Although it still has to be approved by a federal judge, Verizon’s $3.9 billion acquisition of 4G spectrum from various cable operators just cleared a big hurdle, getting the green light from the FCC.
Verizon stands to gain 20 MHz of Advanced Wireless Services (AWS) licenses from Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox Communications and Bright House. The wireless carrier will use the new spectrum to build out “a supplementary high-capacity LTE network parallel to its current near-nationwide 4G infrastructure,” explains GigaOM.
However, in order to get FCC approval, Verizon had to commit to selling a good portion of its new AWS licenses to T-Mobile as well as selling any unused 700 MHz spectrum.
The FCC tacked on two additional requirements before giving the deal its stamp of approval. “The big one is a requirement that Verizon open its LTE network to roaming partners, a key demand of rural operators. The second is that Verizon complete 70 percent of its network over the new bands. While billed as concession to the FCC, it seems more like a concession to Verizon,” the article states.
An added win for Verizon; “the approval implicitly gives Verizon and its new cable buddies permission to divide the wireline and wireless markets between them. The cable companies will resell Verizon’s mobile service, and Verizon can now sell cable broadband and TV service in any area where it doesn’t offer its FiOS fiber-to-the-home connections,” GigaOM reports.
This collaboration could potentially hurt competition, and without wireless pressure on cable providers, there could be less incentive to regularly improve the infrastructure.
Apple’s decisive victory over Samsung on Friday fortifies its current wireless dominance and could potentially make Google and others rethink future product plans.
“The nine jurors here also sent a signal that companies need to be much more careful in incorporating basic design elements in their electronic devices, particularly those affecting the way gadgets look and feel,” reports the Wall Street Journal.
The verdict arrives just weeks before Apple is expected to unveil its new iPhone. The company has earned $156 billion in iPhone-related revenue in the last five years.
Patent lawyers anticipate the decision will lead to an increase in patent suits and may open new ground for litigation. More companies may use Apple’s success in the case to defend the design and features of their own products.
WSJ explains: “More courtroom warfare could raise costs to makers of smartphones and tablets and reduce the number of gadgets on the market — increasing prices to consumers, some lawyers and market watchers say.”
Products with similar form factors and features may be in peril, notes the article: “Not only Samsung but Google — and other smartphone makers who use its Android mobile operating software — could decide, or be forced, to drop or modify features to avoid running afoul of patents.”
While some developers claim the verdict could lead to higher costs for Android software, other analysts suggest that Apple is not the only innovator out there.
“Apple’s patents will not be that hard to design around,” says Jorge Contreras, associate professor at American University Washington College of Law. “I don’t see this verdict as an Android killer.”
Google believes that most of the patents in the case do not relate to the core Android operating system. “The mobile industry is moving fast and all players, including newcomers, are building upon ideas that have been around for decades,” said a Google spokesperson.
Following 21 hours of deliberation, the jury has sided with Apple in one of the biggest patent lawsuits to date. Samsung now has to pay $1.05 billion in damages.
The jury upheld Apple’s utility and design patents; found willful infringement on 5 of 6 patents; and decided “Samsung ‘diluted’ Apple’s registered iPhone, iPhone 3 and ‘Combination iPhone’ trade dress on some products, not on others,” CNET reports. However, according to the jury, “Samsung did not violate antitrust law by monopolizing markets related to the UMTS standard.”
Apple originally sought $2.75 billion in damages. Samsung had asked for $421 million in its countersuit.
“Today’s verdict should not be viewed as a win for Apple, but as a loss for the American consumer,” said Samsung in a statement following the trial. “It will lead to fewer choices, less innovation, and potentially higher prices.”
From Apple’s statement: “The lawsuits between Apple and Samsung were about much more than patents or money. They were about values. At Apple, we value originality and innovation and pour our lives into making the best products on earth. We make these products to delight our customers, not for our competitors to flagrantly copy. We applaud the court for finding Samsung’s behavior willful and for sending a loud and clear message that stealing isn’t right.”
Wristwatches didn’t really catch on until after World War I when people began to ask if it made sense to carry their watch in their pocket. Decades later, people are again asking the same question after wristwatches were replaced by smartphones.
Apple, Nike, Sony and multiple start-ups are working to reinvent the wristwatch as an extension of the smartphone. These devices leverage the power of mobile devices to go beyond just telling time.
Sony’s Smartwatch, for example, can display emails and tweets. Nike’s FuelBand measures the amount of energy the wearer exerts in a day. Start-up Pebble has created a watch that can play music, display text, and show other information like weather.
But some have their doubts about the futuristic-looking devices. “I don’t know if the mass market wants a big display on their wrist if they have a display in their pocket,” suggests Jawbone CEO Hosain Rahman. “The wrist is used for fashion and expression. You can’t just make something functional, and it can’t just do fashion, either… If you’re going to do this well, you have to merge the two.”
Rahman also suggests consumers might purchase multiple wrist devices for various purposes, which would be appealing to manufacturers. “You don’t wear the same thing when you go running that you do when you’re going to dinner,” he says.
Game publisher Capcom has released details regarding its planned online service ResidentEvil.net, a companion to the “Resident Evil 6” game.
According to the Capcom video included in the post, the free service will allow players to compete in challenges, track stats and earn points, while interacting with social platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.
“The publisher will also launch a smartphone app for iOS, Android and Windows devices,” reports USA Today. “‘Resident Evil 6’ launches October 2 for PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.”
“Video game publishers and developers have been working for a while now to try and keep gamers playing their games long after their initial release,” notes WebProNews in a related article. “The downloadable content (DLC) that comes along with a major title release is almost expected at this point, and some companies have even successfully turned their DLC into a subscription service.”
“Whether this type of service will take off for a game that has no large-scale competitive multiplayer mode will be interesting to see,” suggests WebProNews. The article cites requirements of signing up for a ResidentEvil.Net account and having a PlayStation Network or Xbox LIVE account as potential hurdles. “If this is accurate, Capcom is snubbing PC gamers, who are exactly the type of gamers most likely to form niche communities around games they enjoy.”
Yves Guillemot, CEO of gaming company Ubisoft, says the free-to-play model of PC gaming allows the company to “get revenue from countries where we couldn’t previously — places where our products were played but not bought.”
According to Guillemot, F2P games help brands last longer and bring content over longer periods of time. He acknowledges that very few F2P consumers will actually pay, but the company fares worse with high piracy rates.
“On PC it’s only around five to seven percent of the players who pay for F2P, but normally on PC it’s only about five to seven percent who pay anyway, the rest is pirated,” Guillemot says. “It’s around a 93-95 percent piracy rate, so it ends up at about the same percentage.”
Ars Technica questions whether piracy rates are really that high, noting that pirates are actually a small percent of a potential audience. The article also adds that every pirated copy doesn’t necessarily equate to a lost sale (some pirates couldn’t pay for what they download).
“If you complain about the fact that 95 percent of the potential audience for your traditional game is being lost to piracy, you should be equally perturbed that 95 percent of your potential audience is playing your free-to-play game without ever becoming a paying customer,” Ars Technica argues. “Yet Guillemot seems to treat free-to-play freeloaders as a necessary cost of doing business while simultaneously treating pirating freeloaders as a scourge that is ruining the traditional PC gaming business.”
“Guillemot’s argument seems to reduce free-to-play gaming from an exciting new way to get players interested in a game to a new form of digital rights management, where the most interesting bits of a game are hidden behind an unpiratable paywall,” notes the article. “That’s the wrong way of looking at things.”
“As Stardock’s Brad Wardell has noted, the real threat to having a successful PC game is not piracy, but obscurity. Both piracy and legitimate free-to-play options can be seen as ways of avoiding that obscurity while making only marginal sacrifices to a game’s actual economic success.”
Apple was granted 29 new patents this week — among them are patents for its podcast subscription service and three iPod designs (iPod Classic and fourth and fifth generation iPod nano).
Apple’s podcast subscription service was added to its repertoire in 2005. The invention is titled “Techniques and systems for supporting podcasting,” which “pertains to improved podcasts and techniques that facilitate their use,” according to Patently Apple.
Those techniques include creating, publishing, hosting, accessing, subscribing, managing, transferring and/or playing podcasts.
According to the post: “Some are reporting that Apple’s patent win means that they now own the word ‘Podcasting.’ Our report doesn’t reflect that whatsoever. This isn’t a trademark win for Apple.”
“Apple credits Anne Jones, Thomas Dowdy, Jeffrey Robbin, Mike Wiese and Stephen Davis as the inventors of granted patent 8,245,924 which was originally filed in Q2 2009 and refilled as a continuation patent in Q3 2011,” writes Patently Apple.
With Connectify Dispatch, you can use any combination of “Wi-Fi, 3G/4G mobile broadband, or wired connections, and Dispatch intelligently balances all of your traffic for faster streaming, browsing, and BitTorrent downloads. In fact, the more networks you have, the faster you’ll go,” according to the Connectify blog.
Verizon recently lifted its ban on tethering applications for smartphones, allowing for Connectivity engineers to give it a try.
“But instead of just using the tethered phone to get on the Internet when Wi-Fi isn’t working, they decided to use it in addition to every other unsecured Wi-Fi network located around our office building,” explains Alex Gizis, Connectify founder and CEO.
The team simultaneously hooked up 7 USB Wi-Fi cards, a USB 3G modem, a 4G tethered smartphone and an Ethernet connection with “impressive” results.
Check out the 3-minute video that details how the team joined 10 “connections simultaneously, for one super-fast connection.”
Wireless researchers in Germany want to give first responders a “switch” to disable security mechanisms on private wireless routers. The project is aimed at bolstering public communications if they were to fail in an emergency.
“This would allow first responders to use all the routers within range to enhance the capabilities of the mesh networks that allow them to communicate with each other,” Ars Technica explains. “In a mesh network, each node or device can route traffic to the other devices on the network through a series of hops. Adding devices (in this case wireless routers) thus improves the network’s stability and performance.”
The technology would not be difficult to implement on current wireless routers, especially considering many home owners already have guest networks set up.
The research paper does not explicitly state the steps to creating this “emergency switch,” nor does it discuss how abuse of privacy will be prevented. Private wireless traffic would remain private “in theory,” Ars Technica writes, adding “we think this particular idea could raise more problems than it solves.”
“From a privacy standpoint, we think it should be voluntary on the part of users, if it is ever implemented at all,” the article states, noting that it’s useless for the government if not widely accepted. “Deploying the system widely might require intrusive legislation, and software upgrades by router manufacturers that forcibly take away users’ administrative control is something we’re not a fan of, either.”
The paper says many aspects of the proposal will still need to be researched, but it does show that using private routers would greatly improve network performance if emergency communications breakdown.
One reader who commented on the post suggests making the program opt-in with rewards like tax credits to incentivize adoption.
As businesses struggle to learn the most effective social media strategies, Business Insider takes a look at the most popular companies on Facebook today.
The list focuses on 20 companies that market products to consumers (it does not include all the entertainment brands, celebrities and companies such as YouTube that draw a high number of likes on the social network).
The data comes from Likester’s marketing platform called AdCenter.
“While many of the companies on the list are huge brands, there are some surprises,” notes the post. “Companies that are smaller and more niche have discovered that using Facebook effectively can make them hugely popular.”
Levi Strauss, for example, was the first major retailer to include the Facebook ‘Like’ feature on its commerce site. Nutella designed a recent campaign that linked its content with social messaging related to the Olympics.
The list includes the following companies (from 1-20; check out the post for details regarding their social strategies): Coca-Cola, Disney, Converse, Starbucks, Red Bull, Oreo, Skittles, McDonald’s, Pringles, Victoria’s Secret, Walmart, Monster Energy, Target, Ferrero Rocher, Nutella, Adidas, Disneyland, Zara, Levi’s and Burberry.
Jay Parikh, VP of engineering for Facebook, released numbers this week showing just how big Facebook’s data is and how it benefits the social network.
“[Facebook’s] system processes 2.5 billion pieces of content and 500+ terabytes of data each day,” notes TechCrunch. “It’s pulling in 2.7 billion Like actions and 300 million photos per day, and it scans roughly 105 terabytes of data each half hour.”
Parikh says all this information helps Facebook release new products, gauge user reactions and tweak designs.
“By looking at historical data, we can validate a model before putting it into production,” Parikh says, explaining that Facebook can assess impact without actually implementing changes. “We put data in a simulation, and can see ‘will this increase CTR by X?’”
The benefits of big data are also passed on to advertisers to show how successful ads are geographically and among various demographics.
All this data encourages questions of privacy, but TechCrunch reports there are many safeguards in place. “All data access is logged so Facebook can track which workers are looking at what,” the post explains. “Only those working on building products that require data access get it, and there’s an intensive training process around acceptable use.”
“And if an employee pries where they’re not supposed to, they’re fired. Parikh stated strongly ‘We have a zero-tolerance policy.'”
Google has created a new Infringement Finder feature within Google Patents to help patent owners and lawyers investigate cases of patent infringement.
Google indicates the feature is meant to aid in its internal attempts to ward off patent infringement. But the company has made the feature open to the public, suggesting Google’s explanation is little more than a way to defend itself against critics.
Users access the feature within Google Patents. After choosing a specific patent to explore, users click the “Find prior art” link and then look through the search results.
Google automatically sets an “end date” based on the date of the patent, and then researchers “only need to remember one of the simplest truisms of patent law: That which infringes if later anticipates if earlier,” notes Gametime IP. “Thus, by changing the ‘earlier’ (End date) to become ‘later’ (Start date), you can sift through a variety of sources that might indicate infringement.”
“Google’s motivation to create this new feature are not entirely clear, but they have provided what should be a useful advancement in patent analysis,” concludes the post. “By speeding up access to information that may lead to evidence of infringement, Google puts more power back into the hands of inventors and patent owners.”
Taggable video start-up wireWAX just got the Google stamp-of-approval to place its interactive videos on YouTube brand channels, where before videos files were only embeddable on third-party sites.
The company says getting approved was difficult — top YouTube brand users like Nike even put pressure on Google — but the partnership will greatly increase wireWAX’s exposure.
“Going beyond simple video ‘hotspots’ or annotations, wireWAX’s drag ‘n’ drop tool enables users to add full motion-trackable and clickable links around objects, such as faces, products or just about anything,” explains TechCrunch.
“The applications for such interactivity are almost infinite, but include monetizable uses such as ‘shoppable videos’, as created by the likes of fashion retailer Oki-ni. On that note, wireWAX operates a freemium model, charging for additional premium features, such as customizations, on a ‘pay for what you use’ basis.”
YouTube is enabling mobile publishing to provide skippable in-stream ads on mobile devices, which could make more videos available to smartphones and tablets.
“YouTube’s lack of mobile advertising has been one reason a small number of content suppliers bar their YouTube content from going out through YouTube’s mobile and tablet channels,” reports paidContent.
Before, YouTube only had mobile website banners, non-skippable 15-second pre-rolls and Promoted Video ads in mobile searches.
But the skippable ads won’t be coming to your iPhone just yet. “Don’t expect to find the ads inside YouTube’s current, aging iOS app, however. That was built by Apple. Google will build its own for iOS after Apple’s iOS 6 update rips out the app,” notes the post.
Wired has posted an interesting article this week on the Hulcher film camera and its unfortunate decline in a digital world.
“For more than five decades, the Charles A. Hulcher Co. filled an important niche in the camera world,” explains the article. “Their cameras, which shot up to 100 frames per second, were used to make photos of everything from Space Shuttle launches to Major League Baseball games.”
But today the company has only four employees. “Digital has pretty much killed film cameras,” says Richard Hill, a Hulcher employee since the 1950s.
The original Hulcher 70 was built in the 1950s so that NASA scientists could study rocket launches in slow motion. The camera was capable of shooting 50 fps on 70mm film. When Charles Hulcher’s cameras became popular for other applications, the company produced 35mm versions that eventually reached 100 fps.
“The cameras achieved this high speed by running 100 feet of film between two large spools like a movie camera,” reports Wired. “Unlike a movie camera, however, Hulcher ran the film horizontally instead of vertically, creating a larger image area and in turn a high-resolution negative.”
The U.S. Navy used Hulcher camera technology in submarine periscopes. The Royal Canadian Air Force used the cameras for aerial surveillance. Sports photographers were fans of the Hulcher cameras because they were affordable and could be outfitted with lenses from other companies.
“One of the most famous photographers to use the Hulcher was John Zimmerman, who worked for Sports Illustrated, and made several well-known shots with modified Hulcher cameras,” notes the post. “Instead of just allowing the camera to fire multiple shots on sequential frames of film, Zimmerman would often disable the film-advance mechanism, creating vivid multiple exposures that captured the graceful movement of various sports figures.”
Golf Digest photographer Dom Furore says he used his Hulcher camera up until four years ago when he finally made the switch to digital with a modified two-camera system using Casio EX-F1s. Sports Illustrated photographer Heinz Kluetmeier claims the Hulcher images are sharper than those created with digital alternatives. “I wish we had a better digital equivalent,” he says.
Charles Hulcher passed away in 1994, but his company remains in operation five days a week, building the occasional custom high-speed camera, performing repairs on older models and producing small parts in the machine shop for NASA and other customers. “We just do this because we love it,” Hill says. “We’re always here for our customers.”