Author: Kevin Fitchard

Sprint’s LTE rollout machine sprang back into action this week. It announced Thursday that its new 4G network is now available in 21 markets, including Los Angeles, and added a bunch of cities to its buildout schedule in the coming months.

Here are the new markets receiving LTE services: Albemarle, N.C.; Bloomington, Ind.; Charlotte, N.C.; Contra Costa County, Calif.; Denison, Texas; Greeneville, Tenn.; Joplin, Mo.; Kerrville, Texas; Lafayette, Ind.; Lincolnton, N.C.; Los Angeles; Mankato/North Mankato, Minn.; Memphis, Tenn.; Norfolk/Virginia Beach/Newport News, Va.; Palm Bay, Fla.; Port St. Lucie, Fla.; Rochelle, Ill.; Salisbury, N.C.; Shelby, N.C.; Tullahoma, Tenn.; West Palm Beach, Fla.

Sprint now has LTE service in 88 markets (you can see the complete list here), and while many of them are on the small side, the operator is readying some major cities for launch. The operator called out New York City, San Francisco and Washington in Thursday’s announcement, saying customers are already starting to get LTE signals in those cities. In the coming months, Sprint said, it will officially unveil networks in additional 120 cities and towns in coming months.

Sprint is trying to catch up to Verizon Wireless and AT&T, both of which got more than a year’s head start on the No. 3 U.S. operator. Verizon is pretty much finished with its primary LTE network — in its earnings call today that it revealed it has built 4G in 95 percent of its 3G footprint — and it is set to break ground on its second network this year.

Recently AT&T has been turning on new LTE markets in small increments. For instance, on Thursday it said the 4G service has expanded to Cheyenne, Wyo.; Cushing, Okla.; and Florence, S.C. But it plans to make a big push this summer as well, launching in 77 new markets. By the end of the year it plans to have 250 million people under its LTE umbrella, which would put it about 50 million shy of Verizon’s footprint.

Meanwhile T-Mobile’s LTE build is just starting. Its first seven 4G cities went live in March.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• 2012: Data, spectrum and the race to LTE
• New solutions for the evolving mobile network
• Mobile 2012 and beyond

It took three years, but OpenSignal finally has an iPhone app that will measure and track the performance of any mobile network it runs over. OpenSignal has been using its Android app to keep tabs on carriers’ networks around the world, crowdsourcing that data into detailed reports.

Why participate in OpenSignal’s crowdsourcing operations? Think of it as a symbiotic relationship – consumers get benefit out of the app’s features as well. You can use the app as a speed test tool to see if your carrier is living up to its mobile data claims, and it will keep a record of your own data, text, and minute usage.

The app also serves as a signal finder. It will point you in the direction of your carrier’s nearest cell tower and even find nearby open Wi-Fi access points if you’re looking for a faster connection. And if you happen to be shopping around for another service provider, the app will let you compare the performance of different carrier networks in your area.

Ironically, U.K.-based OpenSignal has been using its Android app data for years to extrapolate iPhone performance on U.S. networks. With the new iOS software, it will be able to track iPhone performance directly, as well as tap into a potentially huge pool of new crowdsourcers.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• A look back at mobile in Q1
• How to deliver the next-generation web experience
• What to watch in mobile in 2013

Verizon Wireless kicked off the U.S. carriers’ earnings season on Wednesday, reporting 720,000 net new subscribers in the normally tepid first quarter. As in recent  quarters, much of its growth was driven by contract smartphones – it activated 7.2 million of the devices, including 4 million iPhones – and it continued the gradual migration of its customer base and traffic to its now not-so-new 4G LTE network.

Overall, Verizon brought in $29.4 million in revenues for the quarter, and posted a 15 percent year-over-year increase in profits.

Verizon’s LTE network now covers 491 markets and 287 million people, which is roughly 95 percent of its current 3G footprint. CFO Fran Shammo said it plans to match 4G coverage to its 3G coverage by the end of this quarter, and he reiterated Verizon’s plans to start building its second 4G network this year over recently acquired Advanced Wireless Services (AWS) airwaves. Shammo said Verizon would start offering its first LTE-only devices – with no CDMA fallback – next year, which should coincide with the launch of its voice-over-LTE service.

Verizon saw 5.9 million LTE device activations in the first quarter, bringing its total 4G retail connections to 26.3 million, about 28 percent of its total contract subscribers. Shammo said roughly half of Verizon’s 4 million iPhone activations were for the LTE-capable iPhone 5.

As more customers upgrade to LTE devices, more of Verizon’s data load moves over to its high-capacity networks: 54 percent of its data traffic is now on LTE, compared to 50 percent in the fourth quarter.

The mix of Verizon’s mobile subscribers is also getting interesting. It’s been moving a big chunk of its customer base over to its new shared data plans since it implemented the tiers last year. About 30 percent of Verizon’s accounts are on a Share Everything plan, and the carrier is averaging 2.67 devices per account. But Verizon also acquired 43,000 net new prepaid subscribers. That’s not a huge number in the world of prepaid, but Verizon has been focusing a lot more attention on the budget segment lately, particularly as its 3G network starts to empty.

Shammo said that while Verizon isn’t getting overly aggressive in prepaid, it’s by no means ignoring it. “We will look for niches in which we can make an impact,” he said.

On the wireline side, Verizon continued to recalibrate its business toward FiOS. Its fiber service now accounts for 69 percent of all consumer revenue. Verizon added 188,000 FiOS internet subscribers and 169,000 TV subscribers. Meanwhile, Verizon shed another 89,000 DSL subscribers.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• Mobile 2012 and beyond

Apple’s newly retooled iPhone 5 makes it easier not just for T-Mobile to deliver 3G service to the Apple aficionados among its customers, but also for its mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) partners.

T-Mobile MVNO Solavei said on Wednesday it will fully support all of the HSPA+ radios in the new version of the iPhone 5. That means anywhere T-Mobile offers 3G service, Solavei will too. Previously all iPhones’ 3G capabilities were restricted to areas where T-Mobile had completed its ongoing network overhaul, which to date is about 50 cities. Solavei – which has adopted a multi-level marketing approach (think Amway) to distributing its service – is selling the unlocked iPhone 5 directly to customers for the steep price of $700 through its retail partner GSMNation. But unlocked versions of the device will work just fine with Solavei’s SIM cards.

Solavei, however, won’t get access to T-Mo’s latest and greatest 4G network though. The MVNO confirmed that none of its customers will be able to tap T-Mobile’s LTE network, no matter what phone they own. T-Mobile has only launched LTE in seven cities, and it appears to be keeping its new 4G service for itself for the time being. I would expect that change eventually though. Sprint, for instance, is already opening its new LTE network to its numerous MVNO partners.

T-Mobile’s 3G network, though, is nothing to scoff at. T-Mo the only U.S. carrier to offer dual-carrier HSPA+, which is now accessible by the iPhone 5 and many other devices supporting its Advanced Wireless Services (AWS) band. T-Mobile also has several other MVNO partners, such as Tracfone’s Straight Talk Wireless, that can theoretically support the iPhone 5. Solavei is the only one we know of that is selling a nano-SIM card that fits into to device, but many consumers are getting around that problem by cutting larger SIM cards down to size.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Mobile 2012 and beyond
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
• 2012: Data, spectrum and the race to LTE

You can already spend Bitcoins on hand-crafted goods on Etsy, and you can keep romance alive on OKCupid using the crypto-currency. Now, thanks to Foodler, you can order food with Bitcoin from more than 17,000 restaurants nationwide.

Paying for food online with Bitcoins isn’t new. Pizzaforcoins has famously set up a site that takes Bitcoins in exchange for ordering a pie from your local Domino’s. Some entrepreneurial food purveyors online, such as Bitcoin Coffee, also deal in the digital currency. (For a detailed explanation of how the Bitcoin economy works, check out my colleague David Meyer’s comprehensive post.) But what’s interesting about Foodler is its scope.

Foodler is an online delivery and takeout portal a similar to GrubHub that hosts menus and handles orders for restaurants in 48 states, and it has made Bitcoin another option for payment alongside credit cards, debit cards and cash on delivery. You can’t pay for a pizza or your mu shu pork order with Bitcoin directly to the delivery guy, but Foodler has set up an account portal that generates a unique deposit address and QR code, which customers can use to deposit their Bitcoins. Using the current USD exchange rate, Foodler turns them into FoodlerBucks, which can then be used to pay for orders and even tip through its online portal or mobile app.

It might sound like a marketing gimmick, but Foodler CEO Christian Dumontet said the company is firm believer in innovation, whether it’s technological, economic or, in the case of Bitcoin, both.

“We understand that Bitcoin users are a small, but influential, group of early adopters and Bitcoin orders will likely be a small percentage of all Foodler payments this year, but as early adopters ourselves, we are excited to support the community and help it grow,” Dumontet said in an email. “We were surprised to receive our first Bitcoin payment from a customer in San Francisco just hours after making it available in our system – prior to any kind of public announcement.”

Of course, given the recent nosedive in Bitcoin value, some people may be reluctant to part with their Bitcoins just yet – it would take four times the amount of Bitcoin to buy an $8 burrito today than it did last week. Still, Dumontet isn’t letting the volatility of the crypto-currency phase him. He said would Foodler would hold on to the some of the Bitcoins it does receive, instead of immediately cashing them in for U.S. dollars, and it plans to participate in the Bitcoin economy by seeking out vendors that accept the currency.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Law of large numbers: the issue behind Facebook’s IPO
• 12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012
• Takeaways from connected consumer’s second quarter

The mobile industry’s practice of slowly parceling out Android smartphone updates has earned the ire of the American Civil Liberties Union. On Tuesday, the ACLU filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the major U.S. carriers for not updating their customer’s phones whenever new security patches are available and for not warning consumers of the dangers that exposes them to.

In the ACLU’s blog, Principal Technologist and Senior Policy Analyst Chris Soghoian wrote:

“Google’s Android operating system now has more than 75% of the smartphone market, yet the majority of these devices are running software that is out of date, often with known, exploitable security vulnerabilities that have not been patched. For consumers running these devices, there is no legitimate software upgrade path. The problem isn’t that consumers aren’t installing updates, but rather, that updates simply aren’t available. Although Google’s engineers regularly fix software flaws in the Android operating system, these fixes aren’t packaged up and pushed to consumers by the wireless carriers and their handset manufacturer partners.”

As the ACLU hints in that last sentence, carriers aren’t the only culprit here. Before they can send out an Android update, carriers have to wait until handset makers tweak Google’s code for their own purposes since no one – save Google – is running a generic version of Android on their devices. Recently, Android device makers have gotten faster at releasing updates for their phones, but it’s by no means instantaneous.

Still, carriers are definitely a large part of the bottleneck, often asking for Android features to be removed from a build for competitive reasons. A case in point is Verizon’s disabling of Google Wallet on its NFC-capable phones. The fragmentation and politics of the Android ecosystem has led my colleague Kevin Tofel to call for Google to take back control of Android’s distribution from carriers and device makers.

Getting timely updates for services and features is one thing, but the ACLU is saying that critical security fixes are getting lost in the shuffle. Carrier industry group CTIA didn’t comment directly on the ACLU’s accusations, but it did imply that the threat of security vulnerabilities in the U.S. was overblown. In a statement, CTIA VP of Cybersecurity and Technology John Marinho said:

“Based on recent reports, U.S. wireless networks are among the most secure in the world because the carriers and the overall mobile industry are vigilant in preventing and protecting against malicious attacks. In addition, most U.S. wireless users shop at trusted application stores, which is why we have an app infection rate of less than 2 percent. Meanwhile, many other countries have app infection rates that are more than 10 times greater, and in the case of Russia, the app infection rate is reported at more than 90 percent.”

Image courtesy of Shutterstock user gosphotodesign

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1
• Opportunities and challenges for mobile deals

Social media advertising is all the rage today, but Jeff Dachis, CEO and founder of marketing consultancy The Dachis Group, questions whether brands are really getting the concept. Inserting what are essentially billboards into people’s Facebook feeds doesn’t count as true engagement, he said Wednesday at GigaOM’s paidContent Live conference in New York City.

“This shift from what I believe to be mass communications to a mass of communicators has created a strong fundamental shift in the way brands are going to be built going forward,” he said. “They’re going to have to figure out how to engage with people instead of advertising at them.”

For Dachis that means direct engagement with people influential in their field through social media channels. Those influencers can then, in turn, amplify their message through the same social media outlets, he said.

Speaking on the same panel as Dachis, Google VP of Partner Business Solutions Bonita Stewart took issue with the idea that older formers digital marketing were ineffective. Contrary to popular belief, Stewart said, some display CPM rates are increasing, and Google’s publisher partners are seeing a lot of success using a combination of traditional advertising and new social marketing tools such as Hangouts.

Check out the rest of our paidContent Live 2013 coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominated
• Players and Strategies for Real-Time In-Stream Advertising
• Social 2013: The enterprise strikes back

If you go to a Best Buy and buy a high-end smartphone, you’re likely getting the most cutting edge hardware and software the mobile industry has to offer. But if you were to go to your local car dealership and buy the newest model luxury vehicle, chances are the infotainment and connectivity technologies embedded within are already several years old.

Welcome to the curse of the automotive industry: the lead time on new car designs and manufacturing schedules mean that the technology you’re buying today was developed years earlier. What’s more, that technology effectively becomes locked down in your vehicle. As soon as your drive off the lot the connected car system you have is the one you’re stuck with for years. (For more details on the connected car technology check out our infographic.)

Mobile processor maker Nvidia, however, is proposing a solution to that problem: why not make an upgradable connected car system. We “upgrade” our smartphones and tablets every year or two by buying completely new devices, but that’s not really an option for an automobile.

However, with processors based on its Tegra designs, Nvidia wants to empower automakers to build cars that not only have top-of-the-line computing components when they roll off the lot but also can be upgraded periodically during their long lives.

In short, Nvidia wants to help automakers make connected cars that never become obsolete.

Meet Jetson

According to Nvidia Director of Automotive Danny Shapiro, the company designed its automotive processors, called Visual Computing Modules, around a flexible framework that allows automakers to work future processor technology into what are typically three-year long development cycles. Rather than design a connected car system years away from production using today’s chips, engineers can design tomorrow’s cars using tomorrow’s chips, Shapiro said.

That program is already seeing some pretty significant results, Shapiro said. Within a month of shipping in Google’s flagship tablet, the Nexus 7, the Tegra 3 debuted in the Tesla Model S, powering its impressive infotainment system (along with a separate Tegra 2 processor to handle the instrument cluster).

That solves the first problem – making an infotainment system that’s not obsolete before it hits the show floor. Solving the next problem — making a connected car system that keeps up with the pace of consumer electronics innovation — is much trickier.

To tackle it, Nvidia recently launched a new automotive architecture called Jetson, which tries to solve more than just the problem of obsolescence. First, Jetson is powerful, incorporating Nvidia’s pixel-crunching graphics processing units alongside its Tegra VCM chips. Nvidia is hoping that its silicon won’t just be the brains of your infotainment system but an extra set of eyes on the road.

Nvidia wants to power the advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) emerging in the next-generation of cars, Shapiro said. Moving beyond adaptive cruise control and proximity detection, cars will eventually sport omnidirectional cameras that will “see” the road in all directions and possibly even scanning lasers that can model a vehicle’s surrounding in 3D. The art of processing image and spatial data just happens to be Nvidia’s sweet spot.

In addition, Nvidia has crafted Jetson to be a development platform that builds on its earlier work with its VCM chips. “Automakers can simulate future designs,” Shapiro said. “They can get their development done now, preparing for the next-generation chips and next-generation car apps.”

Finally, Jetson is modular. The core processing unit is designed to be swappable. That means an automaker can easily incorporate the latest and greatest version of Jetson into their existing connected car and infotainment systems each successive years. It also means, Shapiro said, that one day we could upgrade our car’s dashboard computers much like we’d upgrade an old PC.

Pimp my ride’s CPU

Unless you’re one of those folks that can afford to buy a new car every time the ashtrays get full, chances are any new vehicle purchase is going to be a long-term investment. Six years is not an unreasonable time to spend driving the same car, but that’s an eternity in the world of consumer electronics. Six years ago, what we now think of as a smartphone didn’t exist, and no one had yet developed many technologies we now take for granted such as speech-powered virtual assistants, 3D mapping and location-based social networks.

Many automakers have decided that trying to keeping up with the day-to-day advances of that technology is an exercise in futility and have built their connected car strategies around the smartphone itself. Ford and Chevy, for instance have designed their connected infotainment systems as extensions of the driver’s handset. So as the smartphone becomes more powerful, so do their cars’ dashboards.

An upgradable CPU would solve part of that problem, but not the whole problem. It doesn’t matter if your new car dash computer can process hi-rez images in real time if it doesn’t have the sensors to collect those images.

But the auto industry is trying to solve that problem as well. Ford has launched an open-source hardware program called OpenXC, which could let us upgrade components like heads up displays and sensor arrays in our future cars.

I’m not saying you’ll be able to turn your old jalopy into KITT from Knight Rider, but who knows? One day maybe we could customize our cars so they behave like new even if they don’t look like new.

Mouse car image courtesy of Shutterstock user Mopic

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• Why Google Android’s Electric Vehicle Deal With GM Matters
• The fourth quarter of 2012 in cleantech

A new voice digital assistant is on the scene in the U.S., but unlike other Siri-challenger’s Sherpa comes with some overseas work experience. Sherpa launched its Spanish-language Android app in October and since risen up the Google Play charts in Spain and Latin America. Sherpa has since learned English, and on Wednesday it launched in the U.S. in the Play store.

Most virtual assistants powered by natural language processing are taught to do specific tasks very well but tend to come up short when given unfamiliar assignments. For instance, Siri excels at jobs like making calendar appointments and dictating text messages but can be confounded by more general requests for information, usually resorting to simple web searches.

Sherpa CEO Xabi Uribe-Etxebarria said he set out to create a natural language platform that had a much greater scope of understanding, which could easily be applied to new tasks without “training” the app to perform them. He also wanted to create a language-independent platform, one that understood meaning and intent independent of a language’s vocabulary or syntax.

To that end, Uribe-Etxebarria and his machine-learning team developed a sort of meta-language, encompassing 250,000 semantic concepts accompanied by 5,000 rules used to order those concepts. Sherpa uses off-the-shelf speech recognition services (right now it uses Google’s speech API) to translate commands into its meta-language, and then it parses meaning and intent from the resulting string of concepts.

The result is a flexible virtual assistant platform that can easily be applied to new tasks, Uribe-Etxebarria said. Sherpa’s repertoire is constantly growing as it hooks into new apps and information sources. For instance, Sherpa has struck a deal with PayPal, allowing the app to make payments via voice command. It taps into Twitter’s API, letting users navigate their twitter feeds – toggling between mentions, direct messages and home stream views – through voice prompts. For general information requests, Sherpa has developed a nifty information card format, which aggregates information from a variety sources ranging from LinkedIn profiles to Wikipedia entries.

“We’ve gone beyond Siri in many cases,” Uribe-Etxebarria said. And given the flexibility of its technology, he added, Sherpa can continue to add new services and functions at a much quicker space than its competitors.

Still, Sherpa is entering an increasingly crowded space. New virtual assistants are popping up left and right, some very focused on specific tasks like Incredible Labs’ Donna, while some like Nuance’s Dragon technologies are spanning devices, trying to create a single virtual assistant for all things. And of course, Google and Apple are building their speech technologies directly into their phone operating systems – it’s hard to argue with the convenience of that big fat Siri button.

Sherpa got off the ground in Bilbao, Spain, but it now has offices Redwood City, Calif. It has raised $1.6 million in angel funding.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
• Analyzing the wearable computing market

Dish Network’s bid for Sprint presents Dan Hesse and Co. with an interesting choice. Analysts point out that Softbank has more than enough money to counter Dish’s $25.5 billion bid, but money aside Dish would make a much better strategic fit for Sprint.

Softbank offers much-needed investment to the still struggling No. 3 U.S. wireless operator. But Dish doesn’t just bring cash; it’s got 4G spectrum and a huge pay TV network to boot. Informa Telecoms & Media Principal Analyst Mike Roberts lays out all of the advantages of a Sprint-Dish marriage:

“First and most importantly, Dish could combine its 2GHz LTE spectrum with the LTE spectrum of Sprint and Clearwire to build one of the strongest LTE spectrum portfolios in US, which would be the foundation for a powerful new competitor in the US telecoms market. Second, using Sprint’s newly-modernized mobile network would give Dish a cost-effective way to deploy LTE in its 2GHz spectrum and meet the FCC’s rollout requirements. Third, if the deal goes ahead, Dish and Sprint could quickly offer TV, broadband and mobile bundles to compete more effectively with larger integrated telecoms players such as Verizon and AT&T.”

In particular, Dish’s spectrum would give Sprint the immediate room it needs to grow its LTE capacity. Sprint’s current LTE network is bit undersized compared to high-capacity 4G networks its competitors are rolling out. While Sprint is planning to buy the remaining stake in Clearwire — which would give it Clearwire’s vast 2.5 GHz holdings — Clearwire is using a different type of LTE technology that could make getting the right consumer devices more difficult. Becoming part of Dish would give it the right kind of licenses to complement Sprint’s current network.

Also, Sprint taking over Clearwire isn’t a given. Several other companies have expressed interest in the 4G operator and its spectrum, and last week Clearwire revealed it just got a new offer from an unnamed entity to acquire its licenses in big cities for between $1 billion and $1.5 billion. The Wall Street Journal pegged that unnamed company as Verizon Wireless.

Given all of the crazy variables in this complex game of spectrum chess, it seems like a Sprint and Dish would form a good match, but the companies haven’t always seen eye-to-eye.

There was once talk of a partnership between the two, using Sprint’s new networks to host Dish’s LTE service. But those talks fizzled, and Sprint and Dish wound up becoming big adversaries, fighting over Clearwire’s future and squabbling about interference issues in their spectrum neighborhood.

Copious amounts of money certainly can heal old wounds, but there’s a question of whether Dish has enough money. Despite Dish’s big war chest, it would still need to go $9 billion further into debt to finance its proposed deal, Stifel Nicolaus analyst Christopher King said in a research note. Dish may have just set off a bidding war, but it might not have the money to see it through. According to King:

“We believe that DISH is more strategically desperate for Sprint than is SoftBank; however, SoftBank certainly has deeper pockets. … As such, we believe SoftBank is in a better position, financially speaking, to match DISH’s offer – or raise the offer further – should it choose to do so. It appears to us that Sprint is in a solid position from a negotiating standpoint.”

If the money’s right, Sprint may not care about any of the strategic advantages of a Dish deal. As with all carriers, Sprint’s foremost concern is spectrum and Sprint may be in a position to acquire better licenses with Softbank’s cash.

Last week, the U.S. Department of Justice advised the Federal Communications Commission to set rules for its forthcoming TV airwaves auction favoring smaller operators like Sprint and T-Mobile over dominant carriers AT&T and Verizon. If FCC does give Sprint an advantage in that auction, it could walk away with some very attractive 600 MHz airwaves without breaking the bank.

Chess photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Elnur

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• 2012: Data, spectrum and the race to LTE
• Mobile 2012 and beyond
• A look back at mobile in Q1

If you’re trying to promote a new mobile industry standard called Weightless, it makes sense to hire an industry heavyweight to do the lifting. U.K. wireless startup Neul has hired former Icera CEO Stan Boland to take over the company.

Boland co-founded phone baseband chipmaker Icera in 2002, heading up the company as president and CEO for nine years. In 2011, Nvidia — anxious to add radio chips to its mobile processor portfolio — acquired it for $367 million in cash. Boland stayed on as Nvidia’s SVP of mobile communications, but according to his LinkedIn profile Boland left the company in October.

Cambridge-based Neul makes wireless chips, but not for the cellular industry. It’s focusing on the emerging white spaces broadband segment — in particular the Weightless standard gaining traction in the U.K.

White spaces use the spectrum in between TV transmissions for two-day way data communications. The Weightless Special Interest Group hopes to use those airwaves as a backbone network for the internet of things, connecting low-power devices such as smart meters and mobile sensors.

Neul’s principal founders will remain with the company. Former CEO James Collier will become CTO, while William Webb has moved from CTO to chief strategy officer and will maintain his role as CEO of the Weightless SIG. Formed in 2010, Neul has quite the pedigree in mobile silicon. Many of the company’s key executives founded CSR, the U.K. fabless semiconductor giant. Neul, however, has only 45 employees and spent its first two years developing its first radio chip.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• GigaOM Research highs and lows from CES 2013
• Podcast: Mobile winners and losers in 2012 and what to expect in 2013
• Analyzing the wearable computing market

Two years ago, my wife and got a big scare while visiting our in-laws with our dog Lola. While my wife and I were out on a morning run, Lola escaped from the house and disappeared into the neighborhood. Luckily we recovered Lola — thanks to some local good Samaritans and the folks at animal control — but our poor dog had suffered a horrible 18-hour ordeal, having been hit by a car and cornered by neighborhood dogs.

I’m happy to say Lola mended and remains a happy member of our family, but the fright of that day led us to investigate GPS tracking collars. Ultimately we decided against it. The collars are bulky and expensive, and they required regular charging, but mainly we were turned off by the cost of the service. They use cellular connectivity to transmit their coordinates, and the cost of such connectivity isn’t cheap: usually about a $100 annual subscription. We felt that was a steep price to connect an object that performed a single function that we would access rarely, if ever.

However, I’ve always been fascinated by the idea of somehow connecting our dog to the network. After all, I can connect my thermostat, my refrigerator and my car to the internet. I like all of those appliances, but none are more important to me than my pups. And I’ve discovered that today that I have a lot more options for making Lola part of the internet of things.

Options for the connected canine

Near-field communications (NFC) technology is one way that’s getting some attention lately. PetHub just released an NFC pet tag that allows you to scan a lost pet’s collar with an NFC-enabled smartphone. That may seem a bit gimmicky since most tags have emergency contact numbers etched in, but as PetHub points out there is a lot of that can be crammed into a 1-inch tag: vaccination records, veterinary contacts, insurance details and allergy and medial condition info. PetHub tags also have QR codes so they can be accessed by phones without NFC.

But NFC gets really interesting when its used to communicate more than just passive information. Fujitsu recently launched what is essentially a FitBit for dogs in Japan. Called Wandant, the collar attachment uses a three-axis accelerometer to count a dog’s steps. It can also detect whether a dog is shivering and its body temperature. The data is then transferred to an Android smartphone via NFC and then transferred to a cloud-based health monitoring service, which will advise you on exercise and diet for your pup.

We’ve also started seeing NFC’s cousin’s RFID (radio frequency identification) used in interesting ways for several years. Pets have long been “chipped” with embedded RFID tags accessibly by vets and animal control officers. But the technology can also be used for ad-hoc geofencing — monitoring pets movements the same way FedEx tracks parcels in its long, complex delivery chain.

Pet day care and boarding facilities have experimented with RFID tags to manage the activities of their furry clients — say when a dog enters or leaves a play area — track time spent in the facility and even automatically bill their owners. Daily RFID has developed a radio dog tag that will automatically unlock the gate of a dog park whenever an authorized dog approaches.

For those who are serious about quantifying their pets actions (as well as those of their owners), GreenGoose has been tinkering with a connected pet kit that uses multiple wireless sensors that communicate with a hub attached to your home network. You attach those sensors to your pet’s collar and leash and its food scoop and treats bin. Whenever you perform an action, such as opening the treat bin or attaching the leash, the hub records it, creating a log of your pet’s daily activities accessible through its Petagonia iPhone app.

That might come in handy if you have dogs like ours that have fooled us into feeding them their dinner twice — it’s amazing what a forlorn look at a food bowl can do. GreenGoose seems to have taken the kit off the market, and according to ConnectedWorld’s review it still had some bugs to work out. But the experiment definitely held promise. By correlating daily routine information with sensor data, such technology won’t just tell you what your pet has done, but what it needs to do – for instance, notifying if you if the dog hasn’t been walked in five hours or if your forgot to give it its medication.

Creating an internet of pets

While I definitely find all of these gadgets intriguing, ultimately I arrive back at the same problem I found with the GPS tracking collar. I may not be paying a monthly cellular connectivity bill, but I wind buying a bunch of single-purpose devices that don’t really coordinate or communicate with one another. If I really wanted to connect my two pooches, I would find myself outfitting them each with a half-a-dozen collars or tags and then monitoring them from half-a-dozen apps or interfaces.

This is an emerging problem in the internet of things. While its possible to connect many objects to the network, it quickly becomes either prohibitively expensive or unpractical to do so. Just as with any internet-of-things segment — whether connected car, connected home or quantified self — the connected pet needs a platform. This could take the shape of, say, an Android dog collar, or it could just require open application programming interfaces allowing a single app to manage and interpret all of your pet data.

Let’s face it, we all wish our pets could talk. The internet of things will eventually give them the equivalent of a limited voice — letting us know where they are, when they’re hungry, if they need to be exercised and when they get sick. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather my dog talk with a single voice rather than a dozen.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Analyzing the wearable computing market
• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro

Verizon Wireless has always stuck to the premium of end of the mobile pricing spectrum, leaving budget prepaid plans to its competitors. But it may be changing its strategy. On Thursday it introduced a $35 prepaid plan, which is by far the cheapest thing it offers under the Verizon logo.

FierceWireless first reported on the new plan, but we confirmed the details with Verizon today. The $35 tier targets text junkies using basic phones, offering unlimited SMS and web surfing but only 500 voice minutes. Four feature phones — the LG Cosmos 2 and Extravert and the Samsung Gusto 2 and Intensity III — are available under the plan, and it’s not transferable to other devices. Extra minutes cost an additional 25 cents.

Verizon is no stranger to prepaid, but unlike Sprint and T-Mobile, it hasn’t focused much effort on the segment. At the end of 2012, Verizon had only 5.7 million prepaid subscribers out of 98.2 million retail accounts. In addition, much of Verizon’s recent attention has been directed at the upper tier of the prepaid market — tablets and data modems as well as no-contract smartphones plans.

By delving far below the $50 price tier, Verizon is venturing into the territory of prepaid-only players like Cricket Communications and MetroPCS, mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) like Tracfone and Sprint’s no-contract arms Virgin Mobile and Boost Mobile. Prepaid has enjoyed enormous growth over the last several years, so you can see why Verizon is interested, though it’s extremely late to the party.

Verizon’s new love of prepaid likely has something to do with its rapidly emptying CDMA network. Since launching LTE two years ago, 50 percent of all of Verizon’s data traffic has migrated to those new 4G systems. Verizon essentially made 3G a fallback network for its next-generation of high-end smartphone users, and to fill the gap left over it’s only offering prepaid services over 2G and 3G phones.

The four feature phones on Verizon’s basic plan are no exception. While you get unlimited data with the plans, you’d have to try very hard to rack up even a modest data usage on these devices. They sport Opera browsers and a few email and social networking apps, but you won’t get access to any advanced applications. What’s more, they only hold CDMA 1X 2G radios, so connection speeds are quite slow.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Mobile 2012 and beyond
• CES 2012: a recap and analysis
• A look back at mobile in the third quarter

The final vote on T-Mobile USA’s big merger deal with MetroPCS was supposed to take place Friday, but given mounting Metro shareholder opposition, T-Mo parent Deutsche Telekom appears a bit skittish over its outcome. MetroPCS has now rescheduled its shareholder vote for April 24, while DT has submitted a new offer that might make the merger more palatable to its opponents.

The revised deal would still create a publicly traded company, and DT would still maintain its originally proposed 74 percent ownership. But DT offered to slice $3.8 billion off of the debt the combined company would carry, dropping it to $11.2 billion. DT also said it would drop the interest rate on that debt by half a percentage point and agree to a longer lockup period of 18 months in which DT couldn’t sell it shares.

Metro’s owners wouldn’t get additional stock, nor would their $4.09-per-share buyout increase, but the DT tweaks ultimately would make the equity they do receive more valuable. DT estimates the lower debt level and lower interest rates would add $3 in value to Metro stockholders’ shares.

At first, the T-Metro deal looked like it would sail through the approval process. It encountered no antitrust opposition form the U.S. Department of Justice and the Federal Communications Commission found no regulatory reason to hold it up. The Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. raised no national security concerns.

But Metro’s institutional shareholders led by hedge fund Paulson & Co. claimed they were getting a raw deal and tried to recruit other stockholders to its side. DT at first stood its ground, saying the original offer was the best deal shareholders would get. Why did it change its mind? Well, according to Bloomberg, DT got a sneak peak at the absentee proxy ballots as they came in before Friday’s meeting. Apparently it didn’t like what it saw, leading to its decision to delay the vote and sweeten the pot.

Sign image courtesy of Shutterstock user Gary Paul Lewis

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• 2012: Data, spectrum and the race to LTE
• A look back at mobile in the third quarter
• Mobile 2012 and beyond

Phone power supply maker Quantance has raised another $12 million in funding,  which the company plans to put to use commercializing its battery-saving envelope tracking technology.

Envelope tracking might sound like a certified mail service, but it’s really a technology used to tame LTE’s normally power hungry ways. LTE is unique among cellular technologies in that its power levels rise and dip dramatically throughout the course of a transmission – think of an LTE signal like the wild crescendos and quiet interludes of classical music.

Envelope tracking closely matches the power fed into the radio with the power needed at given moment to transmit. The result is a highly efficient power supply that can reduce a phone’s power drain by as much as 25 percent over current 4G devices. Given the miserable battery life of first generation of LTE phones, a 25 percent improvement is nothing to scoff at, and once combined with other power-saving technologies such as integrated handset silicon as well as improved batteries, we’ll see phones that can go much longer between charges.

Quantance’s latest $12 million round is its Series D with all of its existing investors — TD Fund, Granite Ventures, InterWest Partners and DoCoMo Capital – chipping in. Quantance raised $30 million in its previous rounds, going all the way back to 2006, the last of which was an $11 million investment in 2011.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Updated: Forecast: global mobile subscribers, 2010-2015
• The mobile backhaul market, 2011-2012: more innovation, greater competition
• How to deliver the next-generation web experience

An interesting tidbit came out of Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam’s speech at the National Association of Broadcasters conference on Tuesday: Half of the traffic on Verizon’s mobile networks is now video, FierceWireless reported, and by 2017 Verizon expects that number to grow to two-thirds.

At first glance, it would appear that Verizon just is keeping with the global average. Cisco Systems’ Visual Networking Index pegs video at 51 percent of all traffic bound for mobile devices. But Cisco is counting on all traffic to mobile smartphones and tablets whether they’re connected to cellular or Wi-Fi networks. According to Cisco’s calculations one third of “mobile” traffic never hits the cell tower, traversing Wi-Fi networks instead.

Meanwhile McAdam is claiming that half the load on its mobile airwaves is now video, which is frankly quite a lot. McAdam had a good explanation for why: LTE. As its customers move to LTE’s faster pipe, the video experience improves – buffering and choppiness drop away – which in turn encourages more video watching. In fact, a better connection seems to naturally begets more data usage in general. Only 23 percent of Verizon’s subscribers have an LTE device, but they account for well over 50 percent of Verizon’s network traffic.

I doubt Verizon is saddened by this development. As more customers start consuming more video they’ll have to upgrade (the ones that aren’t still clinging to their grandfathered unlimited plans, at least)  to bigger data plans to handle that load.

But Verizon does face a perplexing problem. It’s doubtful many customers are going to start paying upwards of $100 a month for the 10 GB-plus data plans necessary to support hard-core video consumption. So while it wants to encourage its customers to consume more video, there are plenty of economic incentives convincing mobile subscribers to do the opposite.

That’s probably why we’ve been hearing McAdam talk up new mobile video technologies like LTE-broadcast lately. By streaming content to multiple users simultaneously – either for immediate or later consumption – Verizon can deliver more video at less cost. Theoretically, at least, it can pass those sizable savings on to its customers, thus encouraging mobile video’s growth.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Mobile 2012 and beyond
• Controversy, courtrooms and the cloud in Q1
• What the shift to the cloud means for the future EPG

When eBay bought Magento in 2011 it gained an e-commerce platform that merchants could use to create custom online stores, but eBay has largely kept Magento separate from its most famous e-commerce acquisition, PayPal. That’s now changing, though, as the two are announcing a partnership to integrate PayPal’s m-commerce and mobile payments technology with Magento’s service.

In a blog post Wednesday, PayPal CTO James Barrese said his company is creating two new extensions for Magento’s 150,000 merchants. The first, called In-Aisle Selling, hooks PayPal’s point-of-sale mobile payments service Here directly to a merchant’s store. Here lets a salesman to take a credit or debit card payment anywhere in the store with PayPal’s triangular magnetic reader, while Magento’s ordering and inventory system pulls down all of purchase and customer details.

The second extension is called Order Ahead, which lets merchants set up shop in PayPal’s mobile app. In January, PayPal launched a pilot project with one of its key mobile payments customers Jamba Juice. Customers could access Jamba Juice’s menu from the app, place an order while waiting in line or before they arrived — even make special substitution requests — and of course pay for their drink.

Barrese said pilot was a success and now it’s expanding Order Ahead, starting with Magento merchants. Stores can use specialized templates to create their menus or catalogs and synchronize their opening hours and locations with PayPal’s ordering system. Merchants can then manage the pre-orders through a simple console available in the extension or directly integrate it Order Ahead into their existing point-of-sale systems using Magento’s APIs. Customers can pick up their orders either by presenting their names, order numbers or the QR code on their e-receipts.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Opportunities and challenges for mobile deals
• Social media in Q1: commerce and discovery dominated
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro

Mobile data optimization is by no means a new business. Ever since the advent of the iPhone, startups and big network equipment makers alike have promised to transrate, compress and cull extraneous video frames, image resolution and Java script from congested mobile networks.

Invariably those companies have targeted the mobile carriers that run those networks, but a new startup called Wandera is focusing its MDO technology on the people who get stuck paying those data bills: enterprises. Wandera has attracted the attention of Bessemer Venture Partners, which lately has been investing heavily in the telecom and mobile infrastructure space. Bessemer is the sole investor in Wandera’s Series A round, forking over $7 million.

Wandera was founded by Eldar and Roy Tuvey, two brothers from London who created security software-as-a-service company ScanSafe and sold it to Cisco Systems in 2010 for $183 million. After working for Cisco for two years, the Tuveys decided to return to the SaaS model with a new startup, this time selling optimization rather than security software to their enterprise clients.

Eldar Tuvey said Wandera has built what is in essence a cloud proxy server through which all phone-bound HTTP traffic is routed on its way to an enterprise’s mobile devices. During that traffic’s brief stay in that cloud, Wandera applies any number of optimization and compression techniques intended to reduce the amount of data that flows over the airwaves to those devices – and ultimately reduce the mobile data bill the company has to pay each month.

But Tuvey said Wandera is providing more than just a megabyte-culling data grinder. It’s developed a sophisticated set of monitoring and control tools that allows an enterprise to keep tabs on what apps, webpages and services its employees are using and to apply specific policies on that use.

For instance, an enterprise could set strict limits on social networking use, banning it outright or imposing caps on the amount of data an employee can consume in the Facebook app. Or it could prohibit video streaming when employees are roaming internationally, but allow it when they’re on their home networks.

Tuvey said enterprises can even go so far as to apply specific optimization features depending on the app used. So a company could let employees consume as much video or social networking content as they please — as long as they’re willing to put up with choppy frame rates and pixelated images.

“They can implement whatever policies they see fit,” Tuvey said. “It’s completely up to the company.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Dissecting the data: 5 issues for our digital future
• NewNet Q2: Google closes the quarter with a bang
• The Structure 50: The Top 50 Cloud Innovators

Ever sent a text message to a landline number by accident? Chances are it disappeared into a dark void, enveloped by that strange netherworld where orphan missives – along with lost socks and missing pens – find their final resting place. But starting Wednesday those messages actually might get received.

A cloud messaging company called Zipwhip has begun linking landline phone numbers to the SMS grid. Anyone with a U.S. number can now go to Zipwhip.com and register their number. You’ll first have to offer proof you own that number – usually by submitting a scanned phone bill – but if you’re willing pay the $19.95 monthly fee you can make and receive unlimited text and multimedia messages through Zipwhip’s cloud service.

At you might suspect your home or office phone can’t receive an actual SMS. What Zipwhip has done is virtualize the SMS client, allowing you to access it through a browser or through a PC client. You can even download its iPad or Android tablet, so even though the SMS service might be attached to your home number its completely divorced from your home phone.

In fact, the SMS service really has nothing to do with your home landline connection or the local phone company providing it, Zipwhip CEO John Lauer said. Zipwhip is using your landline number as a universal identifier for routing text messaging traffic across the Internet. From the perspective of Zipwhip’s cloud-based SMS infrastructure, you’re home phone is wherever you happen to be logged in.

The technology has been available for some time to link landline numbers to the SMS grid, Lauer said. The only barrier has been mobile carriers’ reluctance to bring wireline world into the SMS clubs. But carriers working with mobile industry association CTIA has gradually been opening up their networks making those links now possible, Lauer said.

So why would you want to tie your landline to the SMS system? While there may be a novelty factor, an ordinary consumer might find having dual SMS numbers overkill, especially if that extra service costs you an additional $20 a month. Lauer expects that businesses will be the most likely candidates for the service. SMS and messaging have gained acceptance as a means of communicating professionally or with customers, he said, so making your business number SMS capable makes perfect sense.

For instance, customers can text their orders to the local pizza joint using its regular delivery number, and that pizza joint could respond with a confirmation or a receipt from that same number. A salesman could use a single office number for all calls and SMS, rather than confuse a customer or colleague with a text message from an unidentified mobile phone. Mobile marketers could engage in SMS promotions using their own phone numbers rather than rely on complicated short codes.

Though Zipwhip is offering the SMS service independently of wireline operators today, it plans to offer the technology up to local phone companies, which in turn could offer landline texting as a feature in their service bundles.

Founded four years ago in Seattle, Zipwhip has raised $2.2 million form private equity and angel investors. It’s first app was an SMS-and MMS-forwarding service, offered both as an app for consumers and as a white label technology for carriers. It counts Sprint and T-Mobile among its customers.

With its new landline SMS technology, however, Zipwhip has moved beyond text forwarding to become a virtual carrier integrated directly into the internetworked SMS grid run by U.S. operators. That distinguishes it from MightyText and other text-forwarding apps. Instead of piggybacking on another carrier’s SMS service through software on the phone, Zipwhip can now power an independent messaging service on any advice over any number.

Photo courtesy of  roberthuffstutter via Compfight cc

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• What Amazon’s new Kindle line means for Apple, Netflix and online media
• The Internet of Things: What It Is, Why It Matters
• Report: How Mobile Cloud Computing Will Change Tech

Remember FLO TV? Qualcomm’s mobile broadcast TV service went live in 2007, promising to deliver digital video content to mobile phones all over the country. The network was supposed to be a proof-of-concept on the grandest scale, generating enthusiasm for Qualcomm’s proprietary MediaFLO multicast technology across the globe. The reality turned out to be much different.

No one seemed interested in paying a subscription fee for TV programming they already got at home. Nor were they interested in buying the special MediaFLO phones necessary to receive that broadcast signal. After limping along for three years, Qualcomm shut it down in 2010 and eventually sold its spectrum to AT&T.

Now Qualcomm is back on the live TV bandwagon, beating the drum over a new video and data multicast technology called LTE-broadcast. Recently I had a chance to catch up with Neville Meijers, VP of business development for Qualcomm, and I asked him the obvious: Didn’t Qualcomm learn its lesson with FLO TV?

Meijers readily acknowledged that FLO TV was a failure, but he claimed it wasn’t a failure of technology. Nor did Qualcomm misidentify the demand for live video content, he said. “At the end of the day it came down to economics,” Meijers concluded.

Why FLO didn’t flow

FLO TV failed for many reasons, but the biggest one was the huge ecosystem every participating player had to buy into to make the whole thing work. FLO required specialty chipsets, and thus specialty devices. It required new spectrum and a new network, and it even necessitated the negotiation of content rights to redistribute any program being broadcast. Those are huge hurdles to overcome, requiring big investments from both carrier and consumer.

If FLO had been a cheap service that you could use over any phone, then it could have worked, but the argument is moot, Meijers said. Qualcomm isn’t trying to recreate FLO TV with a new technology. Instead, Meijers said, Qualcomm views LTE-broadcast as a different kind of service proposition altogether: a means of easing congestion on carriers’ mobile data networks to make all kinds of streamed multimedia content more accessible and cheaper for consumers.

Unlike MediaFLO, LTE-broadcast doesn’t require new phones and new networks, and it uses standards-based, not proprietary, technology. What that means is carriers will be able to use their existing LTE infrastructure and spectrum through hardware upgrades for broadcast and future generations of radio chipsets will automatically support the feature.

What’s more, implementing LTE-broadcast doesn’t mean sacrificing capacity on the regular LTE network, Meijers said. If the network isn’t broadcasting content — or if no one in a cell is watching that content — it simply reverts to its normal unicast LTE state. For those reasons operators are much more enthusiastic about LTE-broadcast than they were in MediaFLO’s dedicated network model. The first trial networks will show up this year, but we won’t see LTE-broadcast on a meaningful scale until 2014, Meijers said.

What can you do with a broadcast network?

If LTE-broadcast was just about live TV, it probably wouldn’t work. As I wrote in January, there just aren’t that many live TV events that would get multiple users on the same cell all watching the same program — the Superbowl, the Oscars and the State of Union Address don’t happen every day.

But Meijers said that there is a lot of content beyond video that carriers or third-party content providers can ship to multiple phones simultaneously. For instance, instead of having each phone individually downloading app, device firmware, OS updates; operators could ship a updates in a gigantic batches to all users. Take a widely used app like Facebook — an update to its iOS software could hit hundreds of devices in the same cell simultaneously, eating up a fraction of the cell’s bandwidth.

LTE-broadcast could also be used to provide unique content at specific locations, Meijers said. At a football game, for instance, all of the cells serving the stadium could feature live video from every TV camera pointed at the field.

And while FLO TV may have failed, carriers are still interested in other video models, Meijer said. Instead of trying to convince customers to watch TV on a schedule, carriers could turn phones into miniature DVRs. At set times of the day they would broadcast programming, whether its popular YouTube videos or HBO’s Game of Thrones, which your phone could then would scoop out of the air and store for later viewing – if you have a subscription, of course.

“There are operators that have close alliances with television providers, particularly overseas,” Meijers said. “They want to offer over-the-top video services of their own.”

Right now watching an entire season of Game of Thrones streamed to your tablet over a mobile network is prohibitively expensive given the amount of data you would consume. But what if HBO paid Verizon Wireless to broadcast every new series episode to all of its HBO Go subscribers when the show aired each week? Since the program is broadcast to millions of devices simultaneously and then recorded in memory, it would cost Verizon little in network resources. That would allow it to exempt what would normally be gigabytes of data from its monthly data caps. Now that’s a compelling case for LTE-broadcast.

TVs photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Peter Sobolev

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Who and what to watch in the new era of the living room
• What the shift to the cloud means for the future EPG
• Mobile 2012 and beyond