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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.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• Takeaways from mobile’s second quarter
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• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro

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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“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.

When you’re permanently connected to the internet via one device or another, then checking something on Wikipeda is very easy: just browse to the site, enter the topic and you’ll be reading more within seconds.

Life isn’t so simple for everybody, though. If you don’t have a smartphone, perhaps can’t get a signal, or are in an area with unreliable broadband (or maybe none at all) then accessing the site will be much more of a challenge. Fortunately there are other options, and although it’s still only an alpha build, XOWA is already one of the best.

The Java-based program takes a little time to set up. After unzipping the download, it must download Simple Wikipedia (a subset of the full site, though with more than 90,000 pages), as well as ImageMagick and Inkscape if you want to display images. This could obviously be a problem if your internet access is slow, but XOWA does at least make the process simple: click a couple of links and the appropriate files are automatically downloaded and installed for you.

There was one small glitch here, as after installing the graphics components we just got an error message when trying to view any page. This wasn’t anything major, though, and after restarting XOWA worked just fine.

The core interface looks and feels just like the normal website. There’s the search page top right, the usual tabs, and simple navigation tools (bookmarks, your browsing history). Every page is rendered very accurately (you’ll forget you’re not in a browser), and you can even edit your local copy of the current page.

What’s more, if you really need more offline resources, then the program can link those in, too. So while editing a page in your offline Wikipedia, for instance, you could in theory look up the spelling of a word in your offline Wiktionary.

Of course none of this will help very much if you regularly use Wikipedia to provide more information on current events. The web version can be updated with the latest developments on some topic within minutes, but this offline subset will be out of date before you even download it. And so you have to think of XOWA as more like a print encyclopedia; it’s not going to cover what happened yesterday, but is still just fine for general reference purposes.

And of course there are a few issues. As you’re not working in a browser, for instance, XOWA provides a “forward” and “back” button of its own. But these are so small that it took us a while to even notice them. Hopefully clearer navigation is on the list of “things to do”.

Problems like this are to be expected for an alpha build, though, and elsewhere XOWA performs very well. If you need a portable and cross-platform mini-Wikipedia which you can use anywhere, then go grab a copy right away.

Photo Credit: Diego Cervo/Shutterstock

Final Book Now Available

The principal goals of the study were to articulate the scientific rationale and objectives of the field and then to take a long-term strategic view of U.S. nuclear science in the global context for setting future directions for the field. Nuclear Physics: Exploring the Heart of Matter provides a long-term assessment of an outlook for nuclear physics.

The first phase of the report articulates the scientific rationale and objectives of the field, while the second phase provides a global context for the field and its long-term priorities and proposes a framework for progress through 2020 and beyond. In the second phase of the study, also developing a framework for progress through 2020 and beyond, the committee carefully considered the balance between universities and government facilities in terms of research and workforce development and the role of international collaborations in leveraging future investments.

Nuclear physics today is a diverse field, encompassing research that spans dimensions from a tiny fraction of the volume of the individual particles (neutrons and protons) in the atomic nucleus to the enormous scales of astrophysical objects in the cosmos. Nuclear Physics: Exploring the Heart of Matter explains the research objectives, which include the desire not only to better understand the nature of matter interacting at the nuclear level, but also to describe the state of the universe that existed at the big bang. This report explains how the universe can now be studied in the most advanced colliding-beam accelerators, where strong forces are the dominant interactions, as well as the nature of neutrinos.

[Read the full report]

Topics: Math, Chemistry and Physics

Canadian venture capital firm Vanedge Capital led a US$5 million Series B financing of San Francisco-based Playnomics Inc., a provider of data science and predictive analytics for mobile, social and browser games. Joining in the round were existing investors FirstMark Capital and XSeed Capital. Tony Lam, principal of Vancouver-based Vanedge, has joined Playnomics’ Board of Directors.

PRESS RELEASE

PLAYNOMICS CLOSES $5M IN SERIES B FUNDING FOR PLATFORM EXPANSION

Vanedge Capital Makes Strategic Investment in Leading Data Science Company for Mobile, Social and Browser Games

SAN FRANCISCO – February 20, 2013 – Playnomics, the global leader in data science and predictive analytics for mobile, social and browser games, today announced a $5M Series B funding raised in a round led by Vanedge Capital and joined by existing investors FirstMark Capital and XSeed Capital. Founded by former Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: EA) veterans Paul Lee and Glenn Entis, Vanedge Capital is a venture capital fund focused on investments in interactive entertainment and digital media. With today’s announcement Tony Lam, Principal at Vanedge Capital, will also join the Playnomics board.

The current round will be leveraged for the company’s continued focus on games and gamification mechanics and further expansion of the existing PlayRM Platform, which already profiles a total of over 100 million unique players across dozens of leading online games and brands worldwide.

“Playnomics has always been focused on determining why and how audiences play, and enabling game developers and brands to measurably increase player retention, engagement and monetization using our PlayRM platform,” said Chethan Ramachandran,
CEO of Playnomics. “With this new round of funding, we’ll be able to further expand the features and capabilities of the platform to meet the growing needs of our partners worldwide. Developers can expect several new product releases this year that leverage our predictive scoring and segmentation engine.”

“As veterans in interactive entertainment and video game technology, we recognize that access to big data science, improved analytics and advanced marketing software is an absolute requirement for successful games. Playnomics has already made significant moves in this space, creating real value for their partners, and our fund was created to support companies like Playnomics as they move forward building out their vision,” said Lam.

Playnomics’ PlayRM Platform and PlayScience Engine currently supports game developers and consumer brands worldwide across over 100 games and applications, both web-based and mobile, scoring data from over 30 million monthly active players and processing over 5 billion in-game events. While the PlayScience Engine scores players across multiple facets, including predictive scores and personality scores, the PlayRM platform puts a comprehensive suite of tools at the developers’ fingertips. This includes the PlayRM™ Segmentation Engine, PlayRM™ Messaging Engine and PlayRM™ Player Marketplace. Developers can effectively segment, target, acquire and engage players based on key game behaviors, ultimately driving increased revenue and retention. The PlayRM Messaging Engine enables developers and publishers to communicate directly with individual users through personalized messages and cross-promotion, based on their gameplay behavior and optimized to encourage engagement, monetization and virality. As player activity and spending continues to grow in mobile, and user acquisition costs skyrocket upwards, the importance of re-engaging the right players rises as well. With today’s funding news, Playnomics plans to continue focus and growth of their platform in this area to meet market demand.

To learn more about Playnomics, visit www.playnomics.com.

About Playnomics
Founded in 2009, Playnomics is the global leader in quantifying play behavior. Comprised of entrepreneurs and industry experts who pioneered data mining in finance, information security and bioinformatics, Playnomics was the 2010 winner of the VentureBeat startup competition “Who’s Got Game”. In 2012, Playnomics launched the first-ever CRM platform for games called PlayRM™, and grew its predictive PlayScience Engine to score a total of over 100 million unique players across dozens of the leading online games and brands worldwide. San Francisco-based Playnomics is backed by leading venture investors, including FirstMark Capital, Vanedge Capital,
XSeed Capital, MetamorphicVentures, Accelerator Ventures, and TriplePoint Capital.

Media Contact
Salley Chan, Playnomics
[email protected]
415-322-9192

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post Vanedge Capital Leads $5M Financing of Playnomics appeared first on peHUB.

Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System (OMERS) saw its net assets under management rise above the C$60 billion mark in 2012, increasing C$5.7 billion year over year. The Canadian pension fund said it posted a 10% return on its total investments last year, based on “strong performance in its private market portfolio.” OMERS’ overall private market portfolio had a 13.8% investment return, led by returns of 19.2% from the internally-managed buyout fund OMERS Private Equity.

PRESS RELEASE

OMERS Net Assets Surpass $60 Billion in 2012 with 10% Investment Return

Strong cash generation and continuing AAA credit rating mark solid year

TORONTO (February 22, 2013) — OMERS, one of Canada’s largest pension plans, today announced its 2012 financial results. OMERS net assets grew to $60.8 billion, rising by $5.7 billion in 2012 and by over $17 billion since the 2008 global credit crisis. Now in its 50th year, OMERS is an active, diversified investor, pension innovator, and an engine of economic growth and employment in Ontario and Canada.

OMERS total Plan investment return of 10% was driven by strong performance in its private market portfolio and solid public market performance in line with expectations and current market conditions. “OMERS had a strong year in 2012. The $5.7 billion increase in our net assets demonstrates the strength and robustness of OMERS business model with the capacity to generate growing investment cash yields and more than ample liquidity to withstand market shocks under stressed financial conditions,” said Michael Nobrega, OMERS President and CEO.

OMERS private market portfolio had a 13.8% investment return – with returns of 19.2% (OMERS Private Equity), 16.9% (Oxford Properties), 12.7% (Borealis Infrastructure) and negative 10.1% (OMERS Strategic Investments). OMERS Strategic Investments, which represents less than two and a half per cent of OMERS net investments, has its principal assets in Alberta’s oil and gas sector. The year-end valuation of these assets was negatively impacted as oil and gas prices fell to their lowest levels in five years.

OMERS Capital Markets, which manages the public market portfolio including public equities, fixed income and debt investments, generated a 7.5% return.

Progress against Strategic Goals

In 2003 OMERS adopted its current strategic plan including an investment strategy designed to provide balance between public and private market assets and to generate long-term, stable cash flows while maintaining liquidity. The strategy has evolved to incorporate avenues for the growth of Plan assets and a “direct-drive” ownership model providing OMERS with greater control of its investments at a lower cost.

“As a pension plan we are focused on our ability to pay pensions to our members over the long term in spite of factors such as the increasing average age of Plan members, low interest rates and volatility in the public equity markets. Our strategy is continuing to evolve to provide us with a fortress-like balance sheet that enables the growth of our assets while maintaining the necessary liquidity to withstand market disruptions,” said Mr. Nobrega.

One of the key drivers of the strategic plan is OMERS asset mix. OMERS ended the year with 60% of its assets in the public markets and 40% in private market assets, compared with 82% public and 18% private before the new strategy was implemented nine years ago. Our long-term goal is to achieve a mix of approximately 53% public and 47% private market investments.

A second key driver is the strategic priority to directly own and actively manage investments rather than retaining external fund managers. OMERS ended the year with 88% of the portfolio now managed in-house, up from 74% five years ago. The long-term goal is to reach 95% of the portfolio managed internally.

Funding Deficit

OMERS has a strong and growing balance sheet, currently with more than $60 billion in net assets. In 2012, OMERS collected $3.2 billion in contributions and paid out $2.7 billion in benefits, clearly demonstrating its ability to meet its pension obligation in the short and medium term.

Annually the Plan makes a projection regarding its ability to pay pensions over the long-term. At the end of 2012, the total pension entitlements earned to date by all Plan members exceeded OMERS actuarial net assets by $10 billion, resulting in a funding deficit. This projected, long-term deficit is mainly the result of increasing liabilities and the impact of investment losses incurred as a result of the 2008 global financial crisis.

In 2010 OMERS implemented a plan aimed at eliminating the deficit over time through measures that include a contribution increase phased in over three years assuming a 6.5% net investment return on an annual basis.

“This deficit is based on a long-term projection going out several decades and in no way reflects our ability to pay pensions in the short term. Solid investment returns which have averaged 8.9% per year in the four years since the financial crisis, and 8.24% over the past 10 years, combined with contribution increases, are already having a positive impact on reducing the deficit. Sustained returns at this level could bring the Plan back to fully funded status earlier than anticipated,” said Patrick Crowley, OMERS Chief Financial Officer.

Awards

In 2012 OMERS marked its fifth time as one of Aon Hewitt’s 50 Best Employers in Canada, third year as Pension Fund of the Year: Canada (World Finance Magazine), and was named one of Canada’s Passion Capitalists.

OMERS 50th Anniversary

A critical component of Canada’s retirement system, the OMERS defined benefit plan was created to provide financial security to municipal workers in Ontario and their families when they retire. Before OMERS, many municipal employers across the province did not participate in a pension plan to support their employees’ retirement. By bringing municipalities and local boards together, OMERS brought strength in numbers through a stable pooled investment fund with secure benefits. Since the first plan members enrolled in 1963, OMERS has grown into one of the country’s largest pension plans. Today, as OMERS enters its 50th year, Plan membership is at a new high of 429,000. For the 124,000 current retired members and survivors, the average annual pension being paid is approximately $18,600.

 Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post OMERS Private Equity Drives Pension Fund’s Returns appeared first on peHUB.

The digital lighting industry is in a quandary. Prices for LED lights are falling quickly, making the technology more compelling to customers, particularly owners of office buildings and warehouses. But the price decline has come at the expense of manufacturers who have over built production capacity and now need to idle some of their equipment.

This imbalance of supply and demand is also happening at a time when market researchers are expecting growth for the LED market to slow in the next several years. Our new report on the LED lighting sector on GigaOm Pro (subscription required) focuses on the latest LED technology, new applications, and the role that LEDs are playing in the increasingly digitized home.

While LED lighting isn’t widely used in homes yet, the technology isn’t new. LEDs are commonly used for indicator and traffic lights. But improving the technology so that it can radiate the same intensity, warmth and even distribution as incumbent incandescent and fluorescent lighting continue to be a challenge.

Already, the making of the diodes themselves is cornered by rivals with large factories. Eleven companies control over 70 percent of the market for LEDs packaged to be turned into bulbs and fixtures. That makes it more difficult for startups to fight for market shares against the likes of Philips, Samsung, Cree and Osram Opto Semiconductors. Many of the large LED manufacturers also design and make their own LED bulbs and lighting systems.

Meanwhile, venture capitalists in recent years have shied away from investing in manufacturing technologies. Manufacturing technologies often take a lot longer to scale and more money than expected to reach the market. Even when they do, many forces — from strong competition to changes in public incentives that have driven clean tech’s growth — have gutted the ambitions of new entrants who thought their technology breakthroughs would naturally lead to high customer demand and profits.

What will be interesting to watch are new business models that go beyond just the sales of LEDs and their bulbs and fixtures. LEDs share a similar DNA as other semiconductor-based technologies, from sensors to wireless networking. Marrying lighting with these technologies can deliver uses in sectors from farming to location-based services. LED lighting, in effect, will serve multiple functions and occupy a spot in the widening web of Internet-dependent goods and services.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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• Tablet market to hit over 377 million units by 2016
• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro

A few days ago, in wake of the lively war of words between Elon Musk’s Tesla & The New York Times,  my colleague Mathew Ingram pointed out that thanks to the Internet and the social web, everyone from companies to governments are acting like media entities and spreading their messages, bypassing the messengers – aka the media outlets. Given that, one might ask: who needs traditional media then?

I tried to help answer that question in my post from last year: Amplification and the changing role of media. The gist of that post was that “as more sources of news start to go direct by posting their thoughts to their blogs, Twitter and Facebook pages, a journalist’s role becomes more about deciding what to amplify and what to ignore.”

…the rise of the social web, that has changed. Blogs, Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other such platforms have made it easy for news makers to go direct to their constituents. So what is the role of today’s media person? In addition to reporting news, I think picking things to amplify is also important. Back in the day, news people made a choice by deciding which stories to write. Today, we have to adopt a similar rigor about what we choose to share and amplify. In sharing (on Twitter or even re-blogging) we are sending the same message as doing an original news report.

The big media outlets still have one thing that they can leverage: attention. By leveraging that attention and highlighting things worth highlighting, they can continue to bring the news to their constituents and at the same time add veracity to it — and thereby add the kind of value that makes them worth keeping around.

Mozilla means serious business about Firefox OS, if today’s Mobile World Congress announcement is any indication. Timing couldn’t be more serious. Gartner says there is little room for a third smartphone platform; in fourth quarter, Android and iOS dominated with 90.1 percent share, based on actual sales. The race for third place is on, with BlackBerry and Windows Phone established, but weak, contenders.

Mozilla proposed Firefox OS nearly two years ago, when BlackBerry OS still had appreciable market share and smartphone growth was strong. But as the first Firefox OS devices come to market, much is changed. Mature markets already rapidly saturate, China is the largest for smartphones, feature phone share is expected to fall below 50 percent this year and Samsung has replaced Nokia as global handset leader. The best place for a newcomer, based on who will partner and where there is room to grow: Second-world and emerging markets — and that’s where Firefox OS is headed.

Alcatel One Touch, LG and ZTE are early hardware launch partners. Eighteen carriers are committed to offering Firefox OS smartphones: América Móvil, China Unicom, Deutsche Telekom, Etisalat, Hutchison Three Group, KDDI, KT, MegaFon, Qtel, SingTel, Smart, Sprint, Telecom Italia Group, Telefónica, Telenor, Telstra, TMN and VimpelCom.

América Móvil will bring Firefox OS phones to Mexico; Deutsche Telekom to Poland and other parts of Europe; Telefónica to Brazil, Colombia, Spain and Venezuela; and Telenor to Eastern Europe and other countries. Full list of launch destinations: Brazil, Colombia, Hungary, Mexico, Montenegro, Poland, Serbia, Spain and Venezuela. Most of the carriers expect rollouts to begin by mid-year and none are markets where smartphones yet have much traction.

This circumstance is crucial to future growth. Smartphones, unlike feature phones, bring platform commitment as users download and purchase apps and get add-ons specific to operating systems and devices. Firefox OS devices face heaviest headwinds in countries where smartphone adoption is greatest and supporting ecosystems with it.

In total, the world belongs to Android and iOS. Anshul Gupta, Gartner principal research analyst, says that “2013 will be the year of the rise of the third ecosystem”. Globally, with 3.5 percent and 3 percent sales market share, respectively, BlackBerry OS and Windows Phone are biggest contenders to be No. 3. But on the macro-level, particularly in countries where feature phones dominate, any platform conceptually can beat others — even those successful in markets like the United States or Western Europe.

From that perspective, Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs’ boast isn’t so outlandish as Android or iPhone supporters might think: “With the support of our vibrant community and dedicated partners, our goal is to level the playing field and usher in an explosion of content and services that will meet the diverse needs of the next two billion people online”.

Critics might look at the situation differently — that Mozilla can’t find partners for major markets and gets the dregs. Even if true, none of the first distribution wave is a country with high smartphone adoption, which again to emphasize is pure opportunity for Mozilla and carriers.

Hardware partners are an interesting lot. None are top-tier. While ZTE and LG rank fourth and fifth for global handset sales — with 3.4 percent and 3.2 percent market share in Q4, according to Gartner — they declined year over year. Third place Apple has greater share than both combined. Sixth-ranked Huawei will join the three this year. Alcatel One Touch is the other Firefox OS partner.

Samsung would be the feather in Mozilla’s cap — but accounting for 42.5 percent of Android sales in Q4, the South Korean electronics giant has little incentive to add a fourth smartphone operating system. Nokia is committed to Windows Phone and Apple will never do anything but iOS. Devices from three of the top-six is a good start, considering Mozilla builds everything new and comes to market late.

The challenge now: Getting devices to market and supporting ecosystem in place. BlackBerry 10 is out, and Windows Phone sales grew 124.2 percent year over year during fourth quarter, according to Gartner, arguably from a small base. So the race for third place is on.

At TED2012, DIY neuroscientist and TED Senior Fellow Greg Gage shocked the TED audience when he cut the leg off a live cockroach onstage to demonstrate his Spiker Box – a device that allows anyone to see and hear spikes in the neural activity of insects.

A year later, his company Backyard Brains is coming up with new science education products — like the MicroManipulator, which allows you to place electrodes on tiny things. These products are affordable enough to allow students of all ages to learn about and experiment with electrophysiology, an experience previously only accessible in professional labs.

Here at TED2013, he demonstrates the BYB SmartScope – affectionately known as the RoachScope. This sturdy, portable microscope, currently in beta, uses smartphones to view, snap and share magnified objects over Facebook, Twitter and email, and costs $80 – putting cutting-edge experimentation into the hands of students, teachers and the just plain curious.

Canadian buyout firm Onex Corp. has completed its sale of a 50 percent interest in RSI Home Products Inc. back to the Anaheim, California-based company. Proceeds from the transaction totaled US$323 million. Onex first invested in RSI in 2008. With the company buyback finalized, Onex announced it has received proceeds of US$471 million, including prior distributions, which results in a multiple of invested capital of approximately 1.5 times and an 11% rate of return.

PRESS RELEASE:

Onex Corporation (“Onex”) (TSX: OCX) and its affiliates (the “Onex Group”) today announced that they have completed the sale of their 50% interest in RSI Home Products (“RSI”) to the company for proceeds of $323 million.

The Onex Group made a $318 million preferred equity investment in RSI in October 2008. The Onex Group has received proceeds of $471 million, including prior distributions, which results in a multiple of invested capital of approximately 1.5 times and an 11% rate of return. Onex’ portion of the proceeds is $186 million, including the prior distributions.

About Onex
With offices in Toronto, New York and London, Onex is one of the oldest and most successful private equity firms. Onex acquires and builds high-quality businesses in partnership with talented management teams. The Company has approximately $15 billion of assets under management, including $5 billion of proprietary capital, in private equity, credit securities and real estate. Onex invests its proprietary capital directly and as a substantial limited partner in its Funds.

Onex’ businesses have assets of $43 billion, generate annual revenues of $37 billion and employ approximately 250,000 people worldwide. Onex shares trade on the Toronto Stock Exchange under the stock symbol OCX. For more information on Onex, visit its website at www.onex.com. The Company’s security filings can also be accessed at www.sedar.com.

This news release may contain forward-looking statements that are based on management’s current expectations and are subject to known and unknown uncertainties and risks, which could cause actual results to differ materially from those contemplated or implied by such forward-looking statements. Onex is under no obligation to update any forward-looking statements contained herein should material facts change due to new information, future events or otherwise.
For further information:
Emma Thompson
Vice President, Investor Relations
Tel: 416.362.7711

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock.

The post Onex Completes Sale of 50% Stake in RSI appeared first on peHUB.

Think quick: what was the best film of 2012? Amour, Argo, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Django Unchained, Les Miserables, Life of Pi, Lincoln, Silver Linings Playbook or Zero Dark Thirty? This question will be decided tonight at the 85th annual Academy Awards. As you prepare your Oscars ballot and debate whether Seth MacFarlane will make a great host (is it just coincidence that he made a movie called Ted this year?), here is a celebration of TED speakers who have won Oscars.

Al Gore warns on latest climate trends Al Gore, who has given three TED Talks in total, won Best Documentary for An Inconvenient Truth in 2006. Three years later, at TED2009, he showed the latest climate data, revealing that damage to the planet was accelerating more quickly than expected. He also offered a potential solution: clean coal.

Rob Legato: The art of creating awe Rob Legato has won multiple Oscars for Best Visual Effects — for Hugo, Titanic and Apollo 13. At TEDGlobal 2012, he gave the talk “The art of creating awe,” revealing snippets of how the memorable effects in each were created. He also shared his penchant for recreating moments that actually happened on film. (See Legato’s picks for the 5 movies that floored him visually.)

Andrew Stanton: The clues to a great story Director Andrew Stanton won Best Animated Feature for WALL-E and Finding Nemo. He also gave the talk “The clues to a great story” at TED2012. His bold idea: starting at the end and working back to the beginning.

James Cameron: Before Avatar … a curious boy James Cameron has been nominated for six Academy Awards and won three. Known for his ability to create engrossing worlds, in the talk “Before Avatar … a curious boy” at TED2010, Cameron shares why he has long been enthralled by the fantastic.

Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy: Inside a school for suicide bombers The 2012 documentary Saving Face follows a plastic surgeon as he journeys through Pakistan, performing reconstructive surgery for women who’ve been the victims of acid attacks. The powerful film won the Oscar for Best Documentary. At TED2010, director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy — a TED Senior Fellow — shared footage from another project, taking us “Inside a school for suicide bombers.”

Jane Fonda: Life's third act Jane Fonda won her first Oscar for Klute in 1971, and her second for Coming Home in 1978. At TEDxWomen 2011, the actress and exercise video enthusiast shared her thoughts on “Life’s third act.”

Jeff Skoll makes movies that matter At TED 2007, Jeff Skoll gave us the one rule he has for picking projects to produce: that they must be movies that matter. Skoll’s film company, Participant Media, has made five Oscar winners, including Syriana, An Inconvenient Truth and The Help.

Don Levy: A cinematic journey through visual effects Don Levy took us through a cinematic journey of visual effects with the help of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at TED2012. The head of marketing and public relations for Sony Pictures Imageworks, he led the awards campaigns for the studio’s first win, for the short The ChubbChubbs in 2003, through their win for Best Visual Effects for Spider-Man 2 in 2005.

Other TED connections worth noting:

• Producer Jake Eberts — known for taking on bold projects like Chariots of Fire, Gandhi, Dances with Wolves and March of the Penguins — has been involved with the making of movies that garnered 66 Oscar nominations, including nine Best Picture nominees. Eberts sadly passed away in 2012, but before his death, often showed film clips at TED — generally unposted because the footage was embargoed. Here, a recap of his talk from TED2009.
• Morgan Spurlock, who gave the talk “The greatest TED Talk ever sold” at TED2011, was nominated for his documentary Super-Size Me.
• Composer James Horner won two Oscars for his work in Titanic, including Best Original Song for “My Heart Will Go On.” Horner desconstructed a scene from the epic film at TED2005.
• Jeffrey Katzenberg, founder and CEO of DreamWorks Animation, spoke several times at TED in the early days. His company made Beauty and the Beast, the first animated film to be nominated for Best Picture, and won Best Animated Feature Film in 2001 for Shrek.
• Producer Lawrence Bender, whose films have gotten 29 Academy Award nominations in total, has also spoken briefly at a TED.
• Ben Affleck, who created a playlist of his favorite TED Talks, directed and starred in Argo — nominated for seven awards this year, including Best Picture and Adapted Screenplay.
• Longtime TED community member Philipp Engelhorn got a Best Picture nod this year for Beasts of the Southern Wild, which he executive produced.

At a NASCAR event on Saturday, debris created by a serious crash flew into the stands and injured a number of fans. As with many such events, a bystander caught the disaster on video and quickly uploaded it to YouTube, but within a matter minutes it was removed due to a copyright claim by NASCAR. It seemed like yet another case of a commercial entity taking advantage of copyright law to smother free speech — until Google reinstated the video and said NASCAR had overstepped its bounds. In this case at least, the search giant did the right thing.

The NASCAR crash followed much the same pattern so many news events do now, in the age of real-time and social media: moments after the crash occurred, there were multiple eyewitness photos and videos of the incident, including one particularly horrific one captured by university sophomore Tyler Anderson, who was sitting just to the left of the section that was hit by the debris — including a tire that flew off the race car in question. Soon, a link to the video on YouTube was racing through Twitter and other channels.

In this case, Google decided to over-rule NASCAR

Suddenly, however, the video was no longer available, and in its place was a standard YouTube message about the content being removed because of a copyright claim by NASCAR. This raised a host of questions for those who were trying to access it, including: How could the racing entity remove the video so quickly? Why didn’t YouTube protest that it should be protected by the principle of fair use, since it was a news event? And how could NASCAR claim that it had copyright over a video that was created by a fan?

When debris hits the crowd, NASCAR's precious video rights should be superseded by the right of the crowd to tell their story.

—
Cory Bergman (@corybe) February 23, 2013

The latter of those questions was answered a number of hours later, when YouTube reinstated the video and released a statement saying that partners such as NASCAR are only allowed to remove content that breaches their copyright, and the content in question didn’t pass that test (even though NASCAR asserts in the fine print when you buy a ticket that it owns everything fans produce while at an event). Said the YouTube statement:

“Our partners and users do not have the right to take down videos from YouTube unless they contain content which is copyright infringing, which is why we have reinstated the videos.”

The other two questions people had are even easier to answer. In a nutshell, Google provides its YouTube partners with an easy way to have content removed almost immediately: it’s a tool called Content ID, and it’s essentially a back-door to the YouTube content-management system. When a company like CNN or NBC or some other partner sees their TV shows or news clips being shared on YouTube without permission, they can submit a form and have it pulled down.

Copyright claims favor the owner, not the uploader

One of the main reasons why Google does this — and why it doesn’t bother (except in extreme cases) to protest or demand an explanation for takedown requests — is that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA only gives services like YouTube “safe harbor” from copyright-infringement charges so long as the company acts quickly when it receives a takedown notice. In effect, there is virtually no leeway for protests or attempts to get a provider to defend their demands.

Prime example of DMCA abuse (which i lectured on today) mobile.theverge.com/2013/2/23/4022…

—
Jillian C. York (@jilliancyork) February 24, 2013

As a number of observers — including Jillian York of the Electronic Frontier Foundation — noted during the NASCAR incident, this is just one of the many ways in which the DMCA actually fosters bad behavior, or at least behavior that seems bad if you believe in free speech and freedom of the press. The fact that Google acted quickly to put the content back up is admirable, but it shouldn’t have to do this, and there are no doubt many other important cases in which it hasn’t that don’t involve something as attention-getting as a race-car crash.

And as Jason Pontin of MIT’s Technology Review pointed out in a recent essay on free speech in a digital era, our speech is to a large degree controlled by private corporations like Google and Twitter and Apple, and in many ways we are still coming to grips with what that means for us as a society.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Petteri Sulonen

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HP surprised more than a few people earlier tonight when it officially revealed the Slate 7, a $169 Android tablet that’s set to ship in the U.S. for $169 in April. It struck me as a safe move for HP, especially after it whiffed so profoundly with its ill-fated TouchPad. After all, people are buying plenty of Nexus 7s, so clearly there must be a market for a cheap, small tablet.

I got the chance to muck around with the Slate 7 at Pepcom earlier tonight though, and to be quite honest, I’m not convinced HP has a winner on its hands.

One of the first things you’ll notice about the Slate 7 is its elongated 16:9 display, and the thick black bezel that runs around it. It’s actually rather reminiscent of Samsung’s 7-inch Galaxy Tab 2.0, another underwhelming Android tab that banked on its price tag to sell. The screen itself (running at 1024 x 600) was decent enough — it was generally very bright, but the colors displayed seemed dull and lifeless.

The Slate 7 seems to have been designed to be as inoffensive as possible. That’s not completely a bad thing — the stainless chassis and the soft-touch plastic that the Slate’s rear is swathed in are rather nice — but there are precious few other design niceties to be found here. Those looking for a little splash of color may be interested to know that a red version will also be available. The Slate 7 is also apparently loaded up with Beats Audio support, a trait it shares with its notebook cousins, but I couldn’t get a feel for it amid all of the noise of Pepcom.

As far as performance goes, what else is there to say? It works just about as well as you would expect a $169 tablet to: not that great. Swiping between home screens could be a little jerky (if it worked at all; quick swipes didn’t always get the job done), and there was a bit of delay as I went to fire up new apps — though some non-final software probably has something to do with that. The Slate 7 has a dual-core 1.6GHz processor and 1GB of RAM to work with, which is usually enough to tackle stock, unfettered Android 4.1 without too many hiccups, but I’m willing to chalk all this jerkiness up to a pre-production lack of polish for now.

Click to view slideshow.

While we’re talking about performance, HP’s booth representatives didn’t have many specifics on the dual-core processor, but a quick look at the settings revealed an option called “Rockchip system updates,” proving nicely that HP sourced the processor from China’s illustrious Fuzhou Rockchips Electronics company. Now I couldn’t care less who the chip came from if it does the job admirably, but the internals here don’t do much to wow. When asked about how HP was able to produce such an inexpensive tablet, HP’s pitchman pointed to economies of scale — order enough parts and the end product shouldn’t cost too much — but opting to go with a SoC from a largely unknown Chinese company probably didn’t hurt either.

What almost certainly will hurt HP, though, is the crowded playing field it’s diving into. There’s the Nexus 7 to compete with of course, but don’t forget devices like the Kindle Fire HD and the Nook HD. Each of them brings higher resolution displays into the mix, as well as tight access with each of their respective media environments for only $30 more out of pocket. That’s not to say that HP won’t work to solidify the ties between its new tablet and the rest of the HP ecosystem — the Slate 7 comes with the ability to wireless print to compatible HP printers.

For better or worse (my money’s on the latter), HP just doesn’t seem concerned with trying to differentiate the Slate 7 from any other Android tablet out there. To its credit, HP isn’t trying to position the Slate 7 as anything other than what it is: a very cheap mass-market play. I’m not convinced that this thing is going to be able to pull away from the pack just by undercutting the competition on price, but I could be wrong — the Slate 7 may be the right tablet with the right price tag at the right time.

The death knell for WebOS has sounded. HP promised a lot when purchasing the Palm mobile operating system back in 2010, only to abandon ship. The company is among Google’s newest and most-important partners. Earlier this month, HP unveiled its first Chromebook, which is followed by its first Android tablet, the Slate 7.

Despite the fact that Mobile World Congress does not technically start until tomorrow, the big announcements have already been rolling out from Barcelona, Spain. HP, not to be left out, unveiled its new seven-inch Android tablet, clearly designed to go head-to-head with Amazon Kindle Fire HD and Google Nexus 7.

The new device packs Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, meaning buyers get Google Now, but no Photosphere, which requires version 4.2 of the Android operating system. The Slate 7 also packs in a 3-megapixel rear camera, embedded Beats Audio, micro USB port, VGA front camera and a dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 at 1.6 GHz. The Slate 7 also features HP’s ePrint technology. There is nothing about storage capacity included in the announcement.

Alberto Torres, the HP senior vice president of Mobility Global Business Unit, says the Slate 7 is designed to “address the growing interest in tablets among consumers and businesses alike, the company will offer a range of form factors and leverage an array of operating systems”. HP also produces Windows 8 tablets. 

As for pricing and availability, the company announced that the Slate 7 will arrive in April and tempts buyers with a $169 price tag — a full $30 below that of the Amazon and Google competitors.

For now, HP teases potential customers with a product wesite that provides additional information. By the way, the website contradicts the press release by stating “available in May 2013”.

So, will this tempt you away from a different purchase?