Florida next month to show off what they’re up to.

In a statement, Professor Gorry Fairhurst said:

“It’s a problem we all notice when you’re using a program like Skype. If anyone else in the house is watching a video at the same time, your video connection becomes jerky and often crashes. This affects gamers who want to play online in real time and companies doing stock training – both end up buying special and expensive internet connections to make these work, but often it’s not more bandwidth that’s needed to go faster – it’s less delay.

We think we can reduce this delay by making a set of small but important changes to the way computers and the network process the internet data.”

So, what sorts of changes are we talking about? Fairhurst told me on Thursday that there are two main strands to the RITE project’s work: revising the core Transmission Control Protocol (TCP, a.k.a the flipside to the Internet Protocol) and changing how network routers handle buffering.

“We’re trying to change TCP so that it works better with thin applications — applications that don’t send a huge amount of data and aren’t really interactive, like media streaming and conference calls,” he said. “We would make a small change to the timer mechanism so that you can recover data when you send a burst and lose part of it — it can take quite a lot of time to recover one lost packet — and we also have to do something to the way the congestion window works.

On the other side, to make this work effectively you have to change the way the routers behave as well. People know routers have lots of memory in them, but TCP tends to fill up all the buffers inside. We’re going to make recommendations on how to avoid buffer blocks — this is more directed at operators than people building PC software, but these things have to be done at the same time.”

Fairhurst noted that the TCP revisions would be piloted in Linux. After those Linux patches have been rolled out over the next year, the RITE researchers will try to get the standards community to do its thing and then “hopefully convince Microsoft, Apple and everyone else” to incorporate the changes into their applications. Google, which has developed the SPDY (pronounced “speedy”) protocol for reducing load time, has already shown interest, he claimed.

Apart from better videoconferencing and faster trading platforms, Fairhurst also suggested that success could “make the internet available to a whole new raft of applications,” such as proper virtual reality.

“It’s a small fix that really came from the gaming community originally,” he added. “Gamers really hate delay.”

Apart from the University of Aberdeen (Scotland), other research facilities involved in RITE include Simula Research Labs (Norway), the University of Oslo (Norway), Karlstad University (Sweden) and the Institut Mines-Telecom (France). The consortium has received just over €3.5 million ($4.7 million) from the European Commission.

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Google has sued BT, the British telecoms giant, in both the U.S. and the U.K. over alleged patent infringement, but the facts behind this and other disagreements between the two firms remain murky.

The patents in the U.S. suit (CNET has located a copy of the court documents) mostly originated from IBM – two cover the reservation of system resources for assuring quality of service, and one deals with assigning connection capacity in a multi-tiered data-processing network. A fourth patent, which was originally obtained by Fujitsu, also covers a “gateway for internet telephone”.

All pretty broad and, according to Google, infringed by BT’s wholesale quality of service products and OneVoice unified communications system. Google is asking the U.S. courts to order BT to stop infringing and to pay Google damages.

The British suit is somewhat more mysterious. While some reports overnight suggested that BT had not yet been served with that suit, the company told me this morning that this has indeed happened. Beyond that, it refused to comment on the specifics of the suit. It’s worth reminding ourselves here that the British patent system is quite different from that of the U.S. – it is far trickier there to patent “business methods” — so it would be a mistake to assume a direct correlation between the two cases.

However, I did get some interesting information from a source within BT: firstly, that the company sees this as “predictable” retaliation for BT’s lawsuit against Google (filed more than a year ago), but also that that 2011 case is going to mediation this coming July. In my own analysis, this makes it possible that Google’s suit against BT is intended as leverage for that meeting.

Google itself has said in a statement that it “always [sees] litigation as a last resort” and is defending itself against both the 2011 suit and BT’s “arming [of] patent trolls” – a clear reference to Steelhead’s January lawsuit against Google (and half the tech industry) using patents it had bought from BT.

However, BT has always maintained that it has “no involvement” with the Steelhead suit, telling me last month that it sold all the rights to the relevant patents last year and would receive no share of Steelhead’s licensing income. Someone is misrepresenting the facts here, and it may be a while before we find out who that is – if indeed we ever do.

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The shift to the cloud does bring with it many security risks – just look at the scary stories being told by security vendors such as Arbor Networks for some examples. But the cloud can also mitigate against certain risks, as the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) pointed out today in a new report.

ENISA is the agency charged with co-ordinating the fight, across Europe, against various worrisome things prefixed with “cyber-”: “cybercrime”, “cyber attacks” and so on. Europe’s new cybersecurity strategy would make ENISA what security expert Ross Anderson recently called “a classified network of military and intelligence agencies”, but the fact remains that the agency is a relatively impartial observer of the security landscape.

When it comes to the cloud, ENISA sees the new approach to computing infrastructure as a “double-edged sword”. Its report, entitled Critical Cloud Computing, notes as Arbor Networks did that the concentration of many organizations’ resources in data centers can multiply “the impact of cyber attacks” – effectively, that an attack against one can be an attack against all. It also points to infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service as particularly hot targets:

“The most critical services are large IaaS and PaaS services which deliver services to other IT vendors who service in turn millions of users and organisations.”

There’s also the issue of critical sectors such as finance, transport and energy increasingly putting their crown jewels into the cloud. However, that’s only one side of the coin. ENISA also sees cloud computing as a pretty good defence against, say, distributed denial-of-service attacks on specific services:

“Elasticity is a key benefit of cloud computing and this elasticity helps to cope with load and mitigates the risk of overload or DDoS attacks. It is difficult to mitigate the impact of peak usage or a DDoS attack with limited computing resources.”

With regional power cuts and natural disasters, the agency claimed, cloud computing can also provide “resilience”. That depends on how resources are distributed of course – just ask customers using Amazon’s storm-prone Northern Virginia data center. Nonetheless, ENISA pointed to the 2011 Japanese earthquake as an example of a disaster taking out “traditional IT deployments” but failing to down certain cloud services.

As for conclusions, ENISA has a series of recommendations for national cybersecurity agencies that includes a focus on making sure IaaS and PaaS providers stay safe, and figuring out just which public services depend on which cloud services. Interestingly, the agency also sings the praises of standardization in the cloud sector:

“Standardization, especially for IaaS and PaaS services, would allow customers to move workload to other providers in case one provider has suffers a large outages caused by system failures or even administrative or legal disputes.”

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Ericsson has revealed its Cloud System, a product for orchestrating private cloud capabilities across the network that effectively ties together previously announced moves such as its membership of OpenStack and redefinition of the concept of software-defined networking (SDN).

Ericsson Cloud System, which will hit availability in the first quarter of 2014, targets mobile operators in particular. It incorporates an upgraded Cloud Manager, which is Ericsson’s operations support system, alongside a new Cloud Execution Environment that’s based on OpenStack and the KVM hypervisor.

This all runs on existing Ericsson Blade System (EBS) server clusters and Smart Services Routers (SSR), and the general idea is to enable virtualized environments across the network, from the base station to aggregation nodes and business support systems.

“Cloud services need to be distributed and networks — including computing and storage capabilities — need to be elastic on an end-to-end basis,” an Ericsson statement reads. “This combination will bring a new set of capabilities that doesn’t exist today… It enables distributed cloud capabilities such as computing and storage capabilities in the network, resulting in a better experience when using cloud applications, and more efficient utilization of network resources.

Ericsson’s take on SDN is key to this approach. The company sees most people’s interpretation of the concept as overly focused on the data center, whereas it wants to push the idea of SDN as covering a carrier’s entire network, with operational and business support systems also in the mix.

The benefit, it argues, would be to make resources elastic, to cope with an application’s bandwidth or quality-of-service requirements on-the-fly. By doing so, Ericsson says, the operator can make its own business more efficient, then perhaps use freed-up resources to provide cloud compute and storage services to others.

“There are lots of advantages,” Magnus Furustam, the head of Ericsson’s Core and IMS business, told me today. “Time to market, simplifying operations, but also the innovation that is enabled. By providing a virtualization layer, you make it possible for the operator to [insert] new functionality in the network where it is needed.

“We think it’s important that this is not a disruption –- we’re not asking our operators to throw away their existing infrastructure. Based on that hardware we can upgrade that to support first of all virtualized environments, and if that is not the case we can add hardware, say a board that supports virtualized environments.”

The Ericsson Cloud System will be shown off at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona later this month, where the company will also launch a new “unified” content delivery network (CDN) system called Media Delivery Network.

The new CDN system, designed to help both fixed and mobile operators get into video delivery, combines Ericsson’s existing packet core and radio technologies with new management and service exposure layers. This will let operators do things like select the best CDN in order to optimize traffic, and cache over-the-top (OTT) content — in other words, third-party content — in order to offer the OTT content providers new guaranteed quality-of-service levels.

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The European Union has just agreed on its budget for the years 2014-2020, and it’s the first time that budget has actually been cut. Unfortunately for European broadband projects that were counting on money from a €7 billion ($9.36 billion) central fund, that’s where a huge chunk of the €34 billion in savings came from.

This formed the bulk of the €9.2 billion “digital part” of the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF), a part that got trimmed down to €1 billion in budget negotiations. That remaining billion will now go to a different subsection, to do with nailing down cross-border digital services such as e-procurement and e-invoicing. The whole ambition of using €7 billion in EU funding over the coming seven years to accelerate deployment of fibre-access broadband networks — which was in turn supposed to help businesses take up cloud services – just went bye-bye.

The cut could potentially hit rural areas and small towns the hardest. However, digital agenda commissioner Neelie Kroes, who must be bitterly disappointed as she’s worked on the CEF plans for years, issued a statement in which she said she was still shooting for the goals of having half of Europe surfing at more than 100 Mbps, and the rest on at least 30 Mbps, by 2020:

“It is clear that there can be no support for broadband with a pot of only €1bn, so this funding will be exclusively for digital services. Our 2020 fast broadband targets, agreed by everybody, may be harder to reach but I am not giving up on them. I will keep fighting, and I will support innovations that help roll-out fast broadband to underserved areas.”

Kroes went on to warn that member states would now need to rigidly adhere to her recently-announced 10-point regulatory plan for upgrading Europe’s broadband infrastructure, in order to hit targets:

“National governments will not achieve their own ambitions if they fail to offer this support. And their own support schemes will come under great pressure to serve areas where the market alone will not act.”

European telecoms providers had previously begged the continent’s leaders not to cut the broadband part of the CEF, arguing that such a move would harm the EU’s competitiveness. It should also be noted that the European Parliament still has to approve the budget before it can come into force.

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There’s a lot of data flying around at the moment about the rise of tablets in relation to the decline of what we traditionally think of as a PC. In the last week, first IDC then Canalys put the ratio of PC to tablet shipments at or below 2:1 for the fourth quarter of last year.

Now another analyst house has weighed in, with related but slightly different metrics. This time it’s GfK, which has been looking at the situation specifically in France and reckons that tablet sales will actually overtake those of notebooks this year. Specifically, GfK is forecasting 5.1 million tablet sales and 3.9 million notebook sales during 2013.

Why is this? GfK puts it down to the fact that tablets have gotten much cheaper, and the average price of PCs is actually going up slightly, no doubt due to the profusion of ‘premium’ ultrabooks. Also, 9.4 million French households now have more than one PC and, due to the ability of tablets to substitute in many use cases, the rise of the tablet is lengthening the renewal cycle for PCs.

Note that that’s “many” and not “all” use cases – GfK’s surveying found that 70 percent of French people don’t see tablets as an outright replacement for PCs. Also, the analyst house was keen to stress that the evolution of hybrid tablet-notebooks and the possible success of Windows 8 could change matters during the year.

Of course, this is about tablets and notebooks, not tablets and PCs as such. Most notebooks are built that way to include an element of portability – an area where tablets have them beat. I find it hard to see proper desktop machines or 17-inch laptops going away anytime soon, though, so the question in my mind is what the ratios will look like once the dust has settled on what is clearly a time of much more rapid change than we could have predicted a couple of years ago.

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ComodIT, the Belgian startup that’s trying to take on the likes of Opscode and Puppet Labs (see disclosure) as the IT automation service of choice among enterprise devops, has added autoscaling capabilities to its arsenal.

As it set out in a blog post, the company also released an open-source Python library so users can integrate its automation into their own applications and processes.

ComodIT was a finalist in our Structure:Europe LaunchPad competition last year in Amsterdam (this year’s event will be in London in September). The company automates not only the ongoing configuration of what goes on within virtual machines (VMs) – whether they’re hosted on public (Amazon EC2, Rackspace) or private clouds (OpenStack, CloudStack, Eucalyptus, VMware) or even on physical servers – but also the provisioning of those VMs. ComodIT lets users migrate machines between, for example, EC2 and a Xen hypervisor by changing a single parameter.

And its latest features may come in handy for those who want to run their application on a private cloud while bursting to a public cloud when needed.

“If you want to have autoscaling for your infrastructure, your web application or database, if you want to have it on hybrid clouds you have to manage the fact that, if the load is becoming too high, you need to automatically scale your infrastructure,” ComodIT CEO Daniel Bartz explained to me. “To do this, usually you are talking about orchestration, but most of the time the tools are scaling only the virtual machine entity itself – if the load is too high, you just pop up a new VM.

“We are able to do that if you need, but also to reconfigure automatically what is in another machine to keep the complete infrastructure coherent and be able to adapt to hybrid clouds.”

The new Python library bears a permissive MIT license and, according to Bartz, is largely targeted at startups that are developing new infrastructure and new applications.

‘Enabling the cloud broker market’

ComodIT is still in beta mode and, before it can hit general availability, it needs to integrate one more piece: its billing system. The firm’s subscription model is a per-node-per-month one, but right now payments need to be organized by email.

And once that billing system is in place, along with connections to providers’ systems, ComodIT will try to become what Bartz calls an “enabler” for the booming cloud broker market“.

“There are two challenges for the cloud broker market,” Bartz said. “The first is technical, and we are close to a solution there – to make the deployment and management of your infrastructure independent of the underlying technology. People can use ComodIT to do that today.

“But the other part is billing relationship management with the different cloud providers. There we are nowhere. To do that, the cloud brokers need to have the underlying technology.”

Intriguing talk, but Bartz wouldn’t say any more for now. Further details will come in the summer, he promised.

Disclosure: Puppet Labs is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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Wunderlist 2, the newly-native redesign of 6Wunderkinder’s popular task management app, is finally hitting tablets more than a month after it became available for smartphones.

Wunderlist was originally designed cross-platform using Titanium, but the need to create native versions became a focus last year for Berlin-based 6Wunderkinder, leading the company to abandon its second product, Wunderkit.

Unusually, the first tablet-optimized native version to be released is for Android. Wanna see some frustrated Apple users? Check out the comment thread in the release blog post.

But those with iPads needn’t fear. Fact is, both the Android and iPad versions were developed and finished at the same time. As CEO Christian Reber tweeted today, the iPad version is simply somewhere in Apple’s approval process. So, while those users won’t get to take advantage of Android-specific features such as homescreen task widgets and inter-app sharing, they should be catered for soon enough.

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It makes sense to call Yandex Russia’s answer to Google, because it’s doing all sorts of interesting things with data and in mobile. And of course, like Google, Yandex’s core business is in search.

And it seems to be doing surprisingly well in that field. In fact, according to the latest comScore qSearch data covering the end of last year, Yandex has definitely now overtaken Microsoft in search, measured on a worldwide basis.

That actually first showed up in November’s stats, when Yandex processed 4.62 billion search requests to Microsoft’s 4.48 billion requests, but that meant each had roughly 2.6 percent share, and with such things you want to see a continuing trend. Sure enough, in December 2012 Yandex handled 4.84 billion requests (2.8 percent share) and Microsoft 4.48 billion (2.5 percent share). It’s a trend.

By way of comparison, Google is still thrashing everyone else, handling 114.73 billion requests in the same month for a 65.2 percent market share. China’s Baidu is next with 14.5 billion (8.2 percent), then Yahoo with 8.63 billion (4.9 percent). Yeah, I know Bing powers Yahoo search, but we’re talking about those consciously searching through what comScore terms “Microsoft sites” here — some of that will be searches through Office and Windows Live, but most will be explicitly through Bing itself.

The weird thing about the stats is the number of unique searchers — for December, Microsoft had 268.6 million of them, and Yandex just 74.4 million. Here we need to bear in mind that language is a factor. In English-speaking countries for example, people may use a variety of search engines when they’re not using Google, the clear market leader. In Russia, Yandex has more than 60 percent of the search market, and people who use it probably just use it a lot on average.

Then there’s the fact that Russia’s internet market is growing really quickly, and so is the market in Turkey – another key country for Yandex.

Whatever the reasons, Microsoft is now down to fifth place in the global search stats, at least according to comScore’s data.

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At the start of January, a group of Nokia refugees in Copenhagen launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund a new wristwatch. And it’s quite a different beast from the Pebble, that greater poster-child for the crowdfunding platform; this one, the Leikr, does color maps too.

It’s a handy feature for runners — the maps use OpenStreetMap data and can integrate routes and online analytics with fitness app Endomondo — and it reflects the fact that the ex-Nokians in question are themselves keen athletes.

And now it’s definitely going to happen. The Leikr campaign shot for $250,000 and scored $267,389 at its closing a couple days ago. According to Seed Capital, which has already invested in Leikr company Acorn (not to be confused with the British computer manufacturer that spawned ARM some 23 years ago), this is a record for any Danish Kickstarter project.

The Leikr displays its maps and six data tiles on a 2-inch screen protected by Gorilla Glass, and it comes with downloadable workouts. One of the main features for athletes, though, is the zippy GPS fix time: 30 seconds max, apparently. I hear (I’ve not dived into the whole sports watch thing myself yet) that this is a sore point for rivals such as the Nike+ SportWatch.

The first units of the Leikr should be delivered in the U.S. sometime in the summer. With this and Jolla now going concerns, I wonder what else we will see come out of the Nokia-downsizing diaspora.

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Mobile operators have what might charitably be termed an interesting relationship with VoIP services, particularly the market leader, Microsoft’s Skype. These services are partly to blame for the decline in voice revenue, and there’s been all sorts of net-neutrality-busting throttling and premium pricing going on in various countries as the carriers try to dissuade users from going all-IP.

That strategy met with only limited success, so last year Skype was able to confidently team up with the mobile billing company Mach on direct operator billing for Skype Credit. And now it’s here, starting in Russia: as of today, Skype users in that country can pay for credit through their normal mobile phone bill or pre-paid account balance.

According to a Mach spokeswoman, the same opportunity will be extended to Skype users in the U.S. and Canada later this month, and other countries will follow. Mach, which provides a billing gateway, has direct agreements with carriers in Canada and Russia. In the U.S. it is partnering up with Payvia, which has similar arrangements there.

“As well as our existing users benefiting from this new payment option, we expect direct operator billing to attract new customers who are looking for more convenient ways to manage their spend,” Skype payments chief Jason Macklin said in a statement.

No carriers are being quoted by name, but “leading mobile operators” are apparently playing ball. Mach lists Orange, Telefonica, T-Mobile, Telus and Verizon Wireless as customers.

It should go without saying that the operators will get a cut of the Skype Credit purchases, although how much they get seems to be a tightly-guarded secret. The credit will cost the same as if it was purchased through more traditional means.

For Skype, it potentially means more reach. For the carriers, it means they get some kind of revenue stream beyond data usage (which is usually flat-rate these days) out of the ‘over-the-top’ technology that’s so disrupted their core business. It may just be that everyone’s a winner here.

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Once upon a time, Microsoft could count on platform dominance around the world, because Windows ruled in the age of the desktop. In emerging economies that platform dominance was usually maintained through rampant ‘piracy’ of Windows – a fact that Microsoft could never openly condone, but from which it clearly benefited.

That was then, this is now. Mobile computing is now the growth business and, for those in emerging economies who previously never managed to get their hands on PC hardware, smartphones are their first computers. And what’s running on such handsets in Africa, the most untapped market of them all? Not Windows – which is why Microsoft has just launched a concerted campaign, called 4Afrika, to change that situation.

Windows Phones for Africa

The lynchpin of this scheme is the Huawei ’4Afrika with Windows Phone 8′ device. Microsoft has already released lower-end Windows Phones in African markets, such as the Nokia Lumia 620, but those are relatively expensive – in Nigeria, for example, that device is expected to cost around $250. The Huawei 4Afrika phone will cost $150.

It would be interesting to know how heavily Microsoft is subsidizing this phone, because the Huawei 4Afrika is a variant of the $300 Ascend W1, which targets the European market. The 4Afrika phone has a 480×800-pixel screen, a dual-core 1.2GHz Snapdragon processor, a 10mm-thick case and 4GB internal storage, along with front- and rear-facing cameras. Standby time – a big deal in markets where power can be unreliable or hard to come by – is rated at 420 hours.

According to a Microsoft blog post, the handset also comes preloaded with “custom apps created by African developers for African consumers”.

Not bad for the price, you may think. But look at the local prices for cheap smartphones – and by this I mean the likes of Nokia’s semi-smart Asha devices but also BlackBerry and Android phones – and you’ll see handsets priced around $80. That’s almost half the price of the Huawei 4Afrika.

According to Ian Fogg, senior principal analyst at IHS Screen Digest, that discrepancy could take the Huawei 4Afrika out of reach for many:

“This is a cheap smartphone for Windows Phone, but it’s still significantly more expensive than the entry-level Android smartphones in the market or the Nokia Asha devices, which Nokia are putting head-to-head with entry-level Android.”

However, Fogg pointed out that Microsoft’s tight reference platform for Windows Phone 8 meant the Huawei 4Afrika would give a much better experience than those cheaper Android phones, which may use cheaper and less powerful components.

Wider campaign

It’s also worth noting that 4Afrika is a scheme that goes beyond phones. Microsoft will also be working with authorities and ISPs in Kenya and elsewhere to deliver cheap wireless broadband using experimental white space technology and solar-powered base stations. The company will also launch an online hub in April for small businesses, giving them free services and, for some, free domain registration.

As Ali Faramaway, Microsoft’s VP for the Middle East and Africa, put it in a separate blog post:

“When we look at the world, many see China or the BRIC countries as the next big opportunity for growth. At Microsoft, we view the African continent as a game-changer in the global economy. We believe deeply in the potential of technology to change Africa, and we equally believe in the potential of Africa to change technology for the world.”

Whether or not Microsoft succeeds in ensuring that technology is Microsoft-based, is up for debate. But it’s certainly worth a shot and, if 4Afrika does really accelerate the rollout of connectivity on the continent, all the better.

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