New technology to boost telecom services business

Dubai: Providing managed telecommunications services to Middle East businesses is worth $2.5 billion, but that could double if operators invest in new equipment, according to an industry official.

So-called next-generation networks are based on internet protocol (IP) technology, and this capability will give business and consumer telecom customers a far wider range of services available to them, said Olivier Campenon, president of BT Europe, Middle East and Africa.

With next-generation networking, telecom providers will be able to enhance their service offering through easier bundling and delivery of voice, data and video service.

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Google to launch business software

Web-based package aims at Microsoft's, IBM's core business
By Robert Weisman, Globe Staff | February 22, 2007

Jumping into a new market, Google Inc. is unveiling a product today to compete with Microsoft Corp. and IBM Corp. in the multibillion-dollar business of providing e-mail, calendar, and other tools on corporate computer desktops.

The Web-based product, called Google Apps Premier Edition, also will include word processing and document sharing, instant messaging, and Internet voice capability. Google will offer it to large companies for $50 per employee, host the applications on its own servers, and provide a service guarantee for its customers.

If successful, Google's business software suite could expand the revenue base of the world's dominant Internet search company beyond search-related advertising, reshape the way businesses deploy their productivity and collaboration software, and pose a direct threat to Microsoft's largest profit center.

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Oracle moves a step closer to Fusion

The launch of Oracle E-Business Suite 12 last month is a major step towards Oracle's first fully standards-based, service oriented architecture (SOA) suite, Fusion Applications, due in 2008.

Fusion Applications is a collection of enterprise resource planning programs based on Oracle's core database management system that make extensive use of web services. It is separate from Oracle's various branded business applications, such as PeopleSoft Enterprise and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, although they will use a common applications platform called Oracle Fusion Middleware.

Courtesy - Computer weekly

Ten things you need to know about VoIP

Before rolling out voice over IP in a business, it pays to tap into the lessons others have learned.

By Network World.

Anybody working on a VoIP project should stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before to avoid their mistakes and glean tips that can make their own deployments go more smoothly. In the interest of promoting this knowledge sharing, here is a list of 10 tips you should follow if you want to roll out VoIP with as little pain as possible.

1. Buy Time - Get Buffer time in advance to meet the unexpected delay.
2. Get Everybody onboard - Give all employers a stake in the project.
3. Know what you have got.
4. Bandwidth Control.
5. Use the right CODEC.
6. Emergency ! Remember 911!
7. Make training simple
8. Gateways to savings. - Use Analog phones and IP convertors where ever possible.
9. The Soft touch
10. Remote Control - Encourage and Implement remote management.

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Sify Launches WiMAX Solution with Mobility

Sify Limited, a leader in consumer Internet and Enterprise Services in India with global delivery capabilities, launched a WiMAX solution with Mobility features, with the deployment of Proxim Wireless Corporation's advanced wireless product.

Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India, February 19, 2007 -- Sify Limited has chosen and deployed Proxim's Tsunami MP.11 WiMAX product line as the core communications platform for last mile access using the 5.8 GHz frequency band. Sify has deployed over 700 Tsunami MP.11 base stations and 3,500 subscriber units to provide Internet access, voice and video broadband services to enterprise, residential and cybercafé subscribers in over 200 cities throughout India.

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Telecom Operators re-evaluating their CDMA startegies

Telstra recently confirmed its plans to shut down its CDMA network in Australia, in favor of its new Next G W-CDMA based network. This is bad news for Telecom NZ customers as they will no longer be able to roam to Australia. (Unless they acquire dual mode CDMA/W-CDMA phones!)

This may not be the only bad news for Telecom however. It appears that Telstra is not alone in re-thinking its CDMA strategy. According to GigaOM, “CDMA is losing friends faster than me losing my pounds”. Some examples of this:

# Three carriers in China (Unicom), India (Reliance), and Brazil (Vivo) are re-evaluating their CDMA strategies
# Sprint announced last year that it will deploy mobile WiMAX as its 4G network instead of evolving its 3G CDMA network
# Europe has, and always will be exclusively GSM/W-CDMA based.

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Microsoft Unleashes Its Robots

By Michael Cohn

Microsoft released its Robotics Studio development software Wednesday, upping the ante in the coming robot wars, at least among inventors and manufacturers.
The Redmond software giant is aiming to create a common development environment that will allow developers to create robotic applications for different types of hardware more easily.
The software can be used by a variety of robot types, including surveillance robots that can defuse roadside bombs as well as robotic arms that can perform surgery (and maybe sign health insurance forms too).
The software is not just aimed at mad scientists. Among the companies that will use the technology are iRobot, creators of the Roomba vacuum cleaner.
“Microsoft will help us extend the reach of the iRobot Roomba Open Interface to a broader community of developers,” iRobot Chairperson Helen Greiner said in a statement.

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AT&T launches first U.S. Mobile WiMAX network

AT&T launches first U.S. Mobile WiMAX network
By Kevin Fitchard

AT&T said today it has been running an under-the-radar commercial Mobile WiMAX network in Pahrump, Nev., since this summer, using the technology to offer fixed broadband services in a market where it current does not offer DSL.

Soma Networks won the contract for a multi-base-station rollout in the town of 45,000 people outside of Las Vegas. While AT&T is using the technology in a fixed deployment, it is using Soma gear based on the IEEE 802.16e specification, which Soma plans to submit to the WiMAX Forum for certification in the 2.3 GHz Wireless Communication Services (WCS) band. Several other service providers have deployed fixed WiMAX networks, based on the 802.16d standard and proprietary broadband wireless networks, while several more have announced plans to trial or deploy Mobile WiMAX networks. AT&T, however, is the first carrier to have a commercial network using Mobile WiMAX technology in the U.S.

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PLAYSTATION®3 LAUNCHES NEXT GENERATION OF ENTERTAINMENT IN NORTH AMERICA

PLAYSTATION®3 LAUNCHES NEXT GENERATION OF ENTERTAINMENT IN NORTH AMERICA
High-Definition Gaming and Entertainment System Now Available; Fans Line Up for Blocks to Be Among First Owners

Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA) today announced the launch of the much-anticipated PLAYSTATION®3 (PS3™) computer entertainment system, the company’s groundbreaking next generation computer entertainment system, for sale immediately in North America. In addition to the PS3 hardware, a software line up of more than 20 first- and third-party titles will be available at retailers nationwide.

PS3 is available today at retailers nationwide in two configurations for consumers. One features a 20-GB hard disk drive (HDD) and carries a suggested retail price of $499, while the second features a 60-GB HDD and built in Wi-Fi adapter and multiple memory card slots for $599. At the heart of PS3 is the Cell Broadband Engine™, one of the most-advanced computer processors in the world, that enables massive floating point calculation, and Blu-ray Disc™ (BD) drive, providing a true High Definition (1080p)* next-generation gaming and movie experience in the home, as well as up to 50 GB of data capacity for video game developers to store content – five times the capacity of DVD.

Courtesy..

The Mobile Web Moves Forward

The Mobile Web Moves Forward
By David Garrett
November 17, 2006 8:19AM


High speed or not, and despite the emergence of all-you-can-eat wireless broadband services like 3 Group's, the mobile Web has yet to set U.S. users aflame -- even though Sprint, Verizon, Cingular, and others with huge investments in high-speed networks hope it will. According to Avi Greengart of Current Analysis, consumers' demands for cell phone features start with voice and proceed to SMS, then ringtones, then games, after which comes everything else.

The mobile Web is moving forward -- slowly. This week, 3 Group, a provider of mobile broadband in Europe, announced a new service, called the X-Series, that combines two new phones with all-you-can-eat mobile broadband in markets that have been dominated by pay-per-click or metered-download plans.
The company did not release the exact price of its new service, but plans to do so by year's end. 3's new plan also has some powerful partners -- among them Yahoo, eBay, Google, Skype, Orb, and Sling, which lets users of high-speed handsets download and watch TV they recorded at home.

The Skype partnership is one of 3's more intriguing moves, because it lets users make phone calls over their cell phone's Internet connection using VoIP technology, paying nothing for the call.

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Chinese operators may build hybrid 3G networks

Research firm warns against move to combine 3G technology with China's homegrown standard -Sumner Lemon, IDG News Service

Chinese telecommunication operators will likely build 3G (third-generation) mobile networks that combine one of the main 3G technologies with China's homegrown standard, a market research firm said Thursday, warning against the move.

"Full hybrid network establishment is not a viable model for network evolution," Norson (Hong Kong) Information Technology, said in a research note. "The most efficient way for operators to build nationwide 3G networks will be to choose one dominant standard and relegate any other standards to supporting roles."

Backed by the Chinese government, Chinese companies have invested heavily in recent years to develop TD-SCDMA (time division synchronous code division multiple access) as an alternative to the two 3G technologies widely deployed by operators around the world: W-CDMA (wideband CDMA) and CDMA2000 EV-DO (evolution data optimized).

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The Future of TV Will Be Personal

Personalisation and interactivity will be the key drivers of mobile TV according to a new report commissioned by Nokia and conducted by Dr Shani Orgad from the London School of Economics. The report examines the future impact of mobile TV on the broadcasting and advertising industries.

The report predicts that the introduction and adoption of mobile TV will ultimately give way to a more personal and private TV experience than that of traditional broadcast TV, with big implications for users, content providers and advertisers. Users will be able to receive content anytime, anywhere, choose what is most relevant to them, and even create and upload their own television content, while content providers and advertisers will be able to tailor their offerings more specifically to the user.

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Video pirates: Watch out for fingerprints

- John Blau,IDG News Service

New video fingerprinting technology from Koninklijke Philips Electronics could help stem the flood of movies and other video content being traded illegally on the Internet.

The technology is able to identify video segments - as short as 5 seconds - by comparing unique fingerprints, or bit strings, extracted from the video segments and comparing them with fingerprints in a special database, Ronald Maandonks, CEO of the Philips Content Identification unit, said Wednesday. "What we've developed is a very fast matching system," he said.

Interest in protecting video content has grown with the proliferation of broadband connections that allow users to download large data files - such as video clips - relatively easily, quickly and inexpensively over peer-to-peer networks.

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Sun's Niagara 2 doubles down with twice the threads

By Stephen Shankland, CNET News.com

Sun Microsystems' "Niagara 2" processor will be able to run 64 simultaneous instruction sequences, twice that of its predecessor, when it debuts in servers during the second half of 2007, a Sun engineer said on Tuesday.

The current UltraSparc T1 "Niagara"-based servers can run 32 threads -- eight processing cores that each can run four threads. Niagara 2 still has eight cores, but each can run eight threads, said Greg Grohoski, one of the chip's architects, speaking at the Hot Chips conference in Palo Alto, California.

"We received first silicon around the end of May, and we booted Solaris in five days. We should have systems to market in the second half of next year," Groholski said. Though he didn't release any performance statistics, he said Niagara 2 goals include more than doubling the processing throughput and more than doubling the throughput per watt consumed.

The first Niagara was an ambitious design that Sun used to try to restore customers' shaken faith in the company's chip engineering skills. And Sun has had some success, selling US$100 million worth of Niagara servers in the second quarter of 2006, only a few months after the radically different design was launched in late 2005.

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Ericsson Wins Billion Dollar Contract in India

Bharti Airtel has awarded Ericsson an estimated US$1 billion contract, including expansion and an upgrade of its GSM/GPRS network and managed services. The deal will enable Bharti Airtel to rapidly extend its GSM footprint in the country and increase its network capacity. The three-year services agreement will see Ericsson manage design, development and deployment of Bharti's network, including capacity and coverage, enabling the operator to expand in rural India and reach out to all towns and cities in 15 regions.

Ericsson will also upgrade the network with mobile softswitch (Media Gateway and MSC Servers), the solution that paves the way to an all-IP network. Bharti Airtel will be able to reduce the operational costs and introduce new services in a cost-efficient way.

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eBay Fees Push Merchants Away

eBayers are leaving the marketplace, citing fee hikes and sluggish sales.

Upset over recent fee hikes and slowing merchandise sales, hundreds of merchants say they plan to close their shops on eBay.

On her web site, eBay seller Melinda Burnett has tracked about 700 merchants who say they have closed, or intend to close, their virtual storefronts on the world’s largest auction site.

Analysts say the possible closures, which would represent a fraction of eBay’s 500,000 storefronts worldwide, were expected after the company on Monday raised the fees it charges merchants for listing items on its site. eBay now charges merchants $0.05 per item, up from $0.02, on items selling for less than $25. For items over $25, eBay is charging $0.10 per listing, compared with $0.02.

eBay also raised the commission it charges sellers for each item sold. The San Jose, California-based company now charges a 10 percent commission, up from 8 percent, on items that sold for $25 or less, and a 7 percent commission, up from 5 percent, on sales of up to $100. eBay, however, didn’t change the commission for items that sold for more than $100 on its site.

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Logitech Launches Revolution Mouse

By Tim Sprinkle

Don't call it a revolution, but Logitech today released a pair of new cordless, laser-guided mice that, the company claims, will redefine how users interact with their computers. The MX Revolution and the VX Revolution for notebooks are both designed to simplify navigation with a free-spinning alloy scroll wheel and built-in search software.

Priced at $99 ($79 for the VX), the Revolution mice are currently available in the U.S. and Europe and feature seven programmable buttons and a high-sensitivity laser for accurate pointing on smooth surfaces.

It all starts with the wheel, the MicroGear Precision Scroll Wheel to be exact. Unlike traditional scroll wheels, this alloy model can spin freely for up to seven seconds, a development that drastically improves scrolling efficiency in large documents. What that means is, you'll be able to literally roll through hundreds of pages or acres of photo space with a single flick of the finger

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MetaSwitch takes aim at cable industry

By Carol Wilson

Having firmly established its softswitch technology in the independent and competitive telephone markets, MetaSwitch is expanding its focus to the cable TV industry, announcing a new product platform designed to let cable companies provide business VoIP services.

The company’s new product -- cleverly called COMPETE! -- Cable Operator Multiservice Platform for Enhanced Telephony Evolution – is already in deployment at 10 cable operators, MetaSwitch announced today, including Clear Creek Telephone & TeleVision, Cunningham Communications, Penasco Valley Telecommunications and Vidia Communications. COMPETE provides hosted PBX, unified communications and integrate T-1 capabilities for cable companies that are now turning their attention to the business market.

The move into the cable industry was a natural one, said Andy Randall, vice president of marketing at MetaSwitch, especially since some of his company’s independent telcos also operate as cable companies. In addition, the cable industry’s growing interest in business revenues and the shift to an IP Multi-media Subsystems (ISM) approach by Cable Labs helped pave the way into this new market.

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Sprint picks WiMax for 4G mobile network

By Stephen Lawson, IDG News Service

The network will offer downstream speeds of between 2Mbps and 4Mbps to 100 million customers by next year

Sprint Nextel, not satisfied with just 3G (third-generation) mobile data, will roll out a faster 4G network using WiMax later this year.

The network, which will start to be rolled out by the fourth quarter and reach as many as 100 million people around the U.S. by the end of next year, will offer downstream speeds of 2Mbps to 4Mbps, Sprint said Tuesday. Combined with fast uplinks, WiMax will offer enough bandwidth for mobile videoconferencing, transfers of large enterprise files and other applications, executives said.

Partners Intel, Motorola, and Samsung Electronics plan to help by equipping notebook PCs and a variety of mobile devices to use the 4G network.

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Sony introduced Mylo (my life online)

Sony Meet Mylo

Sony introduced a new category of portable devices Tuesday with the Mylo, a personal communicator that plays music and supports instant messaging and VoIP communications via services such as Google Talk, eBay’s Skype, and Yahoo Messenger over a Wi-Fi network.

The device’s name, Mylo, stands for “my life online,” and the device came out of development work Sony did several years ago for its old line of Palm OS-based Clié PDAs. The device will be available in September.

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Open Source Telephony - Introduction of CCXML

Voice Browser Call Control: CCXML Version 1.0

This document describes CCXML, or the Call Control eXtensible Markup Language. CCXML is designed to provide telephony call control support for dialog systems, such as VoiceXML [VOICEXML]. While CCXML can be used with any dialog systems capable of handling media, CCXML has been designed to complement and integrate with a VoiceXML interpreter. Because of this there are many references to VoiceXML's capabilities and limitations. There are also details on how VoiceXML and CCXML can be integrated. However, it should be noted that the two languages are separate and are not REQUIRED in an implementation of either language. For example, CCXML could be integrated with a more traditional Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system or a 3GPP Media Resource Function (MRF), and VoiceXML or other dialog systems could be integrated with other call control systems.

This document describes CCXML, the Call Control eXtensible Markup Language. CCXML provides declarative markup to describe telephony call control. CCXML is a language that can be used with a dialog system such as VoiceXML [VOICEXML].

CCXML can provide a complete telephony service application, comprised of Web server CGI compliant application logic, one or more CCXML documents to declare and perform call control actions, and to control one or more dialog applications that perform user media interactions

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Profiting from five trends that are changing mobility

David Haskin

Casual observers understand that wireless and mobile technology is evolving rapidly. It's tougher, though, to understand how to benefit from these new trends in mobility.

"In five years, we'll see a very different landscape when it comes to mobile and wireless issues," said Derek Kerton, principal at The Kerton Group, a mobility consultancy. "It won't be a matter of whether things are coming soon but, rather, it'll be a matter of 'How do you like it?'"

1. Increasing competition among wireless service providers
Benefits: More choices, lower prices, more attractive service plans.
2. Data everywhere
Benefit: Real-time mobile business applications, more productivity.
3. Mobile voice over IP
Benefit: Expands mobile phone coverage, which increases productivity and potentially lowers costs.
4. Fixed-mobile convergence
Benefit: Consolidation of fixed and wireless lines, lower cost, easier administration.
5. Personal hardware and software in the office
Benefit: Early trend-spotting, inexpensive field testing.

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