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Spotify has made its first connected car appearance. At Mobile World Congress, Ford and Spotify announced that the subscription music service will soon be available over the Sync AppLink platform and integrated with the Sync’s voice command system in Ford vehicles in the U.S., Europe and Australia.

According to Spotify Global Head of Hardware Partnerships Pascal de Mul, the updated iPhone and Android apps will soon be able to pair with the dashboard AppLink system, streaming music through the car’s entertainment systems. Users will be able to play their songs, playlists and radio stations and even be able to create new radio stations on the fly with simple voice commands, he said.

Ford has been loading up on music streaming apps in AppLink, making it a key initial focus of its connected car strategy. Its library of supported services includes Pandora, Amazon Cloud Player, MOG Music, Slacker, and Rhapsody as well as multiple radio station’s digital apps.

Ford CTO Paul Mascarenas said digital music streaming figures right into Sync’s sweet spot. Ford doesn’t have to explain the utility of the services to the driving public since music is already the most popular form of entertainment in the car. The integration of a streaming service into Sync is relatively simple. And since the content is audio only and can be manipulated through Sync commands, the apps all easily meet Ford’s requirements that no connected car app distract a driver from the road, he said.

At the show Ford also revealed it is adding AppLink connectivity to its EcoSport crossover SUV (pictured at top) just in time for its European debut. For also brought several apps Europe that were previously available in U.S. cars: Kaliki, Glympse and Aha Radio.

We got a chance to sit down with Mascarenas for a few minutes at MWC to get a quick update on Ford’s new open development platform, originally unveiled at CES. Though the program is barely more than a month old, 2500 developers have already signed up and downloaded the SDK. Many of those devs have already completed apps and have submitted them to Ford, and a few those apps actually received final approval, Mascarenas said. Mascarenas said Ford plans to announced those apps in the coming weeks.

Spotfiy doesn’t count since it began working with Ford before the development program was launched, Mascarenas said, but the program has opened up Sync to a lot of smaller developers who wouldn’t usually get Ford’s direct attention. Ford is now faced with a distribution and discovery issue. “If you go into an app store, there’s no easy way to find the apps that AppLink-enabled, Mascarenas said.

When the number of Sync apps was small, Ford could promote them individually. But there are now 63 AppLink-optimized apps, and that number will grow significantly as the apps start emerging from the developer program. Ford is working on ways to catalog them. Whether that means creating its own app store or portal Android or working with Apple and Google to spotlight connected car software, Mascarenas didn’t say. Ford could also go with the approach, GM appears to be adopting and create a catalog in the dashboard itself.

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Call me crazy, but I love Mondays. Why? Because there is a new AOKP build coming just in time to kick off my week. The team behind the popular custom distribution Android Open Kang Project did not disappoint this time around either. Jelly Bean MR1 Build 4 made its way onto our modding hands with support for new devices and a much-awaited Android 4.2.2 base.

Jelly Bean MR1 Build 4 is the first release based on Android 4.2.2, the latter of which incorporates a number of new features including improved security as well as bug fixes for Bluetooth and other areas. The latest AOKP build touts minor changes, however, compared to its predecessor. The team behind the project says that the focus was on bugfixes, a “flawless AOSP merge” and the expansion of the lunch table (the lunch table is comprised of build configurations that can be compiled into per-device ROMs).

Support for new devices comes courtesy of new AOKP maintainers and includes the HTC One XL for AT&T (codename “evita”), Motorola Droid 3 XT862 (codename “solana”), Motorola Droid 4 XT894 (codename “maserati”), Motorola Droid Bionic XT875 (codename “targa”), Motorola Droid RAZR in both Verizon and international trim (codename “spyder” and “umts_spyder”, respectively) and the Samsung Galaxy Nexus for Sprint (codename “toroplus”).

It is recommended, as usual, to wipe data before switching from another custom distribution or AOKP distribution, the latter based on previous major Android iterations such as Ice Cream Sandwich or the first Jelly Bean version.

AOKP Jelly Bean MR1 Build 4 is available to download from AndroTransfer and Goo.im.

Troubled operating system webOS isn’t defunct yet. According to CNET, LG just acquired software, licenses and the team working on webOS from HP. LG plans to implement it in its smart TVs — not in its phones. In yet another surprising event, Palm’s OS will experience a third (or fourth) life.

While LG states that it will only use webOS for its smart TVs, it’s a good strategic move to obtain an independent mobile operating system. Samsung has become overwhelmingly dominant when it comes to the Android ecosystem. webOS could be a fallback OS.

The financial terms of the deal weren’t disclosed, but webOS now has a very small user base, making it less valuable. LG effectively acquired a dying yet beloved operating system.

Back in January 2009, Palm stole the show at CES by showcasing its brand new and surprisingly good-looking mobile operating system called webOS. But the Palm Pre and later models failed to catch the attention of potential buyers, leaving the company in a bad shape.

HP acquired Palm for $1.2 billion in July 2010. At the time, the company wanted to get into the tablet business, and use Palm’s operating system as a foundation.

But the TouchPad was a failure. HP experienced some leadership troubles on its own. Then-CEO Leo Apotheker announced that it would sell HP’s PC business — including its webOS assets — before reconsidering this move.

Instead of getting rid of webOS, HP just let it slowly die by open-sourcing it. With no official hardware to support it and no company standing behind it, the webOS community had no choice but to fall appart.

WebOS fans, your last hope now resides in LG’s TV land. While the app ecosystem is not as essential on a TV as on a smartphone, webOS remains very resource intensive and unknown to most developers. Most of the webOS team left HP long ago. But letting an operating system die three times is no fun when you can let it die four times.

Update: CNET just pulled its original story. Here’s a cached version while we await LG’s confirmation.

Samsung might have received a $1.05 billion bloody nose in its battle against Apple last year, but the South Korean giant is coming back fighting, by launching the next version of its flagship smartphone on US soil next month. The first such launch in three years.

Confirmed today at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and in a tweet, Samsung will be unveiling the Galaxy S IV in New York as part of the Samsung Unpacked event on March 14.

According to the South Korean Edaily news website, JK Shin Samsung Electronics’ mobile division chief said: “We introduced the Galaxy S III in London last year, and this time we changed the venue (to New York)… as we were bombarded with requests from U.S. mobile carriers to unveil the Galaxy S IV in the country”.

The new flagship device is widely expected to offer a higher-resolution display, Exynos 5 8-core processor, and much better front and rear cameras than its predecessor. One thing we do know for certain is it will be rocking the latest version of Jelly Bean 4.2.2.

Samsung Electronics unveiled the original Galaxy S at the CTIA mobile trade show in the US in 2010, but the S II and S III were launched in Spain (2011) and the UK (2012) respectively.

Are you excited by the announcement, and do you plan to buy the new device when it becomes available?

If you’re confident enough with hard drives to have tried editing them before at the sector level, then you’ll know that most disk editing software is, well, less than helpful. Open a drive and you’ll generally be presented with a basic hex view of your data, then left on your own to figure out what it all means. And okay, it’s true, sector editors are only for the most knowledgeable of PC users, but even experts could benefit from a little help, occasionally.

You don’t have to put up with this, though. Some editors do make a real effort to help you interpret what you’re seeing while browsing a drive. And you don’t always have to pay big money for them, either: Active@ Disk Editor can be yours for free.

On launch the program presents a clear dialog which prompts for the device, partition or logical drive you’d like to view. You can also open disk images in DIM, Microsoft’s VHD and VMWare’s VMDK formats. And whatever you select is then displayed in a familiar hex editor-type view: but that’s just the start.

There’s no need to start guessing where key drive structures are, for instance. If you want to look at the boot sector, directory entries, the MFT and various other NTFS/ FAT/ FAT32/ exFAT/ HFS/ ext2/ ext3 structures, all you have to do is choose the appropriate template from the list. Select “Master Boot Record”, say, and the hex editor view will jump to that point on the disk, while the Templates window interprets the data for you (you’ll see bootstrap code, details on individual partitions, the disk serial number, and more).

And this low-level knowledge of how your disk works can be very useful. Choose the “NTFS Boot Sector” template, for example, and Active@ Disk Editor doesn’t only display a table of its core values (“Signature”, “Bytes per sector”, “Sectors per cluster” and so on), but also shows the same values for the boot sector copy. If you spot a problem then you can edit these directly (so you’re working with decimal values rather than in the raw hex view), and that alone could be enough to get a drive working again.

Typically you’ll have a more complex problem to solve, though, perhaps interpreting some figures of your own — and Active@ Disk Editor can help here, too. Just browse to the sector you need, click at the relevant point, and check the Data Inspector view. This looks at the data you’ve selected, then interprets and displays it as a binary value, ANSI character, Unicode character, 16/ 32/ 64-bit value, even a time (DOS, Windows or Unix) — just pick the one you want.

If you’re looking for particular data but aren’t sure where it is (the contents of a lost file, for instance), then a Find option will help you locate them. You can search for a specific ANSI, hex or Unicode sequence, and there are even options to use regular expressions or wildcards.

Of course you can also edit the disk, too. A Navigate option helps you locate the sector you need; you’re able to edit individual bytes, copy and paste information, clear or fill selected blocks; and if things go wrong then Undo and Revert Changes options should help you to avoid disaster.

And perhaps most remarkably, all this comes in a free package with the absolute minimum of dependencies, which means it’s able to run on anything from Windows 98 to 8.

Active@ Disk Editor still needs to be used with extreme care, of course. As with any other low-level drive editing tool, a single mistake could very easily cause a major loss of data.

But if you know what you’re doing, give it a try: we found the program to be an excellent way to inspect and edit the contents of our drives.

Photo Credit: Balandina G/Shutterstock

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

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

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

Bear with me here.

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

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

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

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

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Nokia has just confirmed two new Lumia smartphones at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The entry-level Nokia Lumia 520 will be priced at $185 (before taxes) off contract, while the mid-range Lumia 720 will cost $338 (also before taxes).

Nokia now has five Windows Phone 8 devices, covering all price points and making it easier for would-be customers to find a model that suits their requirements and budget.

The Lumia 520 boasts a 4-inch display, at a resolution of 800 by 480, and is powered by a 1GHz dual-core Snapdragon processor. It comes with 512MB of RAM and 8GB of internal storage. A Micro SD card slot will allow owners to boost this by a further 64GB, plus users get the standard 7GB of free online SkyDrive storage. The 520 also sports a 5-megapixel rear camera capable of recording 720p HD video. The device comes in the usual range of bright colors – yellow, cyan, red, white and black.

The mid-range Lumia 720 has a 4.3-inch display at 800 by 480 with a ClearBlack filter offering better outdoors viewing. It has a dual-core 1GHz Snapdragon CPU, 512MB of RAM, 8GB of internal storage and a microSD card slot. The biggest difference between this model and the 520 is in the photography department. The rear 6.7-megapixel camera has a f1.9 Carl Zeiss lens designed to let in more light, while the front-facing camera has a 1.3-megapixel HD wide angle lens which will allow self-shooters to pack more friends into the shot.

Nokia is aiming the Lumia 720 at younger, trendier users and so includes a digital lens feature called Glam Me which can be used to whiten teeth, enlarge eyes, and banish skin imperfections.

The Lumia 520 will be available to purchase in the US, via T-Mobile, in the next few months. The Lumia 720 will initially be available through China Mobile in the Asia Pacific market. No word on when or if it will reach the US or Europe.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Sony Mobile Communications chief Kunimasa Suzuki took the stage to deliver something of a state of the mobile union address at MWC early this morning, and took a very brief detour to talk availability for one of Sony’s most promising products. As expected, there was no mention of any new hardware during Suzuki’s address (sorry Xperia SP hopefuls), but he did confirm that the company’s Xperia Tablet Z would begin to rollout globally starting in Q2 of this year.

In the United States, the 16GB model is slated to retail for $499, while a larger 32 GB model will sell for $599.

The Tablet Z, if you’ll recall, is an exceedingly trim Jelly Bean-powered tablet that was first announced for the Japanese market back in late January. Nestled inside the dustproof chassis are a 1.5GHz quad-core Qualcomm processor, 2GB of RAM, and 32 GBs of flash storage, as well as Wi-Fi, LTE, and NFC radios. It’s also one of the only Sony Android tablets in recent memory that doesn’t rely on peculiar (some would say gimmicky) design decisions to stand out from the pack — it’s a decidedly far cry from the downright weird style of the dual-screen Tablet P and the folded magazine aesthetic of the Tablet S.

Sony also provided an exceedingly brief glimpse at some of the services that will appear on its svelte tablet. There’s TV Sideview, a universal remote application that also provides guide information for local programming, and a handsome new gallery app allows users to view geotagged photos on a globe.

Devices like the Tablet Z and its smaller cousin the Xperia Z prompted some (including our own Matt Burns) to wonder if Sony had finally hit its mobile stride. That certainly seems to be the sentiment in Japan, at least for now — Suzuki also noted that the Xperia Z eventually became the top-selling smartphone in Japan (though he didn’t mention if the device managed to hold onto the top spot for any significant period of time). While 2012 wasn’t exactly one of Sony’s best years to date, Sony started to turn the tides at the end and that Suzuki seems sure the company’s mobile division will continue to pick up steam.

“I am confident that 2013 will be a breakthrough year for Sony in mobile,” Suzuki remarked.

Note: An earlier version of this post mistakenly referred to Sony Mobile CEO Kunimasa Suzuki as Kunihiro Suzuki — I’m a dope, mea culpa.

There’s glitter all over the carpet in the hallways at the Gaylord National Resort, a sprawling hotel that sits on the shores of the Potomac River just south of Washington, D.C. It’s definitely not from the thousands of energy geeks that are arriving at the hotel on Sunday night to kick off several days of discussions and meetings about next-generation energy technology for the ARPA-E Summit. It’s the aftermath from thousands of preteen girls, decked out in hotpants, ponytails and ribbons, that just spent two days cheering and dancing their way through a large cheer competition.

The two events seem about as different as when the Consumer Electronics Show used to coincide with Adultcon in Vegas. But the clean energy and energy efficiency industries could use some of the cheerleader’s glitter and cheer spirit right about now.

Following the close of a year which saw the politicization of clean energy technologies, the struggles of dozens of solar manufacturers and electric car companies, and a “cleantech cliff” that saw investments in cleantech startups drop by a third, the 2013 ARPA-E Summit will likely be a pretty sober affair.

As MIT Tech Review wrote recently, government energy R&D spending in 2013 is facing a fiscal cliff, and venture capitalists won’t likely flock back to pumping money into energy companies this year. Both of which mean funding for entrepreneurs, innovators and researchers that have bright ideas for things like next-generation batteries, low cost biofuels, or futuristic solar materials will be difficult to get this year. Or at least it’ll be a lot harder to find money for these technologies than it was a few years ago.

The silver lining of money being tight is that only the most promising technologies will get funding, and there will be less “dumb money,” so to speak. As a seatmate of mine on the flight over this morning put it: the state of clean financing is awful but it inevitably had to correct itself at some point.

Altaeros Energies High Altitude Wind Turbine shown off at ARPA-E 2012

But in the face of these more difficult times, another way to look at the ARPA-E program — which gives small grants to early stage projects and was modeled on the Defense Department’s DARPA program — is perhaps it could be the energy industry’s bit of glitter and cheer. It’s one of the few funding programs from the Department of Energy that has bipartisan support, will likely be able to maintain its current annual budget and is widely celebrated by entrepreneurs, politicians and academics alike.

The ARPA-E Summit itself draws some of the bigger names in technology and politics as speakers — this year New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. In previous years Bill Clinton, Bill Gates and Arnold Schwarzenegger have given rousing speeches.

ARPA-E 2013 will be one of the last places that we’ll be able to hear from soon-to-be-leaving DOE Secretary Steven Chu. Chu has been one of the biggest influences on the U.S. Department of Energy over the last several decades.

I’m personally looking forward to moderating a discussion between IDEO’s David Blakely and Otherlab’s Saul Griffith about the importance of storytelling and narrative for early stage energy technologies (we’ll be live streaming it here for free on Monday at 4:30 PM EST). Particularly in difficult times, creating compelling narratives for next-gen clean energy technologies that could be decades from commercialization will be crucial.

As the energy geeks wake up on Monday morning ready to talk about kilowatts and sunshots with their peers, the cheerleaders will have mostly gone home. But perhaps, in a strange way, they don’t have so little in common after all.

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

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

The promised land

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Will it work?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Qualcomm, the chip company that made its fortune in mobile connectivity had big visions beyond its CDMA and cellular radio heritage. It has entertained a focus on better displays, broadcast television and now, the internet of things. The chip firm has created an open source mesh networking platform called AllJoyn that connects nearby devices to each other, as opposed to connecting each and every device back to the Internet.

At the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona, Spain this week, Qualcomm plans to announce four new implementations of AllJoyn that will allow for seamless notifications, audio streaming from and to any device, onboarding devices onto the network and AllJoyn platform and exporting the control interfaces for devices to other platforms on the network. So when you enter your home in an AllJoyn world your smartphone could send the song you’re listening to over to your home stereo no matter who makes the handset and who makes the stereo (or speakers). Same thing would happen if you wanted to ship the music to your car.

AllJoyn and Qualcomm’s vision for the internet of things

AllJoyn is tough to explain, in part because most of us aren’t that familiar with mesh networking. We’re far more used to having our radios send data up to the cloud and then have that data combine with other services while in a server off in a distant data center. Some companies are proposing we move that connectivity closer to home in some kind of smart gateway device ( in that case your data is sent to a box in your home and then combined with other data to perform a service).

Qualcomm however, is thinking a bit differently. “I don’t need to control my light bulb from Tahiti,” says Rod Chandhok, president of Qualcomm’s Innovation Center. “When you have 1,500 connected devices in your house I don’t think you want all of them connected to the public internet. “

Instead Qualcomm has built a software overlay that can work on any processor and hopefully on any operating system. Right now it does this via an application, but Chandhok hopes that consumer electronics makers will integrate it into the firmware on their many devices in the future. He says Qualcomm already has customers, but he declined to name them. For consumers, the end result is that you can install applications on your smartphone that will work with AllJoyn compatible devices and control them from your handset.

The platform is nice, but the implementation will drive adoption.

Qualcomm has been working on the AllJoyn software development kit for a few years, and has released the basics. But today’s news tries to help speed adoption by offering not just the SDK and specs for the platform, but the implementations. It’s not enough to give someone a fishing rod, sometimes you need to teach her how to cast the line. With these implementations, especially the audio, which Qualcomm developed in conjunction with doubleTwist, it hopes to show developers and consumers how powerful the platform can be.

Chandhok expects that we will see more consumer devices hit the market at the end of the year that feature AllJoyn compatibility. When I asked him how it compared with other efforts to connect devices in the home, such as SmartThings‘ hub or Mobiplug’s gateway, he said that in many ways those companies are concerned with creating a way to get everything on the internet and then to control it. Qualcomm may work with those companies, and they can certainly incorporate AllJoyn, but again, he’s not convinced that every item needs to be online.

And if these new implementations work out and the big name customers Chandhok doesn’t reference start releasing products, he may be right. Most people don’t care if everything is online– they just want an experience and service that’s easy and provides more functionality without adding inconvenience. The next big question will be around the partners Qualcomm find to help contribute to AllJoyn, develop applications that work with it and embed AllJoyn compliant hardware and software into their devices.

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BTI Systems, a company that has been selling networking gear to telcos for more than a decade, has scored $10 million in third round funding, bring its total capital raised since 2011 to $33 million. The Series C funding was led by Bain Capital Ventures and included existing investors BDC, Covington Capital and GrowthWorks.

The company has been providing wide area networking optimization products for telecommunications companies, optical gear and variety of other products in its 13-year history, but in conjunction with its funding new it has launched a software-defined networking product designed to connect multiple data centers. In much the same vein of Google connecting its data centers using OpenFlow, or firms like NTT or Calligo connect their data centers using Nicira’s software, BTI hopes to also help network providers make multiple data centers look and behave more like one.

BTI is offering a chassis-based product (it’s a big box) that customers put in their data centers network and connect via fiber to other BTI boxes in other data centers. BTI expects to announce customers using the product in the second quarter of 2013. The idea behind layering a software defined network between data centers is that it gives operators granular control on how they can route traffic between data centers based on customers and their service level agreements, but it can also lower costs associated with networking.

The promise BTI offers is that operators might not have to over provision to the extent they do today, because they can better manage their traffic and charge for bandwidth based on need. If packets don’t need to travel during peaks times, then the operator has the ability now to use pricing or service level agreements to move a customer’s traffic to less congested period. To be clear, these customers are not consumers, but corporations that are buying bandwidth.

The vision here is for a telco-grade SDN offering for service providers and big content companies that own their own networks, but who don’t have the engineering talent or the interesting in building their own boxes and code to do this. Despite the excitement around SDN inside the data center, using some type of software defined networking between data centers is actually gaining adherents just as quickly — if not more quickly.

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• The promise of SDNs in the enterprise
• Cloud computing infrastructure: 2012 and beyond
• The promise of software-defined networking

“I’m proud of the fact that under my administration, oil production is higher than it has been in a decade or more. We have seen a doubling of fuel efficiency standards on cars over the next several years, so that is saving people money at the pump,” Obama said.

President Obama still doesn’t seem to get it. Yes, oil production is higher than it has been in a decade or more. But, that is not because of actions taken under the Obama Administration. Rather, it is because of state policies and regulations that have encouraged exploration and development on private and state lands, according to the Congressional Research Service. In fact, 96 percent of the increase in oil production over the past 5 years has been on private and state lands, where President Obama and his administration have no input. On federal and Indian lands, where federal policies and regulations are in force, it takes an extremely long lead time to produce energy, and the Obama administration has repeatedly used delaying tactics and moratoria that have reduced production. In fact, between fiscal years 2010 and 2011, oil production on federal and Indian lands declined by 13 percent.

President Obama also claims that a doubling of fuel efficiency standards over the next several years (actually, a dozen years, by 2025) will save people money at the pump. Mr. Obama must be oblivious to the fact that average gasoline prices have increased by 55 percent between 2009 and 2012, are currently rising, and are at the highest levels recorded for this time of year. This price increase has occurred during his administration.

Does President Obama believe that doubling fuel economy standards by 2025 will make the American public feel better about rising gasoline prices when they won’t be able to afford the new, more efficient cars that are mandated? Does he believe that American parents will feel okay transporting their children in cars of much less weight, which is the only way to achieve such standards? People are keeping their existing cars longer, leading to historic numbers of older cars on the road.  In 2011, for example, the average car on U.S. streets was 11 years old, up 12 percent from the previous 5 years.[i]  With a bad economy and rapidly rising auto prices in part due to government mandates such as fuel economy, people cannot afford new vehicles, particularly the higher-priced vehicles that stricter economy standards force into the market.

Studies have shown that the Obama fuel economy mandate will force about the 7 million drivers out of the market because the mandate increases the price of automobiles.[ii] Even though these people will not be able to afford a new more efficient car to take to the pump, the President will presumably state that they “saved money at the pump.”

Oil Production on Federal Lands

In February 2009, at the start of the Obama administration, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar began withdrawing tracts of public land that had already been approved for oil and gas leasing, even though most of the tracts had undergone a thorough, seven-year-long environmental review.[iii] Then, after the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the Obama administration put a six-month moratorium on both shallow and deep offshore drilling, even though the oil spill accident occurred in deep water and drilling in shallow water had spilled only 15 barrels in the previous 15 years. Although the administration ostensibly lifted the moratorium in October of 2010, drilling permit approvals did not take place, resulting in a so-called “permitorium”.  These delays led a Federal Court to hold the Administration in contempt for its actions of slow-walking permits.[iv]  Further, the Obama administration did not put in place President Bush’s offshore lease plan for fiscal years 2010 to 2015 that would have opened new areas to drilling, and waited until late 2011, to put forth its own offshore lease plan for the 2012 to 2017 period that reverted basically to the original areas that had been opened to offshore drilling.

Data from the Bureau of Land Management in the Department of Interior shows just how bad the leasing statistics are under President Obama’s administration.  According to a study by Nobel Royalties Inc., the number of acres leased on federal onshore lands in the lower 48 states in 2010 was at a 30 year low, with 38.9 million acres leased in 2010 compared to 126.6 million acres leased in 1984—a drop of 69 percent. That study also states that on federal lands, 91 percent of resources are either inaccessible or restricted due to government policies. If the federal government were to allow leasing to gradually trend up to normal levels, the government would receive $442 billion in royalties from federal onshore lands and $363 billion from federal offshore projects between 2013 and 2042, for a total of about $800 billion. Once drilling on federal lands is fully operational and production levels have peaked, however, annual royalty payments could reach $100 billion, putting federal royalty income at $1 trillion over 10 years.[v]

But limiting the leases available on federal lands is not the only destructive policy that the Obama administration has undertaken. The administration dramatically increased the time it takes to get a permit to drill to 307 days in 2012. That’s a 100 percent increase since 2005. By comparison, it takes the oil producing states less than a month to grant a permit to drill on private and state lands. North Dakota, for example, where the unemployment rate is around 3 percent and the state economy is growing at 7 percent annually, takes only 10 days to grant a permit. North Dakota now ranks second among the states in oil production, recently surpassing Alaska in output despite having one sixth the land mass and no offshore oil reserves.

Efficiency Standards for Automobiles

The Institute for Energy Research has already assessed the problems with President Obama’s corporate average fuel economy standards in a recent publication. Basically, there is a trade-off between fuel efficiency, horsepower, safety, and cost. The automobile manufacturers can only go so far in increasing fuel efficiency without reducing the weight of the vehicle, thereby affecting safety. Further, increased fuel economy comes with a cost, so there is a further trade-off between purchasing a new vehicle versus just spending more at the pump. With the economy contracting, it will be more difficult for a middle class family to afford buying the new, more fuel efficient car that President Obama is touting.

Conclusion

If Obama wants more federal revenue, he can get it without raising taxes by just relaxing the restrictions on drilling on federal lands both on and off shore. The new revenue from taxes and royalties would be large, jobs would be created, and the economy would grow rather than contract. The oil boom in North Dakota is an example of what the nation could achieve: 3 percent unemployment, 7 percent economic growth, if only he would embrace oil and gas drilling and innovation in this country.  While his rhetoric tries to take credit for growing production, his actions show another story entirely.