That future likely won’t look at all like RapidShare’s past: The company used to run the world’s most popular one-click file hoster, and was frequented by millions of file sharers looking for safer alternatives when music labels and others started to go after P2P users. However, Rapidshare quickly found itself in court, and fought long legal battles with rights holders in Germany and elsewhere.

The company tried to appease rights holders by putting restrictions on some aspects of its service; RapidShare was one of the first companies to get rid of its rewards program, which would compensate uploaders with especially popular files. It also pressured users to get registered accounts, and finally introduced bandwidth limits in late 2012, restricting users to 30 GB of bandwidth per day – not enough for people who were using the service to offer movies and other copyrighted files for download.

Rapidshare had hoped that all of these measures would get the company some love from rights holders, as it was looking to offer video games and eventually also movies through a paid download store. The idea was to redirect downloaders looking for free, unlicensed copies, and swerve up legitimate content instead. However, Holllywood apparently didn’t play ball, and RapidShare nixed its plan for paid downloads at the end of 2011.

The company is now looking to get a stronger foothold in the B2B cloud storage market, and sell personal file storage and backup solutions to consumers. However, the mass layoffs weren’t the first sign that these plans may not be going as expected: Sidler, who joined the company just two weeks ago, is RapidShare’s fourth CEO since 2010.

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Well, a month ago the creator, Berg London, pivoted from its original incarnation as a design house to become a product-focused firm, looking to develop devices to run on its Berg Cloud platform and inviting other developers to do the same. And now the company has stepped up that latter ambition by teaming up with the Benetton Group’s Fabrica communication research center to launch Sandbox, a new R&D facility for developing connected products and services.

Not many R&D facilities run out of a 17th-century Italian villa, but Sandbox will. According to a statement, the facilities in Treviso will be used to prototype “connected objects, spaces and experiences” – just the sort of language you’d expect to hear from such design-centric companies.

Here’s how Fabrica CEO Dan Hill described the Sandbox mission:

“Sandbox is a unique opportunity for Fabrica’s researchers to imagine and prototype how these new connected objects and spaces will begin to radically change the way we live, work, play, organise and communicate. Going beyond the hype around ‘smart cities’ and Internet of Things, we are layering these technologies over our wonderful building to create a unique, open demonstrator – to help both us and our clients understand what it truly means to live and work with these exciting possibilities.”

I’m not sure centuries-old villas restored and expanded by star architects (Tadao Ando, since you ask) are the best representations of normal people’s living or working environments, but it sure does look like a nice place to do R&D:

Berg and Benetton are just the founding partners: more will be added in the summer, they say. Everything that comes out of this luxurious collaboration space will use Berg Cloud, however.

There are quite a few of these platforms gearing up at the moment, all of which aim to make it easier for people to create new types of connected, everyday devices. One of the biggest looks to be LogMeIn’s Xively platform, which counts the muscular ARM as a partner as of earlier this week, but there are other smaller efforts also underway, such as those from Carriots and Electric Imp. This is a very new field, though, so there’s every chance that different internet-of-things platforms will attract different types of developers.

I think it’s fair to say the more design-minded among those developers now know where to look as they prepare to invent the connected future.

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This is a big win for Spain-based Telefónica, which is trying to get as many partners as possible to plug into its BlueVia billing API. It’s previously managed to get Google, Facebook, Microsoft and BlackBerry to agree to play along, but Samsung is the first major phone manufacturer to sign up. It also happens to be the world’s top phone manufacturer, having shipped 70 million smartphones in the first quarter of this year.

Carrier billing makes it easier to sell smartphones to people, particularly in emerging markets, who lack a bank card. Telefónica has 315 million mobile customers around the world, and is particularly strong in Latin America. The fact that Google Play is already plugged into Telefónica’s billing API means that, without this deal, Samsung was risking its cardless Android customers finding it easier to buy through Google’s storefront than Samsung’s.

As Lee Epting, vice president of Samsung’s Media Solutions Centre Europe, said in a statement:

“Samsung is committed to ensuring that our customers have choice and convenience when purchasing content on our devices. Our partnership with Telefónica Digital allows us to deliver yet another easy and convenient purchasing experience to our Samsung Hub and Samsung Apps customers.”

The “direct-to-bill” option will roll out first to Telefónica’s O2 business in Germany, during the coming months, then to its other operating businesses in a phased deployment.

We’re going to be seeing more of these carrier billing arrangements in the future, and that’s a good thing for all concerned. Not only does it mean more apps and content will be sold, benefiting their producers, but it also means the telcos themselves aren’t shut out of the value chain.

And, if the carriers manage to be involved beyond the provision of basic data services, it may stop them complaining about returns on their network investments and trying to do heinous, net-neutrality-shredding things like charging content providers for their traffic. Everyone’s a winner.

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It remains to be seen whether Google really manages to pull this off in an uncluttered way, particularly on smartphones, but the changes do look promising. However, Google’s mobile maps do present one problem, particularly for those travelling in foreign climes, and that doesn’t look set to change anytime soon: they only offer limited offline functionality. Maps for specific places can be easily pre-cached for offline use, but you won’t get search or routing functionality without a data connection.

Enter Skobbler with its new Android app, GPS Navigation & Maps. A couple of weeks ago, the Berlin-based startup heavily revamped its iOS ForeverMap app to bring it in line with the more advanced Android version of the same, and now it’s moved the Android app on significantly – so significantly that it’s even renamed it.

All in one

To be precise, Skobbler’s new Android app combines two previous apps, one of which was for maps (ForeverMap 2, whose users will get this upgrade for free) and the other (Skobbler Navigation, shut down a year back) for turn-by-turn navigation. The company claims, rightly I believe, that the result is the only Android app to combine both these functionalities for both online and offline use. What’s more, open-stuff fans can revel in the fact that GPS Navigation & Maps is based on the crowdsourced and highly accurate OpenStreetMap project.

The fact that the app is priced at just $1 shouldn’t hurt either, although buyers should be aware that this comes with only one free downloadable country for offline use. Beyond that, cities will cost $0.99, states $1.11, countries $2.22, continents $4.44 and the whole world $7.77 – not only is this way cheaper than the likes of TomTom Navigation or CoPilot Live, but it also provides the opportunity to download specific areas rather than entire countries or continents: a useful option if you’re concerned about storage.

A separate free version gives you full online maps for the world, along with a 14-day trial of the turn-by-turn, voice-aided navigation functionality.

Skobbler’s iOS maps app allows you to download any country for offline use for free, but turn-by-turn functionality comes in a separate app on that platform. Like that app, though, GPS Navigation & Maps acts as a showcase for Skobbler’s zippy NGx map engine – the company is keen on selling its technology to partners, particularly those in the automotive industry.

Anti-Google opportunity?

Skobbler’s app has clear appeal for those travelling abroad – data roaming charges are still eye-bleedingly high in most cases – but what about customers who are just looking to use it locally?

There, the company may find a willing audience in the shape of the anti-Google resistance. One peculiarity of Android is that, being Linux-based and ubiquitous, it’s the platform of choice for the open-source crowd while also providing a growing privacy threat, of the kind that horrifies the same people.

The mapping updates that Google announced on Wednesday are clearly designed to make Google Maps more of a personalized interface for everyday movements. This should manifest itself in a particularly tightly integrated way on Android, as the lines blur between Maps and Now and everything else Google is baking into the same pie. A lot of people won’t like that.

It’s unlikely that anyone will completely replace Google Maps for Android with a service such as Skobbler’s, as Google’s in-house location infrastructure is probably too baked-in these days to avoid. But, in terms of consciously firing up a mapping app to negotiate the world around them, some people may find value in choosing a non-Google option, so that their often highly personal location searches don’t get fed into the Great Google Data Stew. For those people, GPS Navigation & Maps could provide a tantalizing alternative.

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A Berlin startup called Versus IO is trying to apply natural language algorithms in its product comparison service, and it’s just closed a $2.8 million Series A round to do so. The round was led by Earlybird Venture Capital and also includes Dave McClure, who previously invested $100,000, and angels Lars Dittrich and Dario Suter.

Right now Versus IO offers a relatively limited set of comparison types – it started with mobile phones only, and is slowly branching out into other types – but the company has great ambitions. As founder Ramin Far pointed out to me, comparisons are a regular feature of life:

“The market size is so huge. Whether you’re deciding which phone to buy or which city to move to, we compare all the time because we can reduce complexity. We started from this point, saying we just present the data, and that’s why we think the product is so successful. We will try to use the system everywhere.”

Of course, Versus IO isn’t the first outfit to go for data-driven comparisons: the big rival is FindTheBest, set up a few years back by DoubleClick founder Kevin O’Connor. However, while FindTheBest shows an admirable amount of data about each product, it’s still up to the user to interpret what he or she is shown. And, at least in my opinion, the range of data points on offer can be quite overwhelming as they are presented.

Where Versus IO has the edge here is in the simplicity of its design, but also the natural way in which results are presented. If, for example, I compare the Samsung Galaxy S4 with the iPhone 5, Versus IO spells out what each of the comparison points means in a qualitative as well as quantitative fashion.

Why not compare apples with oranges?

Looking at the data point of maximum exposure length on the smartphone’s camera, the service tells me that the S4 offers “definitely longer exposure” then explains what exposure means and why a longer exposure can be beneficial for night-time shooting. It also tells me that there are “a tad more apps available” for the S4 than the iPhone 5 – I’m not sure that’s true, but it does demonstrate the sort of presentation we’re talking about here.

What’s particularly nifty about Versus IO, and what makes its future so intriguing, is that you can compare items that are not like-for-like. How about comparing the iPhone 5 with a Canon camera, for example? It’s more useful than it may seem at first – many people will want to know if it’s worth buying a point-and-shoot when the camera in their handset is good enough for many circumstances – and it also demonstrates the generic nature of Versus IO’s data model.

The next step, according to Far, is for Versus IO to start being able to interpret and structure user-generated sentiment. It’s a breakthrough that’s “coming very soon”, he promised:

“The crowd has more wisdom than I. Let’s say tomorrow we’re comparing universities or health insurances. So many people know much more than me, but if I ask somebody to tell me what the best health insurance in the UK is, it wouldn’t work. If we look to comments, there’s a lot of helpful input but it’s not structured enough.

“This means we have to find a way to structure this content from the user… but in the beginning you need a data model which is highly generic. We don’t have databases or tables for phones or cameras – this data model is so highly generic, nobody has it like this.”

Versus IO’s traffic is apparently growing by, on average, 35 percent a month, and Far says it’s currently seeing 2.2 million monthly uniques.

How quickly it grows in future will no doubt have a lot to do with its expansion into other item categories, and also whether or not people prefer Versus IO’s approach to that of far more established rivals such as FindTheBest. It should be noted that FindTheBest raised an $11 million Series B round a couple months back, and clearly isn’t sitting still.

That said, Versus IO certainly promises a lot and its user experience is impressively clean yet informative. It’s very much worth keeping an eye on.

As for me, a Capetonian by birth who is now living in Berlin, I’m going to sit back and contemplate Versus IO’s comparison of the two cities. Did you know, Cape Town apparently has “appreciably lower” sales tax than the German capital?

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The feature can already be seen in ComodIT’s own application store and on the website of lifestreaming platform Storytlr, but is now available for anyone to use. In effect, it makes the installation of server-based apps a lot more like that of mobile apps – an almost one-click experience that even allows users to “share” the apps in question on Facebook and Twitter.

“You can embed the application – just copy and paste [a few lines of Javascript] and put it on your website. You add the direct install blue button and you allow anyone to install that application directly from your website,” ComodIT CEO Daniel Bartz told me.

Bartz suggested this approach would overcome the traditional open-source server software installation experience, which sometimes involves multi-page tutorials. The test-drive aspect is pretty neat too: when that option is chosen, ComodIT basically installs and runs the app for a free 100 minutes in an Amazon EC2 micro instance.

It makes marketing a bit easier for developers and of course it steers people towards ComodIT’s own distribution platform and wider services. As Bartz explained:

“When you click ‘direct install’, in fact you connect to ComodIT and you create a server on which you will install an OS and all the things that have to be done for installing applications. We’re automating the manual procedure – we do this like we do for any other pieces of ComodIT following the devops approach.

“Behind the scenes, we’re activating recipes for deployments. Within your ComodIT account you have access to all the recipes and descriptions that you usually have. The next step is deploying the application not only for testing but also for production, with all the ComodIT features like autoscaling and autobackup.

“We bring the user onto the platform and, as we have a business model based on the number of servers you’re managing with ComodIT, if you have more users installing the application through the direct install button, we’re a happy provider.”

It’s a smart idea and one that could give ComodIT a boost as it competes with the likes of Opscode and Puppet Labs (see disclosure) for devops’ attention.

ComodIT was a finalist in our Structure:Europe LaunchPad competition last year. This year’s Structure:Europe will take place in London from 18-19 September and, if you can’t wait until then for a high-level get-together around cloud automation and other such topics, don’t forget that our San Francisco Structure event is coming up on 19-20 June, too.

Here’s a video explaining how ComodIT’s direct install button works:

Disclosure:Puppet Labs is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.

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That first RE.WORK summit will take place on 19 September, which is also the second day of GigaOM’s Structure:Europe conference in London. The RE.WORK program will kick off with a focus on the areas of: the internet of things, 3D printing, nanotech, artificial intelligence, robotics, computing systems and sensors.

“We’re trying to showcase emerging technologies and breakthrough ideas,” summit founder Nikita Johnson told me. “It’s all about reworking big challenges that we’re facing in the future. We want to bring the technology and science aspect, but with mission of positive impact.”

While the first of these summits will focus on technology, others will have different themes: one in December will deal with urbanization, RE.WORK Health will take place next year, and still others will handle energy, education and the environment. The first three meetings will take place in London, with others set for Dublin, Berlin and other European cities. Events will also be followed up with smaller meet-ups, Johnson added.

Apart from Solve For X, other initiatives in this space include TED, to a certain extent (RE.WORK looks to be a bit more collaborative and interactive) and the engineering-led Global Grand Challenges Summit.

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The companies range from hardware startups that can help customers in developing countries use their phones in new ways, to data companies that are focused on things like identity verification and keeping cloud-based transactions secure. The telco selected companies that were creating a positive impact “on the way we use networks to improve our lives and businesses,” said the Chairman and CEO of Orange, Stephane Richard. The 6 startups were selected out of more than 100 applicants.

Working with startups isn’t really about funding companies — the startups have a potential to receive $20K from the program, but that’s more a token gesture than anything else. The real value of the partnership comes from the startups gaining access to Orange’s massive distribution channels, partner program and marketing heft. For example, startup Fenix International could work with Orange’s African operations to distribute its off-grid batteries.

Because Orange has such a large footprint in the developing world, the company has a particular focus on building apps and hardware for “the bottom of the pyramid.” Orange’s Executive Director of Business Services, Vivek Badrinath, told me in an interview at the launch event on Monday night that the mobile phone is often times the first branded product that a customer in a developing country has, and that brand then has the unique ability to transition into offering core services, like mobile banking, and credit.

During the accelerator program, called Orange Fab, the startups will have a chance to visit Paris, and at the end of the program will have a demo day to feature their progress. Here’s the first 6 out of Orange Fab:

1). Fenix International: We’ve covered this four-year-old San Francisco-based startup many times. The team has built a battery that can be used off grid to charge mobile phones and other electronics, and which can connect to various mini power generation systems like small solar panels, a bike charger, or the grid. The target customer is an entrepreneur in a village that sells cell phone charging, and SIM cards (hence why Orange is interested). These entrepreneurs are already selling these services but often times use shoddy and toxic car batteries for charging. Fenix already has distribution deals with carriers Vodafone and MTN.

2). Re-char: Re-char is a startup that makes a kiln that turns bio waste — woodchips, agricultural waste or leaves — into a bio-based charcoal. The startup has delivered about 1,200 “climate kilns” to farmers in Western Kenya. But with the Orange accelerator program, Re-char plans to build an Android-based device that can connect to a cell phone and can test the quality of the soil, including water content, and pH levels. Farmers would use these devices, and accompanying data service, to test and figure out which plots of land are arable and how much fertilizer to buy and where to use it. Beyond the services and product for farmers, the data from the testing and field mapping could create a valuable data base that could potentially be used by fertilizer companies, non-profits or government programs.

3). Phone Halo: This startup has built a location-based system that can use your phone to find lost belongings, like your keys or your wallet. The company uses quarter-sized button trackers that can be placed on devices — or potentially embedded in devices — to deliver an auditory ring when you need to find one of the lost items. The company has been working with consumer electronics companies to make third-party branded products.

4). AlephCloud: The team at AlephCloud is focused on creating secure connections between devices and across systems from Dropbox to box to email to Amazon. With the growth in the consumerization of IT (you know, like everyone in your office buying their own iPhone and using their own Dropbox account), distributed security systems will increasingly be needed.

5). Virtrue: Virtrue has developed an identification verification system that uses data and algorithms to verify identities across platforms. The service is intended to help companies and consumers reduce fraud and is prefaced on the idea that verified data is much more valuable than unverified data.

6). Talkdesk: Talkdesk is software that can enable a company to set up and operate a distributed call center. The software is browser-based and offers support for sales and marketing.

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Well, those startups now have seriously heavyweight competition in the form of LogMeIn, the remote connectivity specialist, and ARM, the British firm whose low-power chip designs underpin the vast majority of mobile devices, and which is now competing with Intel to own the IoT space.

LogMeIn has just launched its own PaaS for the internet of things, calling it Xively (the beta version was known as Cosm). And developers wanting to start creating connected devices on this platform are being offered the Xively Jumpstart Kit, which combines Xively with ARM’s mbed platform, for building devices using ARM’s microcontrollers. With this kit, the companies promise, developers can “rapidly progress from prototyping to volume deployment”.

Xively is based on LogMeIn’s Gravity infrastructure – the same one used to support the company’s cloud storage offering, Cubby — and it comes with development tools for writing and prototyping services, a provisioning engine for deployment and a scalable management console. It supports real-time messaging and directory and data services, as well as analytics, and it uses a “pay-as-you-grow” pricing model that should make the platform attractive to startups.

The directory services extend to a “commons” named the Xively Connected Object Cloud, through which different companies’ devices can interconnect. According to LogMeIn, a “fundamental philosophy” baked into the Xively terms of service states that “customers own their data and can choose whether or not to share all, part, or none [of] it.”

A showcase page for the platform shows early projects built on Xively that include the Visualight smart lightbulb and even some of the post-Fukushima crowdsourced radiation-monitoring efforts (which used an earlier iteration of the platform, called Pachube at the time).

While the Xively Jumpstart Kit should help inventors and developers gravitate in ARM’s direction, it’s not like Intel is sleeping. Intel said in February that its own Intelligent Systems Framework – a set of specifications for connecting, managing and securing IoT devices – had been used to support more than 50 products. The company also released new software tools for, you guessed it, reducing time to market.

Although ARM does benefit from a much broader ecosystem than Intel, it’s too early to call that race. However, those startups trying to build their own PaaSes for the internet of things had better get a move on. LogMeIn’s offering is already pretty mature for this space and, given the momentum rapidly building behind the IoT movement, its timing is exquisite.

(Incidentally, the internet of things is a subject that will be discussed at our Structure 2013 event in San Francisco on 19-20 June, so be there.)

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Here in Europe, people don’t like their phones too thick and plasticky, and that’s been a consistent criticism levelled at the Lumia 920, Nokia’s previous flagship, and for that matter the very similar-looking 928. The 925 makes things sleek and metallic (I like metal; I used to be a proud owner of the Nokia E71) and is, at 139g, significantly lighter than the 920 (185g) and 928 (163g).

The 8.7-megapixel camera has 6 elements, rather than the 5 found in the 920 and 928, and wireless charging comes courtesy of a snap-on cover rather than being built in, but otherwise it’s really, really similar to the 928: 1GB RAM; 1,280 x 768-pixel, 4.5-inch OLED screen; dual-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm processor; and so on.

Here’s how IHS Screen Digest mobile chief Ian Fogg reacted as the unveiling happened:

Strong hardware similarities of #Lumia 925 to 7 month old 920 shows how much #Nokia is held back by Windows Phone’s sparse hardware support—
Ian Fogg (@ianfogg42) May 14, 2013

And there’s the thing. You can tell Nokia didn’t have that much to shout about in hardware terms, because its main message around the 925 is the around the photo-centric apps it’s pre-installing, namely Hipstamatic’s Oggl and Nokia’s own Smart Camera software, which clearly seeks to rival Samsung’s recent efforts in the Galaxy S4. This is all good and fine, but exciting? Not so much.

Look lower

But even if the limitations of the Windows Phone platform don’t allow Nokia to truly exercise its innovation muscles, that doesn’t mean the Finnish handset maker is taking it easy. Just look at what it’s doing at the low end of its range, once we’re out of Microsoft territory.

As I pointed out a few weeks ago, the QWERTY-enabled Asha 210 offers an incredible amount of social functionality for its $72 price tag (the Lumia 925 costs just north of $600). And just last Thursday, Nokia revealed the Asha 501, a touchscreen device that runs the new version of Nokia’s S40-derived operating system and also comes in at under $100.

The new version of Asha comes with features such as Fastlane, a second homescreen option that provides direct access to recently accessed contacts and apps, rather than showing a conventional grid of apps. This is all a result of Nokia’s purchase in early 2012 of Smarterphone, a Norwegian company that tries to make so-called featurephones seem, well, smarter.

Nokia has come in for a lot of flak for calling its all-touch Ashas “smartphones”, with many seeing this as a trick to inflate its real smartphone shipment figures. That may be one motivation, but I honestly think Nokia has every right to call these devices smart. When the 501 came out, Nokia also made a major push for developers to address the revamped Asha platform, releasing a new SDK and new in-app payment tools. Apps that are already on or in development for the platform include Facebook, Foursquare, LinkedIn and Twitter, and also games from the likes of EA and Gameloft.

Sure, heavier apps are lacking, but frankly the kinds of apps we’re talking about there might be better executed on a tablet than a smartphone anyway – particularly given the excellent battery life promised by Asha phones, Asha-plus-tablet is starting to look like a pretty tempting combo.

Who’s smart now?

Of course, the big promise with Windows Phone these days is that it will hit lower and lower price points, perhaps becoming a viable rival to low-mid-range Android devices at some stage (right now Nokia has only managed to cross the $200 threshold with Windows Phone products, namely the Lumia 520). These Ashas are already targeting the same rivals, though, and they are more optimized for the price point than efforts based on Google’s OS.

Nokia is clearly putting a large amount of effort into industrial design and user experience for both the Windows Phone and Asha ranges. However, it has way more freedom to tinker with its own platform. There’s also the small matter of price — the Lumia 925 costs 6 times as much as the Asha 501 so, if customers respond well to the new version of the Asha platform, the potential impact of the 501 will be greater than that of the Lumia 925. (That is admittedly a big “if”, though, as last quarter’s results showed roughly even sales for Lumia and full-touch Asha phones, with Lumia heading up and Asha down.)

The Lumia 925 sure does look fine, and if I was in the market for a high-end smartphone I’d give it strong consideration. However, in terms of making a real splash, the innovations Nokia is making at the low end come through more starkly than the tweaks made to its Lumia range.

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We’ve covered Transferwise several times over the past couple of year, documenting how the U.K.-based firm is shaking up the international bank transfer market. The company maintains reserves across multiple countries, which it uses to allow transfers at much cheaper rates than those levied by traditional banks.

One of Transferwise’s early angels was PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, so it’s not hugely surprising to see Thiel join in the company’s $6 million Series A round. Other participants include Levchin again, IA Ventures, Index Ventures, TAG, Seedcamp, former Betfair CEO David Yu and Xavier Niel’s Kima Ventures.

Transferwise does seem to be growing at a very healthy clip indeed. At the end of February 2012, it had done £10 million ($15 million) in transactions. By the end of 2012 the total was £50 million, and now it’s apparently £125 million – growth is between 20-30 percent a month. And it’s not hard to see why. I used the service myself once, and it does what it says on the tin: save money.

As Thiel said in a statement:

“Innovation in the banking industry typically involves rent-seeking or unsound derivatives, which offer marginal benefits to consumers. TransferWise demonstrates true innovation in banking by enabling its users to retain their wealth across borders.”

According to Transferwise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus, the fresh funding will help the firm add a dozen new currencies (it currently does euros, pounds, dollars, Polish zlotys and Danish, Swedish and Norwegian krone) and push into the German, Spanish, French and Italian markets.

The company will also hire about another 20 people, on top of its current 35, and will start “taking a look at traditional marketing” too, Hinrikus said.

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The short answer is no. The Sunday Times (paywall alert) may have billed its story as being about the potential sale of 27 million people’s details to the cops, but the reality is somewhat less alarming. As Ipsos Mori has been forced to explain in response to the exposé:

“In conducting this research we only receive anonymized data without any personally identifiable information… We do not have access to any names, personal address information, nor postcodes or phone numbers. We can see the volume of people who have visited a website domain, but we cannot see the detail of individual visits, nor what information is entered on that domain. We only ever report on aggregated groups of 50 or more customers. We will never release any data that in any way allows an individual to be identified.”

So what does this data tell us? According to the original article, it provides insights based on “gender, age, postcode, websites visited, time of day text is sent [and] location of customer when call is made”.

Reverse engineering

Now, as we discussed recently, it is easier than you might think to de-anonymize data due to the uniqueness of our personal movement patterns — as long as you have the will, the datasets and the pieces of identifying information that can be correlated with the anonymized individuals effectively described in those datasets. So those horrified reactions to the weekend’s revelations are not entirely groundless. They are over-the-top, though.

There is a significant difference between a register of communications (who contacted whom and when) and a pool of anonymized data where the most fine-grained nugget of information that might be reverse-engineered would tell you that Person X visited the Gmail domain while within a 100 meter radius of the corner of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road. To assume equivalence between the two ideas is to ignore the elements of intent, will, data-crunching capacity and, frankly, competence. In short, there are far easier ways for the police to track individuals through their handsets, such as just going to the carrier and demanding to do so.

(The Sunday Times said sources claimed “officers had been enthusiastic about the potential for tracking users of pay-as-you-go phones,” but – quality of sources notwithstanding — I suspect those officers may have been slightly overestimating their own data-crunching powers. They may have also overlooked the fact that the operators would have no idea of their pay-as-you-go users’ age or gender, making it near-impossible to tease out an individual from the anonymized mass. Either way, they backed off once the story broke.)

Not damning

And then there’s the matter of this data’s innocent utility. Of all the sources of “big data” that is both largely untapped and genuinely useful, mobile operators must be among the most potentially fruitful. In societies where everyone is carrying a phone, there can be no better way to establish the density and fluidity of traffic flows and footfall. This data is gold dust, not just for retailers, but also for town planners and councils. It shows us how our cities and roads really work, and it can help us make them more efficient and pleasant to live in or use.

I feel a bit sorry for EE in this particular case. After all, its rivals Telefonica (trading as O2) and Vodafone are also offering up their customer data for analytics purposes – Telefonica’s “Dynamic Insights” program is being carried out in partnership with market research firm GfK, while Voda launched its mobile analytics play just last Friday.

“Everyone is doing it” would be a lousy apology in itself, but I don’t think any of these carriers or their partners are doing anything wrong, as long as their datasets are suitably anonymized. If people could feasibly be personally identified from this data, the carriers and their market research partners would instantly find themselves on the wrong side of existing data protection legislation — the fines in the UK for this stuff are pretty paltry, but they would also quickly lose the trust of their customers, so there’s little motivation for the telcos and their partners to cross the line.

It’s great that people are concerned and watchful about their privacy, and long may they continue to be. However, this is a case where the potential benefits of the data are both great and realistically attainable, and where the downsides are so unfeasible as to be worth discounting, at least at this stage. It’s now up to the carriers to explain this to their customers in understandable and honest terms.

There will be great battles worth fighting in the war over our personal data and its exploitation. This ain’t one of them.

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There isn’t much to see in the video, spotted by The Verge on Sunday, as Nokia is keeping most details under wraps until the big reveal. It’s clear that in typical Nokia fashion, the company is planning to play upon its strength of camera quality. The teaser ad clearly shows two flashes on the rear of the camera along with a raised bump where the camera sensor lies. Either the phone is extremely thin or the sensor is larger than current Nokia Lumia phones use.

I suspect the latter as Nokia has been working on its PureView technology, with one example phone being the Nokia PureView 808. That device — more of a concept than anything else, although you can purchase one — offers a 41 megapixel sensor that allows for tremendously detailed photos even when zoomed in. The video also alludes to this concept suggesting the phone will capture “more than your eyes can see”.

It’s also likely that Nokia will move away from their standard polycarbonate material for the phone’s body and instead use a metal casing. That could eliminate the wireless charging feature found on current Lumia’s but would help reduce the weight of the handset.

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Lumira Cloud supposedly gives SAP an answer to the recent explosion in the cloud-based, self-service data visualization offerings. The HTML5-built BI service comes with a “monthly” subscription fee (albeit one that can only be ordered in annual chunks) and lets its users publish and share data visualizations with one another for viewing or editing on desktop or mobile devices.

SAP Lumira Cloud appears to be more an Dropbox-ish add-on for the desktop version of Lumira than a cloud-based replacement, but it does also allow the creation of datasets from Excel documents. The service, which integrates with on-premise data and naturally supports HANA, can also be used to share SAP BusinessObjects Design Studio files and SAP Crystal Reports documents.

This release appears to be the culmination of what SAP has been previously referring to as “project Photon” – supposedly the company’s “true departmental self-service BI offering.” The issue here, of course, is the monumental and somewhat confusing nature of the company’s portfolio. After all, doesn’t SAP already do this SME-courting, departmental analytics stuff through its BusinessObjects BI OnDemand product?

Try visiting at least one of the BI OnDemand product pages and you’ll be taken through to the Lumira page. Look at the Lumira Cloud FAQs and you’ll be told that BI OnDemand will continue to run “in parallel” to Lumira Cloud, but also that OnDemand customers can contact their account representative “to discuss the best timing and strategy” for migrating to the new service.

Perhaps this less-than-clear situation presages a simplification of SAP’s portfolio – no doubt more will be revealed at the company’s SAPPHIRE NOW conference this week. If it doesn’t, customers in search of next-generation data visualization tools have many far more straightforward options to check out.

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That player is the UK’s Axell Wireless, whose commercial and public-safety-oriented DAS installations have aided coverage everywhere from the Pentagon to the London Olympics last year (and the London Underground, too) — interestingly, the company recently branched out into Wi-Fi DAS as well as cellular. The buyer is Cobham, also a British firm, which provides antennas and other technology for the aerospace and defense sectors, but also for commercial customers.

The deal is worth £85 million ($131 million) — £60 million up front and the rest pending good performance in the next year or two. Axell CEO Ian Brown told me on Friday that the buy would mainly help the commercial side of that business:

“The thing that’s really been driving the cellular part of the market is the mass proliferation of smartphones. Now 80 percent of mobile traffic emanates from the building – people are using their mobile phones more inside than when outside.

“Cobham is obviously in the communications and technology business, selling to the defense and commercial markets. As a business, they’ve been looking for adjacent sectors to get into to extend the commercial mix… and that’s their strategic rationale for acquiring Axell.”

Brown noted that the demand for DAS will increase greatly through the rollout of 4G networks (AT&T would no doubt agree), but also through regulations around public safety networks, the market in which Axell is particularly strong.

“Since the unfortunate events of [9/11] a lot of governments around the world have put into statute that key pieces of infrastructure must have public safety communications,” Brown said. “You can’t open a road tunnel in Europe now unless you have public safety communications.”

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Ping.it, an Oslo, Norway-based startup, has been around since 2009 and has experimented with a number of business models, but it launched in public beta this week as a content discovery service. Ping.it’s main feature is “probes,” which it describes on its blog as “small apps which go out and retrieve information from across the Web on behalf of the user. They can be created, edited, shared and subscribed to – all by Ping.it users.”

“I see Ping.it as a new step forward in content discovery using elements from traditional RSS Readers and social media,” founder Marius Lian told me. “Google Reader was discontinued for a reason – time to move on.”

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Although neither company released many specification details of phone, the Lumia 928 is very likely an improved Lumia 920. That phone launched last year as an AT&T exclusive and is considered to be a flagship, high-end model. Here’s a first look at the new Lumia:

Like that phone, the Lumia 928 offers a 4.5-inch OLED screen with Gorilla Glass for protection. It also features an 8.7 megapixel PureView camera with Carl Zeiss optics, Xenon flash and optical image stabilization; something Nokia showed off earlier this week on video. The new Lumia also supports wireless charging.

I think the pricing on this device is quite aggressive when compared to flagship phones running on other platforms. Then again, it probably needs to be. While having a high-end Lumia on one of the largest U.S. carriers can only help Nokia — and Windows Phone 8 sales, for that matter — the price point can help the Lumia 928 stand out from the flagship crowd.

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OpenNebula 4.0, codenamed Eagle, is important for several reasons. Firstly, it includes a complete redesign of the Sunstone cloud management interface and a bunch of new operations for managing virtual machines, such as system and disk snapshotting, capacity resizing and IPv6 support. Ceph is now supported, too.

Drop-in vCloud replacement

Perhaps most important, though, is OpenNebula 4.0′s enhanced support for VMware users. It’s more a case of testing and certification than new functionality as such, but, as OpenNebula Project director Ignacio Llorente told me, “now OpenNebula fits perfectly on a VMware-based data center:”

“A thorough plan was carried out to make life ‘easier’ to VMware technology savvy administrators at the time of using OpenNebula. The workflow of the day-to-day routine tasks that cloud administrators were supposed to undergo was revisited, and the common actions were polished to conform with the philosophy of VMware based infrastructures. One example: the ability to upload VMware disks using the Sunstone Web UI was tested, slightly changed and properly documented.

“Moreover, the documentation of VMware underwent an exhaustive revamp, to comply with VMware terminology and to close the gap between the two technologies. The most noticeable outcome of this is the storage model of an OpenNebula cloud based on VMware hypervisors. This storage model resembles that of the infrastructures using pure VMware tech. VMware administrators would appreciate the description in the documentation of the VMFS and NFS Datastores, which leverages the use of the Disk/LUN and Network File System storage types respectively in VMware.”

Thing is, while OpenNebula has traditionally been seen as a European, more mature counterpart to the AWS-aping likes of OpenStack, CloudStack and Eucalyptus, these days it’s pitching itself more to enterprise users as an open-source alternative to vCloud that comes with lower costs and support for multiple hypervisors. Llorente said that, while most of the OpenNebula community is using KVM or Xen (drivers for which are also improved in the new version, incidentally), 70 percent of customers are using OpenNebula on VMware.

According to Llorente, this means the OpenNebula and OpenStack/CloudStack cloud models can happily coexist – and for evidence of this, he points to the fact that OpenStackers Dell and Cisco are happy OpenNebula users. Other users, by the way, range from CERN, Fermilab, the European Space Agency and NASA to BlackBerry, China Mobile, Telefonica and Akamai.

First OpenNebula Global Conference

The first OpenNebula Global Conference will take place in Berlin from September 24th through the 26th, the project announced in a blog post yesterday. According to Llorente, the aim is to “have a more technical conference” than the more vendor-ish OpenStack Summit.

“We’re trying to have a meeting point where the community users and developers, also partners and customers, can discuss issues about their deployments and the future roadmap,” he said. “China Mobile and BlackBerry have developed enhancements, so we would like to show them. It’s more a community event than a commercial event… we would prefer technical proposals to commercial proposals.”

Speaking of the community, Llorente added that the main focus for OpenNebula 4.2 would be the incorporation of the recently open-sourced OpenNebulaApps with enhancements such as automatic elasticity. These improvements are being funded by OpenNebula customers through the Fund a Feature program that kicked off in February, he said.

And on the subject of conferences, as mentioned above, we will be hosting our Structure:Europe event in London on 18-19 September. If you can’t wait until then to discuss these issues with those in the know, our Structure event will take place on 19-20 June in San Francisco — the panel on OpenStack in the enterprise should be particularly pertinent.

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Not content with sticking two fingers up at the authorities with his Mega secure cloud storage service, larger-than-life entrepreneur Kim Dotcom is planning to release further privacy-centric services. And interestingly, in a Q&A session with the New Zealand Herald late last night, Dotcom said he intended the secure email and instant messaging services to be both military-grade and so easy to use that the user wouldn’t have to do anything to benefit from this security.

This is always the issue with security – if it requires much thought on the user’s part, it will generally fail. Dotcom, who also released a white paper on Tuesday to accuse the U.S. government of misleading New Zealand authorities while pursuing the German-born millionaire, said in the session that he wanted to “provide tools that give our users their privacy back”:

“We are working on encrypted email, IM, etc. The key to make encryption a global success is ease of use. So I am spending most of my time figuring out how I can give you encryption without you having to do anything and at the same time give you military grade privacy. You are all naked on the Internet. I like to help you put some pants on :-)”

It remains unclear what Mega is planning, technologically speaking, to achieve this kind of friction-free encryption. There are plenty of tools out there for sending encrypted emails and messages, but they tend to involve browser extensions or web forms, or paid subscriptions.

Mega’s cloud storage service has also come in for criticism by some security experts, who have pointed out that its use of so-called “convergent encryption” (in order to allow de-duplication) theoretically leaves a trace of who uploaded which file.

That extradition thing

Of course, Dotcom’s plans hinge somewhat on the ongoing extradition proceedings that he faces. The U.S. had Dotcom and some of his associates raided and arrested at the start of 2012 over allegations of copyright infringement, to do with their highly popular (and now deceased) Megaupload file-sharing service, and wants them sent over to face charges.

Since then, the case has occasionally veered into farce, with the New Zealand prime minister having to apologize for the country’s security services illegally spying on Dotcom, and a judge having to step down from the proceedings after describing the U.S. as “the enemy”.

All the while, Dotcom has maintained that Hollywood lobbyists were behind the raid and arrests. He reiterated and expanded upon these claims in the white paper released on Tuesday, verbosely entitled “Megaupload, the Copyright Lobby and the Future of Digital Rights: The United States vs You (and Kim Dotcom).”

The document highlights ties between U.S. vice president Joe Biden and Chris Dodd, the head of the Motion Picture Association of America (the MPAA, Dotcom’s bête noir), describing the whole affair as a “contract prosecution” linked to campaign contributions. It calls on the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform and the Office of Professional Responsibility of the U.S. Department of Justice to “conduct an investigation and hearings into the conduct of the Megaupload prosecution by the U.S. Department of Justice.”

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Mobile analyst Dean Bubley, on the other hand, is clearly unimpressed with the coverage of this subject. In a somewhat irate blog post today, he attacked the notion that there is a simple dichotomy between SMS and “over-the-top” (OTT) apps such as WhatsApp, along with the idea that the carriers’ Joyn collaboration might save their bacon:

“A central theme in these articles is a supposed battle for the ‘messaging market’, with lazy journalists or vendor marketeers painting a dark picture of mortal combat between the righteous fortress of SMS revenues, the marauding hordes of barbarian OTT players at the gates, and the Knights of Joyn riding to the rescue in their shining armour of interoperability.

“This is all palpable nonsense — a strawman argument to reframe a complex and dynamic situation into the usual fatuous and imaginary Us vs. Them, Telcos vs OTTs narrative, coupled to a desperate attempt to make RCS and its GSMA-branded offspring look relevant. Not only is this argument flawed, the likely outcomes will in many cases be worse than useless.”

What really gets Bubley’s goat is the idea that there actually is a “messaging market” as such. As he points out, there is little to compare between a WhatsApp chat and an embedded customer support IM conversation, or between an SMS exchange and an email with a document attached. They’re all messaging, but they’re not the same thing at all.

And what’s more, each one of those scenarios could be supported by a variety of “messaging” technologies:

“Any worthwhile analysis would look at various ways to slice up this supposed monolithic market into separate buckets reflecting context or intent. Perhaps social messaging vs. advertising vs. standalone information vs. gossip vs. B2B meeting arrangement vs. one-way app updates. Or sliced by length of a messaging ‘session’ or number of participants, or a hundred other ways.”

This is very true, and it has me thinking about what we mean when we talk about messaging. But it also has me thinking about our use of other terms, in particular the word “social”.

Facebook, for example, is a service we would think of as quintessentially social — but it’s also a messaging service. Just look at Facebook Home, where the social network takes over the user’s Android handset in a way that effectively melds Facebook messaging and SMS. When you’re sending a message through that interface, which medium are you using? Who cares?

When I was talking to Viber CEO Talmon Marco ahead of today’s desktop app launch, he characterized his Skype-rivaling product in interesting terms:

“We’re starting to see the lines between communication and social are breaking. Once you go into groups and larger groups — today we support groups of up to 40 people — and put a picture in there, is that a communication or social?

“I exchange Viber messages hundreds of times a day. On Facebook I share something once a week, once every two weeks. I’m always thinking twice about what I put on Facebook. I find myself more engaged with an app like Viber than with Facebook. I create far more content for Viber than with Facebook and I think the same applies to most people.”

Most people, of course, aren’t the CEO of Viber, but his underlying point is nonetheless valid. “Messaging” and “social” are merely two facets of modern communications (which can itself be a subset of some other service) and trying to tease the two apart is increasingly difficult.

Which brings us back to Bubley’s post. As I suggested above, I don’t think it’s entirely fair to discount the recognition of OTT apps’ acceleration past traditional SMS. However, it is certainly true that clear-cut comparisons between the various messaging options out there today are near-impossible, if not futile.

Ultimately, messaging is increasingly just a feature, as is the case with social. When you’re designing the communications services of the future, or even the services that make use of communications, context and intent are what count.

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Responsive web design is all the rage right now: it basically means designing a website so that it renders nicely across a variety of device types, from the desktop to the handset (we’re into this stuff ourselves, you will have hopefully noticed). Froont isn’t the only company trying to tackle this market – Adobe is notably previewing its Edge Reflow tool at the moment – but co-founder Anna Andersone reckons her company offers a simpler experience than most.

“Most of the other tools are template-based,” she told me. “Froont allows complete design freedom, so in the responsive design field that is quite new. There is competition from Adobe Edge Reflow, but the main difference is that Froont is an in-browser tool, which means the result is already online and can be shared easily with client and collaborators just by sharing a link, and anyone can use the design on any device.”

Of course, this sort of work is best done on a desktop browser – in fact, Froont’s editing mode currently only works in Chrome. According to Andersone, this is because Google’s browser has better inspection tools than others.

While Froont is clearly aimed at reducing users’ need for traditional front-end development, it’s not as though it does away with devs altogether. “You can export clean HTML code or ready CSS which can be later added to any other platform,” Andersone said. “At that stage you need to have a developer who could connect it to an existing CMS or platform.”

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But now the Cyprus-headquartered startup has taken things to a whole new level with its Viber 3 version: it’s released a desktop app for OS X and Windows, making it a full-blown alternative for Skype’s core user base. At the same time, Viber has also beefed up its Android and iOS apps, while introducing support for eight new languages (reaching a total of 27).

“Viber for desktop lets you do pretty much everything that Viber lets you do on your mobile phone, with minor exceptions such as stickers,” Viber CEO Talmon Marco explained to me. “What puts it apart from Skype is how tightly integrated it is with the mobile experience. Skype went from the desktop to the phone. Viber went from mobile to desktop — the implication for the user is amazing.”

Hello desktop

“Amazing” might be a tad hyperbolic, but Viber’s cross-platform integration is genuinely impressive.

As someone who has a greater variety of smartphones and tablets than most (hey, it’s my job), I can attest to one of Skype’s most annoying quirks – its inability to recognize on one device that I’ve already read the day’s messages on another device. This isn’t an issue with Viber.

“Another annoying thing is my wife always complained that would leave Skype running on my computer at home and every message I exchanged with somebody [while on another computer] would beep,” Marco said. “Viber doesn’t – when you get a message, it beeps at both places. Depending on where you answer the message, the next messages only beep on that device.”

Small things, but useful. A far more major advantage is the ability to quickly and simply transfer calls between devices and network types. So you want to start a call on your home desktop, then pop it over to your Wi-Fi connected smartphone, then maintain the call as you leave the house and move onto a cellular network? It should work.

Ironically, I find this all a bit reminiscent of Telefonica’s Tu Go play, which extends the functionality of that carrier’s phone number-linked mobile services to the desktop. Marco doesn’t see Viber as being in direct competition with the cellular giant’s “over-the-top” app but, as the lines between traditional and new-style messaging functionality continue to blur, I think the similarities between the two are worth calling out.

After all, both essentially extend the same services across both mobile and desktop platforms while using the mobile phone number as the key to the user’s identity. When Tu Go came out, it struck me that this number was one of the carrier’s most underappreciated weapons in the fight against third-party communications services – now that Viber’s also exploiting it on the desktop, though, I’m not so sure.

The desktop Viber app also allows video calls, in the style of Skype and Google+. This isn’t available for the mobile apps just yet, though – it will be, Marco promised – and it also doesn’t allow group videoconferencing at this point.

Mobile revamp

Viber’s announcements today aren’t all about the desktop. For one thing, we now have the full new version for BlackBerry, which – as we reported last month — finally includes VoIP functionality. This makes Viber the first mass-market VoIP provider to offer such a feature on the platform.

However, as we noted when covering the beta, it’s only available for versions 5 and 7 of the platform. According to Marco, this is because Viber has to implement IP-based voice on BlackBerry in a slightly roundabout way (“pretty much recording and playing back”), which makes latency a serious issue on BlackBerry OS 6, but less so on 5 and 7. Even on the supported versions, “users should manually set the APN settings to do 3G – there’s no way around that,” he warned.

Users on iOS will find their updated app now includes video messaging capabilities: previously, you could send photos and locations, but not videos. “Last online” status has also been introduced, bringing Viber in line with WhatsApp on that front – Marco admitted that he himself wasn’t sure how useful this would be, given Viber’s push notifications, but “it’s there.”

Other tweaks on iOS include the ability to search contacts specifically for groups, rather than having to scroll through individual contacts to find them, and the introduction of a new voice engine “that provides better performance on low bandwidth or in poor network conditions.” The aforementioned ability to roam between Wi-Fi and 3G coverage is also a new feature, and the overall app design has evolved.

The Android version gets the same features as the iOS app, but also a hefty redesign. It previously looked very much like the iOS version but is now all Holo — as Marco put it, “the iOS version looks iOS and the Android version looks Android.”

Next trick

Viber now has 200 million users, Marco said. This is the same number WhatsApp announced less than a month ago, but it’s important to note that WhatsApp’s 200 million users are active on the service at least once a month, while Viber is only talking about the number of its registered users. That said, Marco claimed that the majority of those users did use the service last month.

Given the fact that Viber VoIP calls only sometimes use Skype-esque peer-to-peer (P2P) technology, often going through Viber’s servers instead, this means the company has to spend a lot of money on servers – “We’re probably one of the largest users of Amazon Web Services,” Marco said, while conceding that his firm is still generating zero revenue.

So when is Viber going to start monetizing its service, then? This year, apparently. According to Marco, the company will start selling stickers to its users, along with other, as-yet-undefined “value adds.”

How about an enterprise play? After all, the addition of the desktop app makes Viber an increasingly credible unified communications service. “We have nothing to announce at this point in time, but we think that the desktop offering gets us closer to this,” Marco said.

Whatever happens, there’s no question that 2013 will be a very exciting year for the rapidly evolving Viber.

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Standards-essential patents (SEPs) cover, as the name suggests, technology that is essential to certain standards. SEPs are supposed to be licensed by the patent-holder on so-called fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms — essentially, because this technology is so important, the patent holder is not supposed to try blocking rivals from using it as long as they are willing to pay a FRAND rate.

In the case of Motorola, the SEPs in question cover part of the GPRS standard, which is in turn part of the rather important GSM cellular standard. Motorola and Google tried to get Apple to pay a rate of 2.25 percent of the entire device’s sale price in order to use the technology. Apple said this wasn’t a reasonable rate and Motorola sued in Germany, eventually winning its case and threatening the sales of iOS devices in that country. The Commission opened an investigation into this in April 2012.

Crucial to the Commission’s “statement of objections” today, Apple had agreed to let the German court set a reasonable licensing rate, but Motorola had pushed on with enforcing the injunction anyway. This showed Apple had been willing to pay something to Motorola – without that willingness, the Commission suggested, it might not have stepped in.

As the Commission summarized its preliminary conclusion:

“The seeking and enforcing of an injunction for SEPs can constitute an abuse of a dominant position in the exceptional circumstances of this case – where the holder of a SEP has given a commitment to license these patents on FRAND terms and where the company against which an injunction is sought has shown to be willing to enter into a FRAND licence.”

That said, Motorola maintained in its own statement today that “Apple had to make six offers before the court recognized them as a willing licensee.”

A statement of objections is effectively a warning and an invitation to the target to defend itself – after that defence has been heard, the Commission will come up with a final judgement.

In a statement on Monday, EU Competition Commissioner Joaquín Almunia said SEPs should not act as blockers to competition:

“The protection of intellectual property is a cornerstone of innovation and growth. But so is competition. I think that companies should spend their time innovating and competing on the merits of the products they offer — not misusing their intellectual property rights to hold up competitors to the detriment of innovation and consumer choice.”

In its statement, the Commission highlighted the difference between its preliminary ruling and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) proposed Consent Order that would force Motorola to play by the FRAND rules — that order would only apply to Motorola’s future dealings, while the European Commission is preparing to rule on what Motorola has already done.

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ResearchGate, based out of Berlin and Cambridge, Mass., is one of a handful of large academic social networks that is trying to help researchers around the world connect and collaborate. Another example is Mendeley, which got got bought by Elsevier (see disclosure) a month ago, to the consternation of many users.

ResearchGate has previously had A and B funding rounds, where we knew who was involved (Benchmark Capital and Accel Partners typically feature) but didn’t know the amount. This time, we know the amount but not who bought the equity.

Apart from connecting people, ResearchGate also lets researchers treat their profiles as personal webpages for the purposes of republishing papers they have written. This effectively provides a way around the copyright restrictions that frequently irk academics (after all, most of this research is publicly funded), allowing ResearchGate to act as an open access repository for published papers. Users can also share experiment-derived raw data with one another.

ResearchGate recently started trying to make money, offering the eyeballs of its 2.7 million users to recruiters and conference promoters. It’s a safe bet that the money raised in the last week or two will at least partly go towards boosting the company’s sales force.

UPDATE (8am PT): This article has been updated to remove the suggestion that ResearchGate acts as an open access repository for published papers while Mendeley does not. In fact, Mendeley does offer similar functionality.

Disclosure: Reed Elsevier, the parent company of science publisher Elsevier, is an investor in GigaOmniMedia, the company that publishes GigaOM.

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Although it’s always been very important, network security seems to be attracting an increasing amount of attention these days, largely due to high-profile hacks. The Stonesoft acquisition, should it go through the usual regulatory hoops, will give Intel a boost in the areas of firewalls, evasion prevention systems and secure VPN services.

Here’s how McAfee president Michael DeCesare put it in a statement on Monday morning:

“With the pending addition of Stonesoft’s products and services, McAfee is making a significant investment in next-generation firewall technology. These solutions anticipate emerging customer needs in a continually evolving threat landscape.”

McAfee will blend Stonesoft’s services with its own existing portfolio, in particular its IPS Network Security Platform and its Firewall Enterprise product, and it looks like Stonesoft’s “next-generation” firewall will continue to be a product in its own right. In the statement, Stonesoft CEO Ilkka Hiidenheimo noted that “the combination of the two companies allows Stonesoft to benefit from McAfee’s global presence and sales organization of over 2,200 employees, best-in-class threat research and technology synergies.”

Intel said in January that it intended to “deliver more integrated solutions and comprehensive protection across mobile devices, endpoints, servers, and network through an extensible framework,” and would embark on a series of acquisitions, development initiatives and new partnerships to do so. The Stonesoft buy appears to be a pretty loud shot in that salvo.

Stonesoft’s secret sauce is its Security Engine, which can adapt to act as firewall, unified threat management system, server load balancer or VPN concentrator as needed. The company’s military-grade firewalls can be deployed as software or in the form of hardware or virtualized appliances. It’s not yet clear what will happen to the parts of Stonesoft’s portfolio not mentioned in the statement, such as its intrusion prevention system, which is also powered by the Security Engine.

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