Author: David Meyer

The German parliament has passed a controversial law that will force search engines and news aggregators to pay publishers royalties for providing short snippets of their articles in results.

The Bundestag passed the Leistungsschutzrecht für Presseverleger (LSR), or “ancillary copyright for press publishers” law, on Friday by 293 votes to 243. The coalition government was the driver behind the law, and the main opposition, the SPD, now says it will try to defeat the law in the country’s second legislative chamber, the Bundesrat.

The text that got passed in the Bundestag apparently exempts “small text snippets”, although it does not state how short a text snippet has to be to be royalty-free – if it is less than headline-short, this will probably mean the wholesale removal of all German news publications from Google’s search results.

Google has been a vocal opponent of the law, for obvious reasons. In France and Belgium the company has settled related disputes with publishers in deals that many have seen as tantamount to a payoff. However, it looks like the German situation is now beyond settlement.

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We already know that data is integral to finding the cure for cancer, but some of that data needs the attention of human rather than machine eyes in order to be properly interpreted. To that end, the charity Cancer Research UK has teamed up with Amazon, Facebook and Google to create a mobile game for analysing genetic mutations.

The aim of the game is simply to harness more eyes – cancer researchers already trawl through genetic data to try to pick up on subtle irregularities, but the task would be a lot easier if more people were involved. The charity has already created a web-based game called Cell Slider for looking through archived tissue samples, but the new game is supposed to make the search for a cure more fun, and more suitable for on-the-go usage.

Cancer Research UK is holding a hackathon called GameJam this weekend, through which 40 coders – including Facebook engineers — gamers, graphic designers and “other specialists” will hopefully come up with a suitable format (the goal is a game that can be played for just 5 minutes at a time). The result will be hosted on Amazon Web Services, and Google is hosting the event and providing financial support for the scheme.

“We’re making great progress in understanding the genetic reasons cancer develops. But the clues to why some drugs will work and some won’t, are held in data which need to be analysed by the human eye – and this could take years,” Professor Carlos Caldas, senior group leader at Cancer Research UK’s University of Cambridge facility, said in a statement.

“By harnessing the collective power of citizen scientists we’ll accelerate the discovery of new ways to diagnose and treat cancer much more precisely.”

According to Cancer Research UK, Cell Slider has already reduced the analysis time for some clinical trial data from 18 to 3 months – and that’s with tens of thousands of users. The hope is that this new mobile game would pick up hundreds of thousands of users.

The game will launch this summer. If the participants pull it off, it would probably qualify as the most useful application of the “gamification” trend in history.

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British Sky Broadcasting Group (BSkyB) will buy Telefonica’s UK fixed-line broadband and telephony business for up to £200 million ($303 million), the companies announced early on Friday.

The deal, which is subject to regulatory clearance, should close in April. If that goes ahead, the customers will be moved off the O2 and BE Broadband brands and become Sky customers. Sky (40 percent of which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp) would then become the UK’s second-largest ISP, behind BT and ahead of Virgin Media.

Telefonica will get £180 million for its broadband business, plus an extra amount — up to £20 million — upon the “successful delivery and completion of the customer migration process”.

Here’s what Sky CEO Jeremy Darroch had to say:

“Sky has been the UK’s fastest-growing broadband and telephony provider since we entered the market six years ago. From a standing start in 2006, we have added more than 4.2 million broadband customers. The acquisition of Telefónica UK’s consumer broadband and fixed-line telephony business will help us accelerate this growth.

“We believe that the O2 and BE consumer broadband and telephony business is a great fit, with customers used to high-quality products and strong levels of customer service. We look forward to welcoming these new customers to Sky and giving them access to our wide range of high-quality products, great value and industry-leading customer service.”

This deal is not hugely surprising, in that O2/BE has a shrinking customer base (as ISP Review notes, that base peaked at 671,000 customers and currently sits at around 560,000). However, it may prove to represent more than consolidation in the UK’s fixed-line market.

European mobile carriers are itching to carry out more mergers, particularly in highly competitive markets. The UK is about as competitive as it gets. With Deutsche Telekom and France Telecom having already merged their UK operations (formerly T-Mobile and Orange) into EE, I would now frankly be surprised if we didn’t see the newly mobile-only O2 UK merge with one of the others. Based on the complementary nature of their recent 4G spectrum wins, Vodafone would be a good fit.

This is shaping up to be a very exciting year in the UK communications market.

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HP’s Slate7 is the company’s return to the reasonably-priced consumer tablet space, following the failure of its webOS-based TouchPad. I’ve had a hands-on play with it a couple of times at Mobile World Congress, and spoken to HP mobile chief Alberto Torres about it, and I’m still unconvinced.

I do think the tablet will sell — not magnificently, but not poorly either. Its outward styling is attractive enough, and some people find Beats Audio to be a killer feature (I’m a bit too much of an audio purist to enjoy the bass overload that it represents, but that’s me). It has a slightly feeble camera when its key rivals around its price — $169 — have none.

Blandness

However, if I were in the market for a small tablet — I’m not, as I own both an iPad mini and a Nexus 7 — I would steer clear for one reason: the screen.

The resolution isn’t the problem; it’s fine for the size. What I can’t get past is how washed-out it is compared to both the devices I own. More than any other kind of computer, a tablet is essentially a screen with trimmings. It has to convince.

The upside with relatively low-contrast screens is that they can be easier to view in sunlight, and according to Torres this was a conscious choice.

“We really have emphasised readability, particularly outdoors readability,” he told me. “It provides quite a good experience for video and gaming, but we decided to emphasise readability.” Why so? “We were looking at a worldwide product. We thought this product will play well in America, but also when looking at emerging markets outdoor readability is quite important.”

You may wonder why I’m obsessing over this contrast point. Part of that’s down to the splendid metaphor it presents. But it’s also because, even after conversing with Torres on the subject, I am none the wiser as to HP’s mobile strategy. So the tablet has what many potential customers will consider an unsuitable screen, because HP wants to address emerging markets? Why then is the Slate7 priced for the U.S., not for the emerging markets, where you really want to strike below the $100 mark if you want to make an impact?

More blandness

And why has HP chosen to barely skin the Slate7′s Android interface? “It’s not final — there will be a bit more [before release],” Torres said, but he confirmed that HP is trying to leave the Android user experience as close as possible to its stock origins.

I’m an Android user, and I opt for the Nexus line (I also have a Nexus 4 phone), which does use pure stock Android, but that’s not why I buy Nexus: I buy Nexus so I always get the latest OS updates as soon as possible. I used to have an HTC phone, and I kind of miss some of the Sense gimmicks that HTC throws into its devices. Stock Android is fine, but HP is missing an opportunity to really differentiate what it’s offering here.

And that’s the fundamental problem with the Slate7: it’s too “meh.” In my opinion, HP rushed it — you must bear in mind that the company only set up its new mobile division last September, less than six months ago. It feels like the Slate7 was timed to come out at Mobile World Congress, as opposed to coming out when it was ready to turn heads on its own merits.

Hoping for greater contrast

“We are the number one PC manufacturer in the word and we intend to be a leader on tablets as well,” Torres told me. But HP’s leadership strategy is to have as broad a portfolio as possible — some Google and some Microsoft in each segment, a bit of something for everyone.

That’s not enough. Samsung also plays that game, but it can get away with it because some of its products have been real head-turners; the Galaxy Note, which was unlike anything else out there when it launched, springs to mind.

The Note was a risk. Half the world laughed when it came out, scorning its excessive size, by smartphone standards, and its reintroduction of the much-maligned mobile device stylus. But it was a hit, and no one’s laughing now.

It’s not too late, HP. You still have it in you to release something extraordinary. Take your time, take a risk, and make the next one a killer.

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Europe’s digital chief, Neelie Kroes, wants to fix the EU mobile industry. Still stung by the loss of her funding for ensuring the roll-out of high-speed fixed broadband across the EU, she wants mobile to take up the slack, and to that end she has thrown €50 million ($65 million) at 5G research and urged member states to get their act together regarding wireless spectrum.

Kroes has a 2020 goal for the “delivery” of 5G. That seems like a tall order, although the proliferation of IP-connected sensors in the internet of things may well necessitate a shift to even more efficient technologies than 4G.

“Rolling out today’s networks is important,” she said. “But what comes after? For the next global standard, and the next generation of technology, will Europe lead the world, or merely follow?”

The €50 million for 5G research includes €16 million for the METIS project we reported on in December. The goal here is to research faster, more spectrally efficient and more power-efficient mobile broadband than 4G – which in itself seeks to tick all those boxes, but which is not as Europe-led as 2G and even 3G were.

The EU’s investment is for the public part of an industry-wide public-private partnership – the companies involved, including some of the continent’s big carriers (Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, Telefonica, Telecom Italia, Portugal Telecom) and infrastructure players (Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, NSN), will have to stump up more, although they would be doing that anyway.

“Europe used to lead the world on wireless… European 5G is an unmissable opportunity to recapture the global technological lead,” Kroes said.

Of course, coming up with the technology is one thing, and deploying it is another. That’s where those complaints over EU spectrum harmonization come in – as Kroes puts it, the continent’s spectrum allocation map currently resembles “a bowl of spaghetti”, which is one reason why South Korea (population 50 million) has more 4G subscriptions than the whole of the EU (population 500 million). Kroes is really not happy that 17 of the 27 EU member states still don’t have 4G at all:

“We’ve already fixed a target to find a total of 1200MHz of spectrum for wireless broadband. But on average national governments have only awarded 65 percent of the spectrum we have already harmonised in the EU. So when Member States aren’t implementing legal commitments, we will use our full… powers.”

This should come as music to the carriers’ ears, as will her promise to cut down on the bureaucracy around infrastructure planning permits and inter-operator network sharing. Kroes has traditionally used her MWC speeches to lambast the carriers over issues such as roaming charges – this time she’s on their side:

“I am still determined to deliver broadband for all: and for that we must improve the market. So that it works for you in the industry, works for consumers, works for the economy. A European telecoms market more coherent, more integrated, more efficient; with lower investor risks and higher investor rewards.”

Spectrum allocations are a pain to fix, but they are fixable. As for 5G, €50 million isn’t a game-changing amount but it may be enough to stimulate research at this very early stage of the technology’s development. It’s true that Europe let itself fall behind on 4G, and that has real knock-on effects in terms of competitiveness. The EU would be smart to avoid making that mistake again.

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There are rumors flying around about the possible existence of a Nokia-made Windows 8 tablet. Based on what Nokia CEO Stephen Elop said Monday, though, it looks like a release for such a device is way off.

In a roundtable Q&A at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona today, Elop said that tablets may fit into Nokia’s mobile-centric strategy, but he seemed to be more thoughtful than decisive on the matter. He noted that all the assembled journalists had traditional notebooks. Not so, I said, unclipping the tablet part of my Acer W510. What did I think of Windows 8, he asked. A mixed bag, I replied. Another piece of feedback for his fact-finding mission.

What is Elop waiting for in the tablet space, another journalist asked. Three things, he said: Nokia is watching the tablet market evolve; it is “watching the specific platforms and where they stand in terms of maturity”; and it is focused on “understanding and seeing with [its] engineers the ability to differentiate under those conditions”.

Now the prevailing wisdom is that Nokia would go with Windows RT/8 in the tablet space. Is that platform mature? Heck no. Could Nokia differentiate on it? Never say never, but Microsoft is still trying to get its customers to wrap their heads around the RT-desktop user interface split – do we really want to see further customization confusing people at this point of initial education?

How about Android? As a tablet platform, Android still isn’t there yet — that’s a function of its paucity of tablet-optimized apps, rather than any intrinsic flaw. True, Nokia probably has more opportunity for differentiation there, but it’s an extremely tough market, what with Samsung ruling the roost as it currently does. There’s no analogy to be drawn with Nokia’s work on Windows Phone, which no-one dominated when Elop dived in.

No other tablet platform is anywhere approaching maturity – with the exception of iOS, of course, though that’s not an option. And so, while Nokia is probably testing Windows RT/8 and Android tablets in its labs — it would be crazy not to be doing so — by the criteria laid down by its leader we can make a pretty educated guess: that we should not expect Nokia to launch a tablet anytime soon.

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Nokia has used Mobile World Congress to unveil a series of new devices, taking some of its high-end Windows Phone features to lower price points. The standouts there are the Lumia 720, which offers a camera with good low light capabilities at $329 before subsidies and taxes, and the Lumia 520, which will be Nokia’s new cheapest Windows Phone at just $184.

This will help Nokia hang onto its position in emerging markets — good news for its fortunes in the next year or two. But the really interesting announcement from the Finnish firm today was that it is opening up its Here mapping, location-based services and augmented reality suite to other mobile platforms and to third-party developers who might now be able to use it for innovative applications. This is a much more long-term play.

“By gaining scale, we can increase the quality and quantity of the data we receive,” Nokia CEO Stephen Elop told his audience here at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. That’s a valid motivation and, along with the potential new Here services that third-party developers will create, this move will probably make Nokia’s devices more attractive. It also gives Nokia a serious platform that is abstracted from the underlying smartphone OS. But greater exposure for this core Nokia service could also serve as a hedge against a post-smartphone future.

Bear with me here.

The more I think about Google Glass and the wearables revolution that it presages, the likelier it seems to me that “glass” will eventually supersede the smartphone. With the rise of tablets, particularly small tablets, a vast amount of functionality is now being replicated across two devices that people carry around with them regularly. Smart glass could take over some of the functionality that today works better on the handset – particularly talking, navigation and simple messaging – leaving web surfing and gaming for the bigger screen, with less overall overlap.

If that happens, if people have maps in front of their eyeballs more than they do now, if augmented reality becomes more than a nice idea with few essential use cases, then we’re looking at a wave of service innovation that is hard to imagine in the current smartphone paradigm. There will be limited opportunity for hardware differentiation — the quality of these core mapping and AR services will be where most of the action is.

Someone in the audience asked Elop today whether Nokia would bring out smart glass. “We clearly have established a pattern for being leaders in augmented reality,” he replied. “You can well imagine there’s a whole array of new experiences with new platforms coming in the future.”

A vague, non-committal answer, yes. But Elop and his company have clearly been thinking a lot about this trend. If they make Here the go-to location-based services and augmented reality platform, they’re as well placed as any to take advantage and maybe, just maybe, take the lead. The company has reinvented itself many times before, and it can certainly do so again.

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Russia’s Yandex has finally rolled out the alternative Android store that it was talking about last year, adding a major piece to its Google-rivaling suite of services for Android-based phones. The company now offers users search, maps, mail and apps, all without a Google logo in sight.

“We are joining the game to contribute to competition that ensures freedom of choice for the end user and other members of the market,” Alexander Zverev, head of the Yandex.Store project, said in a statement.

Yandex is fast becoming a serious contender: its search dominance in Russia has helped it overtake Microsoft’s Bing on a global level (at least, measured by searches, rather than users) and it’s also becoming increasingly popular in the Ukraine and Turkey, where its Yandex.Store will soon open.

The store’s mostly free 50,000-plus apps include familiar fare such as Skype and Foursquare, but also local treats such as the VK and Odnoklassniki social networks. Users can download it for themselves, but in its core markets, the Yandex.Store will be preinstalled on Android devices from manufacturers PocketBook, texet, Wexler, Oppo, Explay and 3Q. App sales revenues are shared between Yandex and those manufacturers, and the web firm also gets to make money off mobile search, much as Google does.

But that’s not the end of the story – Yandex.Store is also available as a white-label product for operators around the world, from the U.S. to Germany. And in those cases, Yandex will share revenues with the carriers. One Russian operator, MegaFon, is already using a rebranded Yandex app store called GetUpps.

In the case of both manufacturer and carrier partners, Yandex is also offering the opportunity to add payment methods of their choice – operators could for example make their own mobile payment service the mechanism for buying these Android apps.

To top it off, Yandex is also offering an updated version of its 3D Yandex.Shell UI, which device manufacturers can license.

This company keeps adding new ways to take the Google out of Android. And why not? It’s there for the taking, and Amazon has already done more-or-less what Yandex is doing on the Kindle Fire. If you take the view that Google is displacing the Android brand with its own, it’s a completely logical reaction on the part of any company that sees Google as a rival, not a partner.

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Firefox OS is now going to happen. When it was announced a year ago, the carriers said they were in. Now they’re about to prove it: this summer, Telefonica will roll out handsets in Spain, Brazil, Venezuela and Colombia, and Deutsche Telekom and Telenor will do the same in Europe.

But will it succeed? To figure that out, we need to look at a number of variables, including the OS itself, but mainly what it represents for those all-important carriers.

The promised land

From an open standards perspective, the Firefox OS is as pure as it gets right now. The whole thing is based on HTML5 – it’s all about escaping Google and Apple’s walled gardens and frolicking freely in the wilds of the open web. Half the code was written by volunteers.

There will be an official Firefox Marketplace but everyone is free to roll their own, from carriers to games specialists. Any payment method can be implemented – that factor is not in the hands of any one platform sponsor. Apps that run on the platform will also be able to run on rivals that implement HTML5, such as Google’s and Apple’s.

The fact that the carriers are lapping this up represents a moment of supreme irony: these are the same companies – largely former monopolies – that were all about walled gardens, the companies that wanted to replicate the portal-first, AOL model in the wireless world. And what happened to stymie that scenario? Apple happened.

It was the iPhone that really loosened the carriers’ grip on their product. Suddenly they were just providers of voice and SMS and data, not suppliers of value-added services. The revenue cut from app sales now went to Apple and Google, not to the operators. The walls to their gardens had been obliterated, and someone had set up much more attractive walled gardens elsewhere.

So back we come to this idea of the open mobile web. This is an area where luminaries such as Tim Berners-Lee have been on the warpath, pointing out very real problems with the iOS/Android model. These include the inability to share app-based content in a standardized way, and the inability to search across apps. In short: the loss of the level playing field that web technologies represent.

Firefox OS is designed to solve those problems. Weirdly, we can now witness the former walled garden proprietors genuinely extol the virtues of openness. By promoting Firefox OS, they cannot regain control – however, they hope to prise some control from the hands of Google and Apple.

Not convinced? Consider these quotes from Sunday’s Firefox OS launch:

“Operators will benefit from higher control over the mobile ecosystem and consequently will have the opportunity to address specific customers.” – Franco Bernabe, Telecom Italia CEO

“This is a major step to bring balance back to the telco sector. The smartphone market is currently working backwards. [Customers are] not able to take an application from one platform to another. Duopolies are not beneficial for any industry.” – Cesar Alierta, CEO, Telefonica

“Suddenly we have something which is a bit more flexible.” – Jon Fredrick Baksaas, CEO, Telenor

“This is the beginning of the end of walled gardens.” – Marco Quatorze, CMO, America Movil

Will it work?

In Firefox OS’s favor, it comes readily equipped with many apps, including any mobile website written to behave like an app (think Twitter and Facebook). The fact that so many web apps are out there, and that writing one means addressing most mobile platforms at once, means Mozilla may just achieve its stated goal of getting developers to stop migrating to a purely native strategy.

In my brief hands-on experience with a ZTE Firefox OS phone, performance was slightly but not excessively laggy (bear in mind that the software is still not complete). According to the demonstrator, web apps apparently run better on Firefox OS than on other platforms because there’s less overhead – no Dalvik or anything like that. Will they run better than their native equivalents on the latest iOS and Android devices? Doubtful, but that’s not the point.

These initial Firefox OS phones are not powerful. They are sub-$100 handsets that will be going up against Nokia’s Asha range and low-end Android devices from Huawei and ZTE. Given that those cheap Android devices are not equipped to handle everything their platform has to offer, Firefox OS may indeed provide a better experience at that price point. Nokia is the player that’s most likely to get hurt here.

Considering that potential performance advantage and the apparent will of the carriers to promote them, these handsets seem to have a fighting chance in the developing markets where they will first be pitched. I find it hard to see them doing well in more mature smartphone markets, but the performance of the finalized software may prove me wrong.

The question here really is the will of the operators to see Firefox OS succeed. There is every reason to believe they are primarily concerned with wringing concessions out of Google, such as better deals on app revenue share. If they get that, perhaps they will pull back on Mozilla’s open platform.

But even if that happens, and the mobile industry achieves greater balance, well, job done.

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HP is back in the non-Windows small tablet game, and this time Android is the platform. The company’s webOS-based TouchPad may have been loved by some, but not by enough to help HP battle the iPad. Now, after a year of licking its wounds, HP has returned with the Slate7.

The Slate7 is HP’s new entry-level tablet, a cheap-ish 7-inch Android device that has two main selling points: its shell is stainless steel, and it features Beats Audio, just as the TouchPad did. The choice of materials means the Slate7 is not the lightest in its class – at 368g, it outweighs the 340g Nexus 7 and 308g iPad mini — although it is lighter than the 395g 7-inch Kindle Fire HD. As for Beats Audio, well, it should produce decent bass.

The tablet runs on an ARM dual-core 1.6GHz processor and has a 3-megapixel camera on the back and a VGA camera on the front for Hangouts and Skype There’s no word yet on screen resolution or the possibility of a mobile-broadband-equipped version – the initial announcement is of a Wi-Fi-only affair that will go on sale in “selected” countries in the EU, Middle East and Africa for €149 ($196).

Multi-platform strategy

HP’s mobility chief, Alberto Torres, joined the company in September last year – he was previously in charge of the MeeGo project at Nokia. In a statement today, he laid out HP’s new mobility strategy pretty plainly:

”To address the growing interest in tablets among consumers and businesses alike, HP will offer a range of form factors, leveraging an array of operating systems. Our new HP Slate7 on Android represents a compelling entry point for consumers, while our ground-breaking, business- ready HP ElitePad on Windows 8 is ideal for enterprises and governments.”

Also taking into account HP’s Pavilion Chromebook and its Envy X2 Windows 8 tablet, it is clear that HP is hedging its bets in both the tablet and notebook spaces. A major question now is which platform the company chooses for its smartphone strategy, which CEO Meg Whitman hinted at last year.

And across all these platforms, we still need to see what HP’s big differentiators will be. Hopefully I will get my hands on the Slate7 at Mobile World Congress in the coming days, so we can see if HP is counting on style alone to set itself apart from the plethora of 7-inch rivals.

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Much of the talk around the “internet of things” is centered on sensors and the networking or connectivity part of the puzzle — the IP addresses that everyday objects will need to have, or the machine-to-machine (M2M) networks needed to connect all those sensors. But infrastructure isn’t the end of the story.

There’s another element to this new wave of technology, namely the software ecosystem that will emerge on top of that infrastructure. And a fundamental building block for that will be identity management — not for the users’ identities, but for the things themselves.

A company that’s thinking very hard about this element, Evrything, has just joined a U.K. industry group that was set up last year by mobile chip architecture giant ARM, white space radio pioneer Neul, next-generation street light firm EnLight, sensor data outfit AquaMW and home energy management company AlertMe. The Internet of Things Architecture Forum (IoTA Forum, not to be confused with a similarly named European Union project) aims to shape the internet of things, and Evrything’s contribution could make it easier for businesses to plug into that vision.

“We think a missing piece for the internet of things is how the identities of things get managed,” co-founder Andy Hobsbawm told me today. “A lot of the talk is about connectivity, but our view is that connectivity is being solved. The question is how you create applications that are valuable, and you can’t do that without making individual things addressable.”

Hobsbawm drew an analogy between Evrything’s platform and Facebook, only a Facebook that’s for inanimate objects rather than people. The idea is to give each item its own discoverable profile that may contain digital content, warranty information, or even an associated virtual object.

The key to this approach is the smartphone, which the end user would use to interact with the tagged object — this could be through a technology such as NFC, rather than over the internet, so in a way it offers a bridge between the internet of things and things that aren’t necessarily always connected to the internet:

“Using everything’s system means that if the thing itself doesn’t have embedded connectivity, it’s simply a smart tag, performing many of the same functions. Your Facebook profile is a digital representation of you, an active living thing on the internet — somebody could be writing on your wall, or a Farmville app could be updating. So when you connect with [an object] using your smartphone, you draw down the updated dynamic state of that information.

“We would say it’s simply a case of defining connectivity as persistent or partial — it becomes connected when you provide connectivity with your smart mobile device.”

This could mean neat new applications for consumers, but Evrything also supplies managed analytics and APIs for businesses that want to track individual items and add data to them as they pass through the distribution chain. One example: the firm boasts a case study with the beverages giant Diageo, where people buying their dad a bottle of whisky for his birthday could add a “personalized film tribute”.

The company is also working with IBM and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and, according to Evrything, the IoTA Forum is expanding to include device manufacturers and service providers. With links like that, it looks like this “Facebook for things” approach may just find traction.

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Telefonica and NEC are to work together on developing network virtualization technologies, the companies have announced.

The Spanish telco and Japanese vendor have a fair amount of history together, with NEC providing the platform underpinning Telefonica’s small-business software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings. Now that relationship is being extended to co-develop software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualization (NVF) technologies.

The precise direction of that collaboration is a mystery for now, but here’s the background. Like other carriers, Telefonica is keen to re-engineer its networks to reduce management complexity and allow the rolling-out of new services that can only work across a virtualized, software-centric network. And along with its rivals, Telefonica is involved in a global specification-setting group for this very purpose – after all, interoperability is essential when you’re designing the telecoms networks of the future.

However, when specifications are being set, it helps to be in the driving seat; hence Telefonica’s new partnership with NEC.

“Our idea is to have some kind of standardized solution, not just for Telefonica but for the rest of industry,” Enrique Algaba, Telefonica’s director for network virtualization, told me this morning.

All this plays into an evolving conception of SDN, which sees the technology as applicable to entire telecoms networks, not just to data centers (Ericsson is particularly keen on this interpretation, as it reiterated in a whitepaper yesterday). This already goes beyond the original purpose of network virtualization, but Telefonica appears to be taking the concept even further, all the way to the set-top box.

“We’re thinking these technologies could be applicable to access – also in the fixed line,” Algaba said. “There are some interesting use cases in virtualizing home equipment, to simplify the architecture we have in the home network.

“From the Telefonica point of view, this is something new so we are pushing this in the market. We think we have to be here in order to steer in some way this new approach, in order to have our requirements included.”

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Yesterday Metaio, the Germany-based augmented reality (AR) company, announced a deal with ST-Ericsson which will see the latter integrate a specialized AR processor into the next generation of its mobile chipsets.

This will be the first dedicated chip of its kind to see commercial deployment, and it should have a big impact on the power consumption of AR applications, which are today generally a big battery-suck due to their intensive use of graphics and, increasingly, 3D rendering. As Metaio CEO Peter Meier put it in the statement:

“The AREngine will do for augmented reality what the GPU did years ago for the gaming industry. This is a great leap in the AR space, and we strongly believe that the AR Engine working with ST-Ericsson platforms will help realize the augmented city — the idea of a completely connected environment powered by augmented reality and made possible with next-gen, optimized mobile platforms.”

Here’s the video the companies put out. Notice the emphasis on the use of the AREngine chip in smartphones:

That emphasis on handsets is understandable because ST-Ericsson’s business today is largely in smartphone chipsets – it is surely no coincidence that ST-Ericsson is supposedly going to be supplying its NovaThor chipsets to Nokia, which takes great pride in the CityLens AR app that runs on its Lumia handsets.

However, while AREngine may make use of such apps slightly more attractive on smartphones, I don’t think power consumption is the main reason why people don’t walk around constantly holding their phone at arm’s length in front of them. Here are three far more likely reasons: it looks absurd, it’s dangerous, and it represents poor ergonomics.

That’s not to say AR is useless – far from it; it’s occasionally handy today and I believe there are many cool applications lying on the other side of a tipping point we’ve not yet reached. It’s just that, with smartphones, AR makes the most sense in short bursts, like when you actively need to establish the direction in which you should next walk. And power’s less of an issue there.

Where the AREngine processor would be superbly useful is in smart glasses, of the Google Glass ilk. These devices will be the real tipping point for AR – they remove the absurdity, danger and poor ergonomics of physically and consciously holding something out in front of you as you walk.

And as such wearables get redesigned to make their users look less like tools, their sleeker, skinnier new look will mean less battery space. Combine that with the fact that such devices will need to constantly display AR data, and Metaio and ST-Ericsson’s technology becomes a no-brainer.

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IBM and Deutsche Telekom, the carrier behind the T-Mobile brand, are to work together on creating smart city systems, the companies have announced.

The smart city concept, which is closely related to the “internet of things”, is reliant on pervasive connectivity, drawing on what has traditionally been known as machine-to-machine (M2M) technology to hook up everything from traffic lights to public transport vehicles to the local broadband network. This usually involves the use of cellular networks.

The idea there is to be able to analyze sensor-based data from all these sources so as to better coordinate them and make cities more efficient, both to live in and in terms of energy use. For example, sensors in parking bays might help drivers find a space more easily, cutting down on the emissions that might come from driving around unnecessarily.

IBM has been working on this type to echnology for a while, as have other companies such as Microsoft, Cisco and Intel. Today’s deal allows IBM to plug its data-wrangling capabilities into Deutsche Telekom’s established global M2M ecosystem – DT will also handle details such as SIM card access management.

“M2M is a technology with enormous growth potential as it adds real value to our daily lives, both in business and privately,” Thomas Kiessling, Deutsche Telekom’s chief product officer said in a statement. “Our joint Smarter Cities initiative gives us the opportunity to work with cities across the globe and offer them valuable end-to-end solutions that help support public welfare as well as their economic growth in the future.”

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Back in the middle of last year, a clever little service called doo went into beta on OS X and Windows 8, which was itself only a consumer preview at that point. The service allowed users to import all the documents they had in various cloud storage pockets ––DropBox, Google Drive and email accounts — and bring them together in one place, where they could be automatically scanned, tagged and categorized.

Now doo is coming out of beta on OS X today and, over the next few weeks, on Android, then iPhone, then iPad (a refreshed Windows 8 app will follow in the next couple of months). And, while the end result is similar to that in the beta, it’s quite a different beast under the hood.

Why? As CEO Frank Thelen told me, the future may be all about semantic tagging, but for now people still love their folders:

“The beta period was a very tough time for us. We learned that people are not willing to put their documents into a library like iTunes. We had to change the product in a way that people can keep their existing folder structures, and we’re just a smart overlay. Basically we had to change the whole architecture.”

So, while the beta version involved wholesale importation of documents, the new overlay approach involves just pointing doo to existing folders and letting it do its semantic thing, namely optical character recognition, smart auto-tagging of people, sources and places, and categorization — doo can recognize and classify 70 different types of document, from contracts to tickets. In the beta, if you opened a document it would open in doo; now it will open in the service it’s stored in, such as DropBox.

Essentially, doo has morphed from a well-organized document repository into a cross-service search engine for consumer and small-business cloud storage. That in no way diminishes what it does — it’s super-valuable to have a tool that can return useful data when asked to, for example, find all invoices stored in the last 30 days. Additionally, Thelen said, improvements to doo’s syncing capabilities mean it can always detect when a file is stored multiple times across different services, and always serve up the most recent iteration.

You can also scan documents straight into doo, or even photograph them in via smartphone. But, for now at least, the main value for most people will be in its management of existing documents across DropBox and so on. It’s like a smarter alternative to Found (which was in any case acquired by YouSendIt last month).

By the way, for those of you who want to run doo on a Windows 7 PC, you may have a wait in store for you. While it will come at some point, Thelen said, the doo team hasn’t even started working on it yet.

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And so the European mobile point-of-sale (POS) terminal wars continue. With iZettle, Payleven, Adyen, mPowa and SumUp all trying to replicate Square’s dongle-based model in the EU, the various stages in this scramble for the mobile merchant tend to involve the signing of distribution partnerships or the support of new cards or card technologies.

Yesterday it was iZettle adding chip-and-pin capabilities — as happened earlier this month with Payleven — and partnering up with Banco Santander, and today it’s SumUp’s newfound support for American Express cards.

SumUp is still working on the technical implementation for the deal, and its merchants will start being able to take payments from AmEx cardholders in the second quarter of the year in the UK, Germany, Ireland, Austria, France, the Netherlands, Spain and Italy. Belgium and Portugal should follow, though SumUp is still in negotiations with American Express on that point.

This is not the first such firm to sign with AmEx – after all, American Express has actively invested in iZettle. However, according to SumUp, the deal means the company “will accept more types of cards in more regions than any other mobile point-of-sale technology provider worldwide”. Co-founder Stefan Jeschonnek told me SumUp has “several tens of thousands of merchants” now using its terminals, and “several thousand” are joining each week.

SumUp does have an extra trick up its sleeve, too: later this year it will be bringing out the slightly Square Wallet-ish SumUp Pay, which will let end-users pre-approve a participating merchant through an app, then pop up on that merchant’s system as soon as they walk into their shop – the idea there is to allow purchases based on a simple verbal interaction with the merchant, without the need for even taking the phone out.

And according to Jeschonnek, SumUp will be able to exploit its growing installed base of merchants to crack the classic chicken-and-egg problem associated with mobile wallet schemes:

“We’re making payments smoother today with the card reader, but we’re thinking about how things should work in the future. We are building technology to make that real-world interaction possible again… The difference this time around is that we already have a pretty large and fast-growing merchant base. For our merchants to accept SumUp Pay will be as simple as updating their app.”

He added that SumUp Pay would also provide a nifty way around Visa’s stringent authentication procedures, which have previously proved a stumbling block for the likes of iZettle, when it launches later this year.

It’s good to see companies innovating in the financial technology space, and SumUp’s focus on in-house technological development theoretically places it well there. That said, with the mobile POS wars as heated as they are in Europe right now, I would not be in the least bit surprised to see a rival try to beat SumUp to its frictionless payment goal.

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The indoor location market is heating up nicely, as various players in the mobile industry start to contemplate the marketing potential of mapping the places where GPS doesn’t help. But it’s still a young market, with room for new entrants with bright ideas.

The Austrian startup indoo.rs, which has just picked up an undisclosed high six-figure seed round, may be one such company. Very much a technology rather than marketing firm, indoo.rs is developing a platform that it hopes will be picked up by silicon vendors and handset manufacturers. Apart from locating the user based on nearby Wi-Fi and cellular signals – as Google does, for instance — the indoo.rs platform also draws on other data sources such as the handset’s accelerometer, gyroscope, barometer and compass to improve accuracy.

If that reminds you of what Qualcomm is trying to do with its IZat platform, you’re right to pick up on the similarity, only Qualcomm is hardwiring its technology into its mobile processors. Indoo.rs is taking the software angle.

Indoo.rs business development chief Marcel van der Heijden — who joined the team from investors SpeedInvest (the other backers are tecnet equity and Techinvest) — freely admitted to me that the IZat hardware approach has its advantages, particularly in terms of speed and power efficiency. However, he suggested that the software angle provided hardware independence and greater release flexibility.

What’s more, he pointed out, IZat is supported by around 12 percent of today’s Android devices, while indoo.rs’s software development kit (SDK) can target 95 percent.

So what are we looking at here, anyway? Indoo.rs’s platform has three elements. The first is a client SDK for Android devices, allowing developers to build indoor navigation capabilities into their apps – a conference organizer might use this in their show-floor app, for example.

The second is a measurement tool, for Windows and Linux, that makes it possible to import maps of a venue, annotate the map with physical features such as walls and staircases, define zones and then measure Wi-Fi “fingerprints” throughout the location. The final piece is the cloud-based back-end, which matches the user’s surroundings with a predefined map.

The hard work here is in balancing all the variables that go into accurate positioning: not only the quality of the Wi-Fi and cellular networks that are involved, but also the quality of the sensors in the handset. If indoo.rs is to succeed, it will need to produce superior algorithms.

Whether that happens remains to be seen. Qualcomm may have a lot of heft behind it, but indoo.rs isn’t going up against Qualcomm as such – indeed, it would probably quite like to gain it as a customer for its IP. In the meantime, the Austrian startup is busy joining the ARM Connected Community and, soon, the In-Location Alliance, so it’s connecting with the right people.

This story was updated at 1:30pm to correct the spelling of indoo.rs’s name.

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Amazon isn’t having much luck in Germany at the moment. Just one week ago, it found itself accused of employing a security company with neo-fascist links at its distribution centers there (it sacked the company in question quite quickly) and now it’s attracted the attention of the country’s antitrust authorities.

The Bundeskartellamt (Federal Cartel Office) is looking into complaints about the “price parity clause” that Amazon imposes on its third-party merchants. The clause forbids the merchants from selling goods they sell on Amazon cheaper elsewhere online, including on eBay and through their own sites.

“Amazon’s price parity clause, under which sellers are deprived of their freedom to sell a product offered through Amazon cheaper on another internet sales channel, could violate the general ban on cartels,” Bundeskartellamt president Andreas Mundt said in a statement.

“This applies in particular if the restriction of the sellers’ freedom to determine prices also restricts competition between the different internet marketplaces. Such a restraint of competition seems likely as, under normal circumstances, sellers have an interest in offering their products on several internet marketplaces.”

The authorities have identified two particular problems with this setup: first, that it makes it very hard for new marketplaces to challenge Amazon, and second, that Amazon can therefore charge higher seller fees than necessary, hurting the consumer.

To find out more, the Bundeskartellamt is now surveying 2,400 third-party Amazon merchants. If this confirms what it suspects, it will very likely force Amazon to remove the price parity clause from its terms in Germany.

This is hardly the first time that people have complained about Amazon’s price parity clause, which was introduced a few years ago. In the UK, the Office of Fair Trading said in 2011 that it was looking into complaints about the clause as applied to e-books, but it didn’t open a formal investigation. Apple’s EU e-book antitrust inquiry also had to do with a similar clause, which the European Commission forced it to scrap.

We have asked Amazon for comment, and will add it in if and when it arrives.

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OnApp is one of the most interesting European cloud players, as it offers traditional hosting providers a way to fight Amazon by federating the spare capacity in their data centers — it also has more than 500 of these providers as customers around the world, so this is a serious endeavor. Now the company has launched version 3 of the OnApp Cloud platform, taking its distributed storage piece out of beta, improving its content delivery network offering and adding support for VMware hypervisors.

The VMware support is a big deal for OnApp as it helps the company’s service-provider customers better target the enterprise (OnApp already supported Xen and KVM hypervisors, and still intends to support Hyper-V). A new feature called Cloud Boot was introduced to automate the deployment of hypervisors, and there’s a new support console for cloud administrators and end users too.

But it’s the OnApp Storage piece that is particularly critical for the company, Kosten Metreweli, OnApp’s chief commercial officer, told me. This is partly because it solves performance problems for providers, but also because it lays the foundation for OnApp’s upcoming federated compute play.

There are two advantages to this kind of federated storage: it utilizes spare capacity in providers’ data centers, pooling it then slicing up the aggregate into virtual disks, and it also removes the typical bottleneck found in the SAN controller. According to Metreweli, OnApp’s unified approach makes for speedier I/O as well:

“Other distributed storage platforms that have tried to this have required high network bandwidth to work, so we have introduced a clever piece of tech called VM-aware. Because we know where the workloads sit, and we control where the storage sits, we can say at any one point in time we can ensure there’s at least one copy of the data that you’re storing on your virtual disk sitting on the same hypervisor as the compute that’s using it.

“You take away any of the network requirements from a read perspective. You’re getting 95 percent of raw disk performance on what is effectively an enterprise-class SAN, which is pretty unheard-of.”

The content delivery network (CDN) boost is also significant: OnApp’s year-old federated CDN was previously limited to static content and non-real-time “pseudostreaming” — think YouTube – but it now also has a livestreaming capacility.

“We feel that over the last 12 months we’ve validated the concept and proved that this federated CDN capability can work,” Metreweli said.

“We just finished a project with Europe’s largest dance music festival using our distributed CDN to distribute content on a global basis, so now we feel we can take the next step into pushing higher capacity traffic across that CDN. Members of our CDN federation will be able to make more money out of their infrastructure, because there will be more content going over the CDN.”

Others such as VMware and the OpenStack players are also working on the federated cloud idea, and OnApp’s CDN capabilities clearly take on the likes of Akamai, but it’s tricky to identify a direct rival for the sum of what OnApp is doing. Its entrenched network of service provider customers puts it in a good place.

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The UK’s 4G spectrum auction has raised £2.34 billion ($3.62 billion), with BT and the country’s four main mobile carriers winning new spectrum that will allow them to roll out LTE services.

The auction took in 250MHz of spectrum in the 2.6GHz band, which is high-bandwidth and good for urban deployments, and 800MHz band, which is lower-bandwidth but longer-distance and better for rural deployments. EE (which already runs 4G on reused 2G spectrum)and Vodafone both won spectrum in both bands, while Three and O2 (Telefonica) each won spectrum in the 800MHz band. Niche Spectrum Ventures (a BT subsidiary) only won 2.6GHz spectrum.

The reserve price for the auction was £1.3 billion, although the government had budgeted for it to bring in £3.5 billion.

According to the regulator Ofcom, new services should roll out in about six months’ time, and the whole of the UK will be able to receive 4G services “by the end of 2017 at the latest”. This will partly be helped by an obligation placed on Telefonica to ensure coverage for at least 98 percent of the UK population through its own network alone.

Ofcom chief executive Ed Richards said this would be good news for parts of the country where mobile broadband is currently scarce:

“This is a positive outcome for competition in the UK, which will lead to faster and more widespread mobile broadband, and substantial benefits for consumers and businesses across the country. We are confident that the UK will be among the most competitive markets in the world for 4G services.

Here’s who won what:

It’s worth remembering that this represents BT’s return to the mobile network operator status, after spinning out BT Cellnet (now O2, owned by Telefonica) in 2002.

More soon…

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