Euro Tech News

Cisco Unified Data Center

2012-01-27T20:06:00.002Z

Cisco have produced a very fluffy (or should that be 'cloudy') video about their unified data centre services.

You can watch the video here

Press TV license revoked

2012-01-20T18:19:00.000Z

Press TV who broadcast on Sky's platform have previously been fined £100,000 for transmitting an interview with Newsweek and Channel 4 journalist Maziar Bahari while in an Iranian prison while under duress.

Press TV are based in London, though they have stated that editorial control is actually from Press TV International (based in Tehran). Press TV were given time to remedy the situation (or correctly license Press TV International) but have not done so, thus Ofcom are revoking their license.

Press TV will be removed from the Sky platform by the end of Jan 20th 2012.

Press TV has also stated that is unwilling or unable to pay the fine of £100,000 and Ofcom will peruse this as a separate matter.

TI adds WiFi to embedded microcontroller

2012-01-19T17:18:00.001Z

Texas Instruments has added WiFi to its SimpleLink CC3000 wireless processor, using only 0.5% of normal resources it also only needs 6KB of Flash, 3KB of RAM.

This follows Redpine and STMicro who have also added WiFi to various micro controllers.

These enhancements are moving towards the 'internet of things' where every device is connected from your toaster/washing machine and TV's and tradition home automation units.

One major advantage is there is NO operating system on the chip so it's very efficient.

HomePlug Powerline Alliance release AV2 specification

2012-01-11T14:44:00.000Z

The Hompeplug Powerline Alliance have released the Homeplug AV2 specification allowing for HD video streams to be delivered across standard in home/premise mains wiring. The AV2 specification is backwards compatible with the existing Homeplug AV standard (also known as IEEE 1901).

The new standard was developed by the HomePlug AV Technical Working Group which is made up of representatives of Broadcom, devolo, France Telecom, Marvell, Qualcomm Atheros, Ralink, Sony, SPiDCOM Technologies and STMicroelectronics

The AV2 standard supports a Gigabit/s physical link and can support multiple input/output links between units.

The current AV500 standard supports 500Mb/s links and units are now generally available. Many manufacturers have moved to smaller chip fabrication processes (i.e. 45nm or smaller) and so the Powerline chip are smaller in size allowing smaller end-user products and also for the chips to be embedded in more devices such as consumer audio/video products.

O2 to WiFi London Olympics

2012-01-09T17:01:00.002Z

O2 has announced plans to put in place 13,000 WiFi hotspots across London and out to Stratford to cover the London Olympics in 2012.

The company is making deals with local councils to use street furniture (such as lamp posts) to provide the coverage. It's hoping to offer the largest free WiFi network in London, competing with other operators such as The Cloud (bought by Sky) and BT Openzone who operate their own network and have hotspots in every Starbucks store.

The network will require users to go to a landing page which will have localised advertising which O2 hope to recover costs through.

O2 will also use the network to off-load data traffic from their mobile network. Though WiFi can be used to cover large areas, it's not really designed for that purpose and can suffer from congestion when many WiFi networks co-exist.

Broadcom debuts 802.11ac Gigabit chips

2012-01-06T18:11:00.001Z

Broadcom has announced several chips based on the new 802.11ac specification which supports Gigabit over wireless.

The BCM4360 supports the PCIe interface and wireless speeds of 1.3Gb.s using 3 wireless streams and is suited for access points, routers and PCs.

The BCM4352 (PCIe) and BCM43526 (USB) support 867Mb/s using 2 streams and the BCM43516 (USB) supports 433Mb/s using a single stream. The USB chips are designed to go into mobile devices and things like connected TVs.

802.11ac uses the 5GHz band and 80GHz channels.

There are likely to be several other 802.11ac announcements at CES.

There's also bound to be lots of announcements for 802.11ad which uses the license exempt 60GHz band.

Full (Mind)speed ahead

2012-01-06T18:01:00.000Z

Mindspeed has acquired Picochip the Bath based company who produce SoC designs for 3G femtocells and LTE cells using software defined radios.

The deal is worth up to $76.8m ($27.8m in cash now with another $25m is the company meets various milestones by 2013). This valuation may seem low as the company has been the leader in 3G femtocell reference designs, but they are coming under heavy competition from big players such as Broadcom and Qualcomm.

All 150 employees should survive the transition to the new owners.

Ofcom make more spectrum license exempt

2011-12-28T21:36:00.000Z

Ofcom has announced plans to make spectrum license exempt in the 3400 to 3800 MHz band and the 2GHz band.

The 3400 - 3800 MHz band can be used for personal locator beacons on land, wireless road safety systems and wireless access terminals, while the 2GHz band is used for mobile satellite services.

Also terminals used for the 2012 London Games Tetra Network are also license exempt.

The Next Generation Secure Memory Initiative to secure mobile devices

2011-12-20T18:16:00.000Z

Panasonic, Samsung Electronics, SanDisk, Sony and Toshiba have teamed up to form the The Next Generation Secure Memory Initiative which will put DRM (Digital Rights Management) on to mobile devices and memory.

This should allow content providers to put their content on mobile devices securely, allowing Blu-ray HD films to be copied on to a mobile device and played.

The system uses public key infrastructure to ensure robust copy protection.

If they achieve their aims, then the technology should be available on Flash memory such as SD Cards and on Google's Android, connected TVs and Blu-ray players.

Ofcom mandates battery back-up for FTTP services

2011-12-20T13:28:00.000Z

Ofcom has published a statement mandating battery back-up for fibre provided broadband. The Communication Provider must provide at least 1 hour's battery back-up time.

When broadband is provided over copper (using standard ADSL/2/2+) or even when the service is FTTC (fibre-to-the-cabinet) where cabinet to the premises is over copper (using VDSL/2/2+) then the copper pair is powered from the cabinet and even if the premises suffers a power-cut, then line will still be powered and phone calls can still be made.

With FTTP (fibre-to-the-premises) then fibre goes all the way to the customer premise and there is now power. Telephony services are provided over the fibre, so if there's a power-cut to the premise both broadband and telephony services are lost. If the premise end of the fibre has equipment that is battery backed, then at least calls can be made.

Ofcom recognises that FTTP deployments at are an early stage in the UK and will monitor the situation and amend if necessary.

iTunes Match, great, but SLOW

2011-12-20T13:18:00.000Z

Apple seem to have sorted the initial problems with iTunes Match and it's now up and running, the service costs £21.99 per annum.

The first thing it does is scan your music collection to see what tracks are available in the iTunes Store, it then marks them and makes them available through iTunes.

Then comes the slow bit, any tracks it can't directly match get uploaded to iCloud and that takes a LONG time.

My music collection consists of around 11,000 tracks, of which around 8,000 were matched to iTunes Store tracks. That leaves just over 3,000 unmatched tracks which have to be uploaded - and iTunes seems to upload around 300 per day, so it's going to take a while (around 10 days of leaving the computer on and continuously uploading). Hopefully Apple will track users' uploaded tracks and if it spots identical tracks from other users will use those for matching purposes.

Apple's iTunes Match comes to UK (sort of)

2011-12-15T18:07:00.000Z

It's now possible to purchase Apple's iTunes Match in the UK (in iTunes, go to Store, then Account - which appears at the top right corner under 'Quick Links' - then there should be a setting for Match and then purchase the service for £21.99pa, then 'add this computer').

Unfortunately it seems very random as to whether all or any of it works (except for the actual purchase). Adding this computer sometimes is there and if clicked may re-appear after. If the actual Match tab appears in the left, it doesn't seem to do much (last night it just went to a Genius page and then disappeared again). There's obviously a few teething problems or it was just launched early (or even by mistake).

This is very untypical of Apple, usually when things are officially launched they're pretty polished, if services are made available early it's usually to the developer community who are much more forgiving of bugs and errors.

If this is the shape of things to come now that Steve Jobs has gone, it's a slippery slope.

Duedil raises second angel round

2011-12-15T17:51:00.000Z

Duedil, the company that offers free information about UK and Ireland companies and company directors has raised a second angel round from Jonty Hurwitz, the founding CTO of Wonga followed by Passion Capital and Federico Pirzio-Biroli.

Duedil is different from most other sites in that they link the information from the 7m original data points on companies and directors (so they have over 30bn data connections) so if you look at a company and list the directors, then you can click on any of the directors and see what other companies they are (or have been) associated with.

They also link to other data sources for information about County Court Injunctions, any legal actions etc, with more data sources being added all the time.

Hurwitz sees the vast potential for business growth in big data analytics and will bring his technical and strategic expertese to Duedil, which he hopes will develop into the premiere source of business information in the world.

Though currently all of Duedil's information is free, they must be developing paid for models or the company will haemorrhage cash as licensing the business information costs a lot of money. They must also be at risk from existing companies such as Credit Expert (Experian) who could build similar services on top of their existing data, though Duedil has developed an extremely nice UI which would take time to duplicate.

Maggies Hope Page is Million Dollar Homepage v2

2011-12-15T16:38:00.001Z

Alex Tew famous for the Million Dollar Homepage site, has now set-up another site Maggies Hope Page in order to raise funds to support his cousin Maggie and her family as she has cancer and they are faced with mounting medical bills.

People can buy 10 x 10 pixels for £5 which is suitable for a small icon/image, though of course larger blocks can be purchased for larger images.

Maggie was diagnosed in January 2009 with breast cancer which has now spread and she now has 25 tumors on her lungs, liver, spine, hips, ribs and brain. She has divested her life savings and remortgaged her house to pay for alternative remedies, but though knowing her husband David will have to raise Liam, Danny and Anne, David, Cian and Fintan by himself and under huge debt.

Anyone going to the site buying blocks of pixels will be helping the family.

New look GMail has chat and calls

2011-12-13T18:16:00.000Z

It seems that the new version of Google's GMail has re-instated free calling into the web based email service.

It has been available to US users since launch as part of Google Voice and appeared briefly in other markets, but now it's come back (at least in the UK version).

Your Google Talk contacts appear (if they're on-line) but there's now also a call icon when clicked brings up a popup with the ability to dial numbers.

If this stays, then there's a good chance their going to introduce Google Voice outside the US and can compete with Skype.

Cardmunch, probably the most useful iOS app in the world

2011-12-07T17:31:00.000Z

Cardmunch (now Cardmunch by LinkedIn) is an iPhone app (though it will work on an iPad or iPod Touch) is a business card reader that gets the details off the card and put them into your address book (and if wanted, request the user to connect on LinkedIn).

That doesn't sound very exciting, but what actually happens is that a picture of the card is sent to a real person (similar to Amazon's Mechanical Turk) and they type in the details they can read and at some point later the application notifies you that the card is ready.

This means that you get back the card data which tends to be pretty clean and accurate (without having all the graphics data there too).

Once in your address book, it's easy to search for new cards as they all have "scanned by Cardmunch ..." and any oddities can be easily fixed.

Once you use it, you'll never look back.

New start-up Quantenna gets Gigabit WiFi out

2011-11-16T19:26:00.001Z

WiFi has been around a while but there are always improvements being made. The last major release 802.11n support MIMO, faster transmission speeds and auto-channel selection.

A new standard 802.11ac is an improvement to WiFi operating in the 5GHz band (an improvement to the old 802.11a standard) supporting 80MHz channels (802.11a supports 10/20MHz channels) though it has not actually been ratified yet.

The leaders in the WiFi chip business are Qualcomm Atheros and Broadcom but a new start-up Quantenna with funding from Telefonica has released a new chipset QAC2300 which implements the draft 802.11ac standard. The greater channel size will allow for in-home streaming of things like HD video.

The other major new standard is 802.11ad which operates in the 60GHz band (which is also license exempt in the UK) and this will also allow for extremely high speed services, though the range is very limited as pretty much everything will stop a low power 60GHz signal (like glass and walls) and at higher power it's dangerous as it's ionising radiation which can cause damage to human tissue.

Moshi Monsters leaves the web and move on to the Nintendo DS

2011-11-12T17:17:00.000Z

Moshi Monsters the children's on-line social world that already has over 50m registered users (between 6 and 12) has now moved on to the Nintendo DS with the release of Moshling Zoo.

The game allows children to run the Moshling Zoo and they have to collect up to 52 different Moshlings (which are Moshi Monster pets) including some rare and even ultra-rare types.

The game is available now from on-line retailers for £29.99, and a limited edition is available from Game which includes three days membership to the on-line version of Moshi Monsters, 1,000 free Rox (the in-game currency of MoshiMonsters), Topps series 2 trading cards, an exclusive Moshi Monsters top trumps card and the exclusive Moshling.

Moshi Monsters comes out of Mind Candy the brainchild of Michael Acton Smith and will be followed by music videos (if they don't get sued again) and video series.

NVidia introduces Tegra3

2011-11-10T15:59:00.000Z

NVidia has starting showing off it's new Tegra3 ARM based system (code named Kal-El). It has 4 cores based on the Cortex-A9 architecture and a 12 core GForce graphics GPU which allows for hardware accelerated affects such as dynamic lighting, Flash Player 11, HTML5 and WebGL.

It can also output to HDMI and support NVidia's 3D Vision technology which converts OpenGL to stereo 3D for viewing on a 3D TV.

However the main advancement is that it offers 3 times the graphics performance while offering a 61% lower power consumption than the Tegra2. It achieves some of this by actually having 5 CPU cores (the 5th being a low power ARM variant) and only using the Cortex-A9 cores for intensive CPU applications, so when a system is just playing music or some other non-CPU intensive task the big cores are powered down. This is known as variable symmetric multiprocessing (vSMP) and is a technology patented by NVidia.

The Tegra3 will be used in a forthcoming tablet from ASUS known as the Asus EE Pad Transformer Prime.

Other ARM licensees such as Texas Instruments (TI) are already snapping at NVidia's heals with forthcoming high performance OMAP chips which will support technologies such as holographic displays, HD augmented reality, real time voice translation and natural speech interaction.

There are now more ARM processors than actual arms in the world now.

Ofcom fine Just4Us TV and Playboy TV

2011-11-09T17:18:00.000Z

Ofcom has fined Just4US TV Ltd (£60,000) and Playboy TV UK/Benelux Ltd (£40,000) for offensive advertising relating to premium rate call services enabling the viewer to chat to the female presenter. The fines are payable to HM Paymaster General.

The channels concerned are Red Light 1 (operated by Just4US TV) and Red light 2 and Red Light 3 (operated by Playboy TV). Just4US TV is a wholly owned subsidiary of Playboy TV.

The offences occurred in April 2011 and the finding highlighted a number of examples of broadcast material that was clearly inconsistent with the Chat Service Guidance2, such as images of the presenters:

* spitting on their bodies to emulate ejaculate;
* using a cupped hand and on one occasion a telephone to cover their genital area, resulting in clear pressure between their hand or telephone and the genital
area;
* pouring oil onto their buttocks and genital area; and
* wearing clothing that did not adequately cover their genital area (in one case outer labia were clearly visible).

These channels were all broadcast on Sky's open channels (marked Adult on the EPG).

Moonfruit makes on-line selling easy

2011-11-08T18:45:00.000Z

A couple of weeks ago, Moonfruit the website building service launched the ability to set-up an eCommerce enabled shop through their on-line tools.

The system called Shopbuilder allows a site owner to set-up an eCommerce enabled shop in 10 minutes. The back-end is provided by PayPal and there are tools to enable stock control and other features an on-line retailer requirers.

The system can also make the items available through Facebook and Twitter (with eBay coming soon).

Moonfruit currently host over 4m sites and these now all can be eCommerce enabled so anyone who may have thought about selling on-line can now do so very easily.

With the social network integration, this really does differentiate the service from other eCommerce solutions out there as it provides a one stop eCommerce solution. The site produced will even work with mobile browsers so giving access to the millions of users who now use the Internet through their mobile phones.

Sony Ericsson drops Ericsson for €1.05

2011-10-27T15:41:00.000Z

Sony Ericsson is departing ways with Ericsson and Ericsson is being paid €1.05bn for the privilege. Sony will incorporate the phone division into it's networking and connected devices devision and will retain IP rights.

The partnership was formed 10 years ago with Sony and Ericsson owning an equal 50% stake, both had declining phone divisions. In the 10 years the market has progressed to smartphones and Sony has incorporated technologies from other divisions into the phones themselves such as their Cybershot cameras and Playstation Portable.

Ericsson were a world leader in cellular radio systems, but much of the handset radio technology is now available from established chip vendors so Ericsson's value to SE is less.

Sony will now continue to drive the smartphone market but as part of Sony Corporation directly.

Microsoft completes acquisition of Skype

2011-10-14T16:39:00.000Z

Yesterday (13/10/11) Microsoft completed the acquisition of Skype which now can operate as a business devision of the Redmond Corporation.

The official Microsoft press release is here.

The sale went through for $8.5bn which is a considerable sum for a service which is basically free, though Skype is generating revenues.

Lady Gaga goes Goo Goo about a Moshi Cartoon

2011-10-14T16:29:00.002Z

Moshi Monsters the brain child of Michael Acton Smith and parent company Mind Candy has been slapped with an injunction by world famous pop star Lady Gaga to prevent them promoting or launching any music based on the fictional Moshi character Lady Goo Goo.

The single "The Moshi Dance" was due to be released on iTunes after the phenomenal success of the YouTube video which received over 1m millions views a month over the summer. This has also put a stop to the planned release of "Pepper Razzi"

Lady Gaga's lawyers said that children might be "confused" by the similarity of the characters, but even a 6 year old can differentiate between a real life person and a Moshi Monster cartoon character.

Michael Acton Smith commented “This court ruling is a huge disappointment. It’s pretty obvious that kids will be able to tell the difference between the two characters. The shame is that millions of kids fell in love with Lady Goo Goo’s debut single on YouTube and now won’t be able to enjoy her musical exploits. It was all done in the name of fun and we would have thought that Lady Gaga could have seen the humour behind this parody.”

This could have implications for tribute bands and other parody acts, though allegedly changes to the UK law may stop this kind of block happening in future.

In the meantime it's only upsetting who now can't get Lady Goo Goo's music legally (50m of them worldwide), though maybe it will please parents who now won't have to fork out buying the singles.

RIM plays a game of TAG

2011-10-11T16:35:00.000Z

RIM the company behind Blackerry has introduced Blackberry TAG an application for Blackberry v7 devices with NFC (near field communications) that allows Blackberry users to touch each other's phones together and they can transfer information (such as Blackberry messenger IDs) to each other.

Users can also share contact information, URLs, photos and other multimedia info, simply by touching phones.

Though a standalone application it will incorporated into the next version of Blackberry's v7 operating system (OS) and an API made available so other applications can use the technology. NFC is an important technology (though most see it's use in wallet type apps), though various iPhone and Android apps allow transferring info between devices using Bluetooth etc and these apps are popular.

SOme say it might be too little too late for RIM, but it should encourage more of the youth market where they are already popular.