Author: Kevin Fitchard

Verizon Wireless may have shut down its own app store, but it’s not wiping its hands of app curation entirely. The carrier has started reviewing, rating and recommending Android and iPhone apps to its customers.

What’s interesting about Verizon’s approach is it isn’t making its recommendations based on how entertaining, useful or fun a particular app is. Instead a team of Verizon engineers is looking at each app’s impact on the phone’s battery life, its drain on a customer’s data plan and how loosely it plays with security and customer privacy.

Basically, Verizon is compiling a series of regularly updated recommendation lists. The first is a list of 20 apps available either for Android or iOS that Verizon claims deliver a “best in class” experience on smartphones and tablets. As you might expect, Verizon isn’t being entirely objective in its choices, but it never claimed to be. One of the apps is even Verizon’s own AppLuvr software, which recommends other apps based on what’s already installed on smartphones.

The second list applies a much more visible methodology, rating the top 25 free and top 25 paid apps in Google Play based on three criteria: security, battery consumption and data usage. The third set of reviews is essentially Verizon’s naughty list: 13 apps – all games – that will drain your battery or eat up your data plan at a rapid clip.

Verizon isn’t making any friends here among the game development shops. Enormously popular games like Halfbrick’s Fruit Ninja Free and OMGPOP’s Draw Something got bad marks because of their battery drain. Other apps like Facebook Messenger and eBay scored relatively high but were penalized because of their high data consumption.

That may come us a surprise to many users since Facebook and eBay wouldn’t appear to consume that much data, especially compared to streaming multimedia apps like Pandora and Netflix, which received the highest possible Verizon ratings. But what Verizon is likely highlighting here is the persistence of those two apps’ connections. While Facebook might consume only a tiny fraction of the data in a single hour than, say, a Netflix video stream, the social networking app is always running in the background – transmitting a constant stream of signaling traffic over the network and whittling away at your data plan.

Alcatel-Lucent recently analyzed the enormous impact Facebook has on mobile networks through that signaling traffic. On Nov. 15, the social networking giant updated its iOS and Android apps, precipitating a 60 percent boost in Facebook signal load on mobile networks, even though the number of new Facebook mobile users increased only 4 percent in the same time frame. Alcatel-Lucent now estimates that Facebook is responsible for more than 15 percent of all mobile signaling traffic and accounts for more than 20 percent of all network airtime.

Carriers have long implored developers to keep the constraints of mobile networks in mind and build more efficient apps. With these rankings Verizon could be upping that pressure, punishing developers who keep developing unnecessarily chatty software.

As you might expect, neither Facebook Messenger or the main Facebook app made Verizon’s list of “must have apps” (though eBay did). Verizon, however, named Facebook’s much more network-efficient Instagram photo-sharing app in its top 20. I doubt Facebook cares either way.

Any time a carrier produces a must-have list you should take it with a grain of salt, but I will give Verizon credit. It actually recommended Tango, an over-the-top voice, video and messaging app that competes directly with Verizon’s core voice and SMS services.

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FreedomPop on Thursday launched its promised data sharing program, allowing its customers to share or trade megabytes like a broadband currency. The mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) also revealed it has gone back to its investors for a another $4.3 million infusion, which FreedomPop COO Steven Sesar said would carry it through the rest of its beta trials before it launches nationwide later next year.

Sesar said you can think of the broadband sharing feature like a “family plan on crack.” Instead of sharing your pool of monthly megabytes or gigabytes with just the wife and kids, though, FreedomPop customers can request bandwidth from or award bandwidth to any other customer using FreedomPops’s social networking tools.

The broadband sharing program is the latest twist in FreedomPop’s distinctly anti-carrier approach to mobile data. As we’ve written before, FreedomPop doesn’t see much value in selling consumers data plans. Instead it wants to sell them services over what it considers a commodity pipe – it wants to be the water-slide amusement park, not the water utility.

Consequently FreedomPop is offering any customer who buys one of its modems 500 MB free of charge each month (though it sells bigger-bucket plans for a monthly fee) and allows them to “earn” more free data by referring new customers, participating in promotional programs and become entrenched in the FreedomPop social community. The more active customers become in the FreedomPop community the more free data they accrue and therefore the more likely they are to remain customers.

Under the current rules there are limits to how much data individual customers can earn or trade. But the company is gradually relaxing those rules, Sesar said. For instance, it is upping the amount of free data customers get from becoming friends with another Freedom customer from 10 MB to 50 MB each month. There is now an overall cap of 500 MB on free data customers can earn beyond their guaranteed monthly 500 MB allotment, but Sesar said the virtual carrier plans to boost the cap in the coming months and eventually eliminate entirely.

“Ultimately the goal is to allow you to earn, exchange and share data as much as you want,” Sesar said. “Right now we’re still testing the waters, making sure customers don’t game the system.”

FreedomPop plans to launch its own voice and text messaging plans next month in partnership with TextPlus. It will also expand into the home with a new wireless broadband gateway that taps into the same Clearwire WiMAX network used by its mobile service. Later this year it will begin selling its first LTE devices, switching to Sprint as its primary provider.

One of FreedomPop’s most attention-grabbing plans, however, is on hold. The company intended to launch a sleeve modem that fit over the iPhone 4 and 4S shortly after launch, but the device has been held up by U.S. regulators for testing. That’s left many perspective FreedomPop customers who pre-ordered the device in the lurch.

Last month, FreedomPop said it hoped that the device would be cleared for shipment this month, but this week Sesar said there was still no update on when or if it would be released. He added that if the modem was delayed too much longer, FreedomPop may just move on, refocusing its strategy on other devices.

FreedomPop was founded in 2011 with the backing of Skype founder Niklas Zennstom, and since then has raised $11.2 million in funding. The company is calling the $4.1 million a series A1 round, since it includes only existing investors DCM and Mangrove Capital.

Sesar said the cash would allow FreedomPop plenty of leeway to tinker with its strategy, services and plans while in beta. But later this year, Sesar said, it plans to put together a proper series B round to launch a fully commercial service nationwide and move beyond viral marketing to attract a larger customer base.

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The holiday smartphone boost enjoyed by AT&T and Verizon was replicated at Sprint. In the fourth quarter, the country’s third largest mobile operator sold 6.1 million smartphones, 2.1 million of which were iPhones. But Sprint is also still feeling the pain of departing Nextel and Boost Mobile customers as it prepares to shut down its iDEN network completely in the second quarter.

Sprint lost 644,000 Nextel contract customers and 376,000 Boost customers, though Sprint was able to lure 521,000 of those departing subscribers over to its CDMA network. There are now 2.1 million iDEN customers remaining, which means Sprint has a rocky two quarters ahead before the network goes offline completely.

On the CDMA side of the house, Sprint added a net 401,000 contract customers and 525,000 prepaid customers, but the Nextel exodus still resulted in a net loss of 400,000 customers. Sprint now has a total 55.6 million mobile connections.

Sprint activated 2.2 million iPhones (as opposed to sales), which is just a quarter of the volume done by dominant iPhone distributor AT&T, but Sprint was able to use the device to lure in more customers. Of the 6.6 million iPhones sold in 2012, Sprint estimated that 40 percent were new customers, meaning Sprint isn’t just upgrading its existing subscribers to the iPhone. The carrier also said that it sold more Samsung Galaxy S III phones than any other carrier.

Sprint reported a loss of $1.32 billion in the fourth quarter off of revenues of $9 billion.

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Alcatel-Lucent confirmed early Thursday that CEO Ben Verwaayen is resigning after four tumultuous years at the helm of the Franco-American network equipment maker. Verwaayen will stay put while the board seeks a replacement.

The announcement confirms the Wall Street Journal’s report Wednesday on the resignation, though the newspapers sources seemed to disagree whether Verwaayen was forced out by the board or if the decision was mutual.

“Alcatel-Lucent has been an enormous part of my life,” Verwaayen said in an Alcatel-Lucent statement. “It was therefore a difficult decision to not seek a further term, but it was clear to me that now is an appropriate moment for the Board to seek fresh leadership to take the company forward.”

When France’s Alcatel and the U.S.’s Lucent Technologies merged six years ago, the combined company was supposed to dominate telecom infrastructure. Its portfolio spanned both the wireline and wireless markets from optical networking to IP routing to 4G base stations. But the last half decade hasn’t been kind to telecom equipment makers and even less so to Alcatel-Lucent. The company has struggled financially, and it’s lost competitive ground both to traditional rivals like Sweden’s Ericsson and to more recent challengers from Asia like Huawei.

On the wireless side, Alcatel-Lucent plowed its resources into LTE. It built an innovative new radio architecture called lightRadio, and focused on landing early key contracts. At first that strategy seemed to be succeeding. Verizon Wireless, AT&T and Sprint awarded the company major portions of their massive LTE contracts, but the deals began to peter out after those initial big wins. The vendor was left out of big European deals even in its home country of France.

Image courtesy of matthi / Shutterstock.com

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Facebook wants to ensure that billions of people in emerging markets have access to its mobile apps when they buy their first phones. The social networking giant found an easy solution to that problem: Facebook is working with Chinese chipmaker Spreadtrum to embed its software directly into the guts of inexpensive smartphones.

Before you get too excited, Spreadtrum isn’t building the elusive Facebook Phone. Instead, it’s guaranteeing that millions of new phones sold into emerging markets will be “Facebook ready.”

Spreadtrum is pre-installing Facebook’s application software in its all-in-one Android smartphone platform – basically a smartphone-in-a-box containing the baseband and applications process, protocol stack, operating system and reference design. Spreadtrum’s customers — handset makers — can then use that platform to quickly produce inexpensive smartphones quickly and with minimal engineering and design investment.

Technically any Android phone user could simply download the Facebook app from Google Play (Facebook is often pre-installed on smartphones, in fact) but the Spreadtrum agreement ensures the software will be optimized for even the lowest end smartphones expected to make their way into countries like India and China. Facebook won’t have to deal with OS fragmentation on those devices, or worry about whether their hardware is capable of supporting its app’s features. Spreadtrum will work with Facebook to test app updates and new features to ensure they’ll work across the phones already in the market.

Also, having your app icon sitting front and center on a new phone’s home screen can’t hurt when introducing yourself to a new country.

“Working with Spreadtrum will extend Facebook’s reach in emerging markets, leveraging the rapid shift from feature phones to smartphones that is now taking place globally,” Facebook VP of mobile partnerships and corporate partnerships Vaughan Smith said in a statement.

Spreadtrum has already begun shipping its smartphone platform in China, building off the company’s expertise in the TD-SCDMA radio technologies unique to Chinese operators. But on Wednesday, Spreadtrum revealed Facebook has given it permission to sell the platform outside of the Chinese market, opening up the possibility of millions of new Facebook-optimized devices in Latin America, Southeast Asia, Africa and India. Spreadtrum said it expects to ship 80 million to 100 million of those chipsets in 2013 alone.

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In-app push messaging specialist Urban Airship bulked up its wallet with $25 million in new funds, raised from August Capital and its previous investors Foundry Group, Intel Capital, True Ventures and Verizon (see disclosures). The new round brings Airship’s total funding to $46.6 million.

The extra cash should come in handy if Airship plans to continue its acquisition spree of late. In December the Portland, Ore.,-based startup bought up fellow True Ventures company Tello so it could expand its marketing and branding business into Apple’s Passbook digital wallet. In October, Airship acquired SimpleGeo, adding a location-aware component to its push messaging platform. Though Airship didn’t mention anything about additional acquisitions, it did say it would use the funds to expand internationally.

Airship technology delivers the in-app and background push notifications for more than 20,000 brands with an app-store presence. Airship, for instance, powers the sports score and news updates across ESPN’s family of apps.

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

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They may still be reluctant, but three of the four major carriers are now willing to entertain the idea of sharing the same airwaves with government users. This week Verizon Wireless, AT&T and T-Mobile signed a memorandum of understanding agreeing to explore spectrum sharing possibilities on 95 MHz of frequencies currently used by the U.S. Department of Defense and other federal agencies.

Charged with identifying more airwaves for commercial use, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) recommended last year that the private and public sector split time on government airwaves. The idea is that the DOD and other users were only using their spectrum at certain times and in certain places, so why not let carriers access those frequencies whenever and wherever they weren’t occupied by the feds?

Carriers traditionally like licenses they can call their own, and the industry initially responded to the deal with skepticism. In a blog post, AT&T still said it would rather see airwaves cleared entirely of government users and auctioned for government use but was amenable to the idea of sharing if clearing the airwaves was not possible.

“I want to emphasize that we continue to believe that clearing and reallocating is the best approach to freeing up much needed spectrum for commercial mobile broadband use,” AT&T Assistant VP Stacey Black wrote in the policy blog. “The existing exclusive licensing regime has resulted in billions of dollars in wireless infrastructure investment, enabling the U.S. to lead the way in the global mobile broadband marketplace. While clearing spectrum for exclusive commercial licensing must remain the top priority, when that is neither time nor cost effective, AT&T supports exploring sharing arrangements.”

Black hints at another possible obstacle to a shared spectrum plan: Congress. Lawmakers have counted on the billions raised in spectrum auctions to fill government coffers. Depending on how spectrum sharing was implemented it would either raise no money or far less than previous auctions.

Over the next few months, the three carriers and the DOD conduct trials and simulations of sharing scenarios at government installations. The results of those tests will be released in March.

Sprint was the only carrier in the Big 4 not on the list, but a Sprint spokesman told FierceWireless that the company works closely with the NTIA and will be following the tests closely.

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Russian billionaire investor Roman Abramovich has plunked down £70 million (U.S. $110 million) for a big piece of London’s Truphone, an international mobile operator that charges local rates for calls made in other countries.

Abramovich’s new 23.3 percent stake in Truphone isn’t quite as impressive as his outright ownership of the world-famous Chelsea Football Club (that’s soccer to us Yanks). But the investment is a huge vote of confidence to an aging startup, which is on its second business model in six years. Abramovich’s investment vehicle Minden led a £75 million round – it’s first since its £16.5 million Series B in 2008 — valuing the company at £300 million.

Truphone started out in 2006 as the mobile equivalent of Skype, developing handset software that allowed customers to place free or low-cost VoIP calls over Wi-Fi to international destinations and while roaming onto international networks. Rather than compete with other VoIP providers like Skype it partnered, supporting their services within its client.

But in 2010 Truphone became a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), creating an international SIM card that access multiple networks in different countries as if they were “home” networks. The result is a service where customers paid the same local rates regardless of whether they were in the U.S., U.K. and Australia.

Truphone plans to use the new funds to expand its virtual footprint outside of Anglophone countries. It plans to target the Netherlands, Hong Kong, Poland, Germany and Spain this year, but is also in negotiations with carriers in other countries to buy capacity off their networks, the company said. Truphone added that it would hire another 500 employees, most of which would be based in the U.K.

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Despite receiving a higher bid from Dish Network, Clearwire is moving forward on Sprint’s $2.2 billion acquisition offer. Clearwire filed a proxy statement on Friday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission indicating that it still recommends the Sprint deal to stockholders, but it also left itself just enough wiggle room to keep Dish’s offer on the table.

When Sprint made its bid in December to buy up the remaining shares of Clearwire it didn’t already own, it also agreed to extend $800 million in financing to the hobbled WiMAX carrier. Clearwire could have started withdrawing those funds in January. But when Dish submitted its counterbid it clearly stated that if Clearwire took that money from Sprint, the satellite TV provider would take its offer and skedaddle.

Clearwire didn’t dip into the Sprint financing in January while it was reviewing Dish’s offer. On Friday, Clearwire revealed it wouldn’t tap those funds in February either, which would keep Dish at the table and allow it to continue negotiating. The filing also reveals that since 2010 Clearwire has held negotiations with at least nine other entities over possible spectrum sales, strategic partnerships or outright acquisitions.

Though Clearwire hasn’t eliminated Dish from consideration, Sprint said the recommendation in the proxy statement was a clear vindication of Sprint and the substance of its offer. From Sprint’s statement:

“We continue to believe that the DISH proposal is illusory and conditioned on many things, including the receipt of governance rights, a spectrum sale and a commercial agreement which are not actionable under our merger agreement and other agreements between Clearwire and Sprint. We are pleased the Clearwire Board continues to recommend approval of our transaction and look forward to closing our merger and delivering even greater wireless service to the American consumer.”

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Gary Paul Lewis

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Manhattan may have the most high-powered corporations in the world, but it doesn’t even have the most powerful mobile data networks in New York City. That distinction goes to the borough on the other side of the Harlem River.

A recent round of speed and performance tests in New York from RootMetrics revealed that data speeds from mobile broadband networks averaged 13.5 Mbps, nearly 2 Mbps faster than any in any of the other four boroughs. The home of the Yankees also clocked the best upload speeds in the city, averaging 5.8 Mbps.

Manhattan actually had the lowest download speeds of the five, though it sat right in the middle in terms of upload. It’s doubtful that the big four operators are neglecting Manhattan. Rather, its lower performance is probably a reflection of its much greater density of people and smartphones along with the difficulty of finding tower space in the overbuilt borough.

When broken down by carrier, things get interesting. In all five boroughs, Root recorded the fastest average speeds on AT&T’s LTE networks. Verizon’s LTE came in second in all five cases, while T-Mobile and Sprint were a distant third and fourth respectively (neither carrier has LTE in NYC yet). But in Root’s overall testing of the NYC metro region – which by Root’s definition spans northern New Jersey, bits of southern New York and most of Long Island — Verizon came away with the speed prize, averaging 13.4 Mbps to AT&T’s 10.3 Mbps. While AT&T has built LTE over ever inch of NYC, that coverage seems to fall off when you leave the city.

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For some time we’ve been hearing about small cells and the big capacity boost they’ll bring to mobile data networks, but what we haven’t seen so far are any actual commercial small cell launches. That will change this summer, according to Ericsson EVP and head of networks Johan Wibergh.

Starting his summer Ericsson, the world’s largest mobile infrastructure vendor, will begin shipping its first commercially viable small-cell base stations and remote radio heads, Wibergh said in an interview with GigaOM. He wouldn’t name any particular customers, but in the U.S. at least, it’s not hard to guess. Both Sprint and AT&T have committed to large-scale small cell rollouts starting this year (Ma Bell has already begun experimenting with the technology in Missouri and Wisconsin). Both are major Ericsson customers, as is Verizon Wireless, which has also talked up small cells in the past.

Before we go any further, I should probably explain what Wibergh means when he says small cell. There are a lot of things out there that are called small cells such as home femtocells and distributed antenna networks. Also, carriers have been deploying the building blocks of small cell networks, picocells and microcells, for years. But ultimately those have been coverage solutions, injecting mobile signals into nooks and crannies where big tower-based macrocells can’t reach.

What the true small cells networks of our near future will bring is the creation of an alternate yet complimentary high-capacity network. Instead of cramming picocells onto cellular gaps, carriers will mount picocells on lampposts and buildings, right under the gaze of towers with which they’ll share the same airwaves. That’s a hard feat to pull off because any time two signals use the same frequency in the same space, you get interference. For the last several years, Ericsson and rest of the mobile industry have been trying to figure how to mitigate that interference. That’s why it’s taken so long to convert an ordinary picocell into a true small cell.

The industry, however, appears to be the ready, at least it better be. AT&T has promised to have 40,000 small cells transmitting away by the end of 2015. Ericsson probably doesn’t want to leave egg on the face of one of its most important customers.

Wibergh, however, cautioned that small cell technologies still have some evolving to do. At first, small cell network will function much like an extension of the large cell counterparts. The network will pass us from big cell to small and vice versa. The key difference is that when we occupy that small cell we’ll have a lot more bandwidth at our disposal.

But as cellular standards evolve networks will be able to pull off an even neater trick. Our devices will be able to link to multiple cells simultaneously, Wibergh said. The same signals that once interfered with one another will reinforce one another creating an even more powerful connection. High-capacity Wi-Fi will get layered in, creating into a heterogeneous network in which our devices can establish multiple simultaneous connections using multiple radio technologies. What that boils down to is an awful lot of bandwidth.

Density image courtesy of Shutterstock user higyou

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Verizon Wireless will now start selling Square’s card reader in its retail stores across the country. Though it’s really just a new distribution deal among many, moving closer to carriers puts Square in an ideal spot to target would-be entrepreneurs and small business owners right as they’re making their smartphone purchases.

Starting Thursday, Verizon stores will sell the device for $9.97, plus new users will get a $10 credit to their account, canceling out even that minimal up-front investment. Since Square only charges by the transaction (2.75 percent) and doesn’t require any minimum number of transactions, I can’t imagine it will take a very hard sell to convince a small business customer buying a smartphone to try out the reader.

AT&T also began selling Square’s card readers last year. In fact, the major carriers have been expanding their retail horizons beyond smartphones and modems. They’re marketing peripheral devices and gadgets that link to handsets, but don’t sport separate cellular connections. In AT&T’s new flagship store in Chicago you can find everything from smart watches to connected health and fitness monitors.

What’s more, Verizon and AT&T appear to have avoided their usual tendency to cash in on devices or services they distribute directly. Instead of trying to sell customers a “Square plan” or attempting to take a piece of each Square transaction, Verizon and AT&T seem content with the data traffic Square and other peripheral device makers drive over their networks.

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Digital loyalty and rewards startup Belly is experimenting with a marketing concept as old as the supermarket: the free sample. It’s recently introduced a new program called Belly Bites, which allows local businesses to offer complimentary samples of their wares – whether it’s a donut, a manicure or free admission to a concert – to customers in their loyalty programs.

Belly is a Chicago-based startup backed by Lightbank and Andreessen Horowitz that is trying to take retail rewards programs down to the small business and the local level – while providing something much more sophisticated than the buy-10-get-one-free punch card. Belly users either use their Belly app or a QR code on a physical card to check in at a store’s iPad whenever they stop in at a participating business. That allows stores to track their customers’ purchases, award points and market more effectively to their most loyal customers.

The Belly Bites program adds a more active component to a normally passive rewards system. Instead of waiting on the customers, businesses can lure them in by offering a free tidbit, which is then highlighted in Belly’s app. In fact, customers can use the app as a sort of goodie radar, following the path of free treats and services around their neighborhoods. According to Belly, the free samples focus is much more manageable than a daily deal coupon campaign, while still introducing new customers to local businesses.

Belly also revealed today that it has revamped its Android app. The app is now compatible with all versions of the Google OS, but the biggest improvement is for frequent Belly users with the latest Android handset. The new Belly widget can be used to place a customer’s loyalty QR code on the home or lock screen of an Android 4.2 (Jelly Bean) device, turning it into a physical card.

Ever had the urge to go out to dinner at a restaurant but couldn’t find anyone to dine with? Social dining startup Grubwithus might just have an app for you. Over the weekend it launched GrubTonight, an iPhone app that allows strangers in the same city to meet up for impromptu meals with just a few hours notice. Think of it as a tweetup with a set menu.

If you’re not familiar, Grubwithus is Los Angeles-based startup that specializes in organizing group meals for people with similar interests. Users sign up for a Grubwithus account, and then start signing up for dinners, organized weeks in advance around themes such as the love of sushi or a fascination with Ron Paul. Grubwithus pre-arranges set meals with partner restaurants, and diners prepay their bills before attending. Once there everyone only needs to cover their drink tabs.

GrubTonight works in a similar way, though much accelerated. The iPhone-only app — Grubwithus probably isn’t hosting any Android-lover meals just yet — alerts members to dinners being held that night along with their menus and locations. Unlike the regular Grubwithus dinners, there’s no theme, just social interaction. Diners again prepay and they receive a confirmation an hour before the meal is held. At launch, GrubTonight is only offering up meals in the LA area, but the company said it would expand to more cities in the coming months.

Grubwithus said that the app is focused on immediacy, making it ideal for business travelers, tourists looking to meet each other or the locals or as a means for the newly relocated to meet the community. If a group of diners hit it off they can meet for future meals using the social tools in the larger Grubwithus network.

Grubwithus is one of many startups exploring the idea of a “real-life” social network built around the communal table, but it’s developed more momentum than most. A Y Combinator alum, Grubwithus raised $1.6 million in seed funding from Ashton Kutcher, Andreessen Horowitz, First Round Capital, Aviv Nevo, and other angel investors.

Last year, it announced a $5 million Series A round led by LA VC GRP Partners. In February it used some of those funds to buy up Canadian “supper club” startup The Social Feed, allowing it to expand internationally. In addition to LA, Grubwithus is now organizing meals in Chicago, New York, San Francisco and San Jose, Toronto and Washington, D.C.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user corepics

The company that coined the term AirCard will make AirCards no more. Sierra Wireless is selling its 3G/4G modem business to NetGear, which take over the manufacture of its line of mobile hotspots, wireless dongles and data cards.

NetGear will pay $138 million in cash and assume $6.5 million in liabilities as part of the transaction, which will allow the popular Wi-Fi router maker to expand beyond wired and Wi-Fi networking into the cellular market.

External modems were once Sierra’s bread and butter, but over the last five years it began to focus much more an embedded radio modules and the machine-to-machine market, making a few key acquisitions along the way. Meanwhile cellular modems are becoming more of a commodity business.

Sierra has probably seen the writing on the wall. As more smartphones and tablets come with their own hotspot capabilities there will be less need for stand-alone modems, so it’s a market it seems ready to concede to Novatel, Option and networking gear makers like NetGear.

Meanwhile, as the internet of things take shapes more and more devices will start sporting cellular radio connectivity – not just laptops and tablets but also home appliances, cars and even wearable electronics. It’s in those devices Sierra wants to embed its connectivity.

Perhaps personalized dialing codes are the new ringtones. As with ringtones in the past decade, carriers are getting excited over a vanity phone number service called StarStar Me, created by mobile marketing startup Zoove, and its potential to provide an alternative revenue stream beyond voice and data plans.

For $3 a month, T-Mobile customers can sign up for their own personal alphanumeric code. When that code is dialed, preceded by two taps of the “*” button, from any U.S. mobile number it will ring that customer’s phone. Customers who download the StarStar Me app from the iTunes or Google Play stores will also be able to use StarStar Me’s call management features, which can be used to send callers an automated voice message or SMS and even a link.

It’s a neat idea, and one that could put some service revenue in carriers’ pockets. But there are some inherent limits to how big such a service could scale, especially when compared to other blockbuster carrier services of the past like ringtones. While anyone can set a Prince song as their ringtone, only one U.S. mobiles subscriber can have the StarStar Me code “**PRINCEFAN.”

Still if that one Prince fan pays $3 a month into perpetuity for that short code, I’m sure his carrier won’t complain. And StarStar Me isn’t lacking for customer interest. Zoove said it has received hundreds of millions search queries for personalized dialing codes in the last 90 days, and while it isn’t revealing how many people have signed up for their own StarStar monikers, Zoove said that 100,000 calls have been placed to existing codes to date.

So far Sprint, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile all now offer the StarStar Me service. So if AT&T does sign on with Zoove in the future, its customers might find the pickings for available codes slim.

After spending the last six months boosting its small-town cred, Sprint is focusing more 4G attention on larger markets. On Monday it took its LTE network live in Boston and Austin, joining Chicago and Indianapolis, which Sprint turned on right before the Christmas holidays.

When Sprint first launched LTE this summer, it started with six large cities, but it quickly shifted its focus to smaller cities, towns and suburbs, getting 4G markets online as soon its Network Vision upgrade was complete. Sprint’s LTE network is now live in 58 cities, but most of them are small markets.

Sprint may be returning to the urban zones, but it isn’t abandoning the places in between. In addition to Boston and Austin, Sprint launched LTE in seven other areas: Bryan/College Station, Texas; Columbia, Tenn.; Emporia, Kan.; Farmington, Mass.; Fort Wayne, Ind.; Gettysburg, Pa.; and Western Puerto Rico (including Aguadilla, Isabela, Cabo Rojo, Mayagüez).

In fact, Sprint plans to double its current number of LTE markets in the coming months, targeting both big and small areas. Los Angeles, New York City, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., are all on the list, as are Kerrville, Texas, and Shelby, N.C.

If you’re a carrier having trouble coping with the onslaught of mobile data traffic, why not get a Wi-Fi provider to ease the burden? That may be the approach that Germany’s Deutsche Telekom is taking.

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, DT is weighing a stake in Spain’s Fon, a crowdsourced Wi-Fi community in which members share with one another their home and business Wi-Fi connectivity. The Journal’s unnamed sources did not reveal the size of the potential investment, nor its timing.

Fon has been around since 2006, but its fortunes didn’t really take off until the smartphone came to prominence. Operators like BT, Softbank Mobile, Belgacom and KPN began working with Fon, tapping into its alternate network of access points to offload traffic off of 3G networks. In some cases, operators are bundling Fon Wi-Fi routers (called Foneras) with their smartphones.

If the Journal report winds up being true, this would be an interesting strategic move for DT, one that would allow it to confront the market pressures that are forcing down mobile data prices. DT runs mobile networks under the T-Mobile brand throughout Europe and the U.S., and it’s been more aggressive than most in making use of Wi-Fi (T-Mobile USA’s Bobsled app, for instance).

But if DT were able to deploy tap into the Wi-Fi networks of millions of its own customers as well as those of other Fon members (Foneros), it could start shunting substantial portions of its mobile data traffic off of its 3G and 4G networks and onto the unlicensed frequencies. Iliad’s Free Mobile has adopted just such a Wi-Fi centric strategy in France – using the Wi-Fi connections of Iliad broadband customers – and consequently its dirt-cheap voice and data plans has launched a price war among the French operators.

There are apps that cater to salesmen, to cooks, to contractors and to stockbrokers. Why not an app for farmers? FarmLogs — a Y Combinator grad relocated to Ann Arbor, Mich. — has raised $1 million to invest in its digital management platform for farmers – and by farmers I mean the ones out of Steinbeck novels, not the ones on Facebook.

FarmLogs has designed software-as-a-service platform that helps small growers plan, manage and analyze their agricultural operations with the aim of maximizing crop yield and therefore profits. FarmLogs will track inventory, forecast profits, and digitize paperwork. It even follows the weather. The software is hosted in the cloud, which subscribers can access through an Android app, an HTML app optimized for the iPhone and iPad or a standard web browser.

Crain’s Detroit Business has an excellent description of just how sophisticated FarmLogs’ software is:

According to [CEO and co-founder Jesse] Vollmar, a midsize farm of 3,000 acres might have 60 separate fields, which can get complicated when it comes to keeping track of what needs to be tilled, watered, planted, fertilized, sprayed or harvested.

FarmLogs does that, with color-coded calendars for each bit of the mosaic that makes up the Google Earth image of a decent-size farm.

FarmLogs has hourly weather forecasts so farmers can plan when to get in or get out of fields. It tells them the price all the area grain elevators are paying for various grains, as well as prices at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. It has video feeds of various experts at the Chicago Board of Trade talking on issues of the day.

The $1 million round was led by Chicago’s Hyde Park Ventures and Ann Arbor’s Huron River Ventures with Hyde Park Angels, Silicon Badia Ventures, First-Step Fund and angel investors also participating. According to Crain’s, that includes the $245,000 in seed funding it raised from Silcon Valley’s Start Fund and Andreesson Horowitz.

While farming might seem like an odd place for tech investment, FarmLogs points out that agriculture employs 36 percent of the global workforce. Big agribusiness companies like Cargill and ConAgra Foods, being gigantic corporations, have access to technology that not only engineers their food products but streamlines their business operations. Smaller farmers, though, don’t have access to such resources.

An emerging sector of startups is starting to feed that small farm base. For instance, New York City’s FarmersWeb has built an online e-commerce platform that links small growers and meat producers to local restaurants, grocery stores, institutional kitchens and wholesalers.

If Cisco’s $475 million acquisition of Intucell this week tells us anything, it’s that we should be paying attention to the Israeli mobile infrastructure startup scene. Coincidently another Israeli radio networking company emerged this week that has a lot in common with Intucell, but rather than optimizing cell performance, it’s optimizing network power.

Tel Aviv-based eVolution Networks revealed its first customer this week, announcing that pan-Caribbean mobile operator Digicel is adopting its Smart Energy Solution (SES), a set of technologies that allows a carrier to power down its towers when not in use.

It sounds like a simple idea, but it’s not an easy one to implement. Mobile networks are designed to deliver their full capacity at a moment’s notice in order to handle the unpredictable patterns of the cellphone-wielding public. Consequently most base stations remain at full power whether it’s rush hour or the wee hours of the morning.

eVolution’s technology constantly monitors, analyzing its radio coverage characteristics as well as daily traffic patterns. Based on that information it decides which base stations in which places can safely be powered down at night or during other off-peak hours without sacrificing coverage. As traffic patterns change, SES changes the mix of cells staying online and off.

Though Digicel runs networks throughout the Caribbean, Central America and in the Pacific Rim, its Jamaica network was the first to get the upgrade. Digicel began testing the platform in early 2012, and fully activated network-wide in October. After three months of operations, Digicel estimated eVolution cut its radio network energy consumption by 23 percent (though eVolution said it can boost savings up to 35 percent in some cases). Digicel believes it can save up to $1.4 million annually in electricity costs, by reducing its power consumption by 2.8 GWh while keeping 1.5 kilotons of CO2 emissions out of the atmosphere.

In the last few years, all of the radio vendors have been prioritizing energy consumption. They’ve drastically lowered the wattage of their base stations, and have introduced “sleep mode” features that allow them to power down when traffic is low. But it’s going to take decades for that newer infrastructure to replace the old 2G and 3G networks – some of which are over a decade old – that populate the world today. eVolution certainly isn’t going to lack for business if carriers start seriously prioritizing their energy footprints.

eVolution, now two years old, has raised $4 million from Breslau Capital Partners. While Digicel is the first carrier to commercially implement its technology, the startup said it is in talks with several other large Tier carriers worldwide, all of whom are suffering from high energy bills.