News Archive - November 2008

Nokia plans to stop making phones for the Japanese market, one of the largest in the world. Meanwhile, Nokia also announced plans to create a platform that will allow people to use their mobile phones to control their home electronics, and security and energy management systems.

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RIM could take years to introduce a device based on long-term evolution (LTE) despite current talk about the BlackBerry vendor working on a wireless broadband handset based on the proto-4G technology.

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Large service providers are already pulling back on VoIP equipment purchases, though other key components of next-generation IP-based networks — such as policy servers, for adding intelligence and control to the network — are expected to grow even in the face of an overall spending downturn. — It surprises me that any significant investment would be made in NGN technologies. After all, at the end of the day, one has a telephone. Carriers must start looking at something bigger: enabling multimedia communications across a number of different user devices.

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Video is now making it possible for people to work remotely and still feel like being in the office. Are you finally starting to see a transformation in the industry from a voice-only to a video world? Quite possibly, but we still have a lot of work to do in terms of increasing bandwidth at the access.

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Using teleconferencing technology has lately become an obvious and financially practical choice to offset rising business travel expenses. Yet sometimes simple chatting doesn't cut it. There has been growing interest in the notion of online conferencing with a "virtual presence" emphasis, which enables people to share information and their very selves with one another with a stronger sense of near-tangible "face time."

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Now that H.323 and SIP are nearly 13 years old and both are widely deployed, which one can we say won the protocol war? The answer is that they both did, but there are many things one must still consider when selecting the right protocol to use. Also, given the age of these protocols, isn't it time to start asking about what comes next?

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Nokia's chief executive, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, believes the time is right for the company to move aggressively in the U.S. market, where it commands just a 6% market share compared with its global share of 40%. And, it is betting its future on Symbian, a fully open mobile platform.

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Nortel reported its biggest quarterly loss in seven years amid a worsening economy, with losses at $3.4 billion, or $6.85 a share, during the third quarter of 2008. — But do not let those numbers fool you. Nortel took some big, one-time charges and are shaving staff. Look for Nortel to turn things around in the next two quarters.

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AT&T announced plans to acquire Wi-Fi network provider Wayport in a $275 million cash deal.

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Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer dismissed the Android mobile operating system, saying he believed that building it was not easy and was not financially unsound for Google. "They can hire smart guys, hire a lot of people, blah dee blah dee blah, but you know they start out way behind, in a certain sense," he said. — I think Balmer just does not get it, in more ways than one. Google wants to enrich the user experience, help users find things, buy things, etc. Google makes money that way and driving change in mobile devices will definitely help them, because there are more mobile devices in the world than desktop computers.

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Google and other technology companies that wanted access to more free spectrum have gotten their wish. The Federal Communications Commission unanimously agreed to open up unused broadcast TV spectrum for unlicensed use.

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VoIP and social network startup Jaxtr has laid off 13 of is employees and its chief executive has stepped down. The company raised US$10M in June 2008, which it still has in the bank. The company believes it had enough funding to operate at least another 18 months.

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Today marks a significant step forward for instant messaging technology, with the acquisition of Jabber by Cisco. Jabber is the leading provider of open standards-based instant messaging technologies that fully supports inter-domain instant messaging federation. The technology driven by Jabber, called XMPP, enjoys wide industry support, with dozens of clients and servers that support the protocol, not the least of which is Google's GoogleTalk product.

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