Wireless Blog

Icomera, a Swedish supplier of Internet connectivity to trains, is buying Moovera Networks, based in the UK. The move should create the largest provider of in-vehicle Internet access technology – encompassing trains, buses, coaches, trucks and ferries.

In 2008, Moovera Networks’ Moovbox M Series Mobile Broadband Gateway was selected by Swebus Express, Arriva Scandinavia, Trent Barton, and Wightlink Isle of Wight Ferries, among others, to provide Internet connectivity to their passengers.

The Moovbox M120 provides local Wi-Fi with backhaul provided by 3G UMTS/HSPA, TD-CDMA, FLASH-OFDM, iBurst and WiMAX.

Icomera provides backhaul-agnostic gateways that switch between concurrent satellite and cellular networks. Icomera automatically switches to the best wide area network without session interruption. Icomera will add Moovera’s multi-radio Moovbox to its portfolio of fixed and mobile broadband gateways.

Moovera’s UK based Kent operations and its nine employees will become Icomera’s UK office, bringing the total workforce in Sweden and the UK to over forty people.

Free WiFi access for passengers on the UK’s East Coast main line has lead to a tripling in usage, according to train operator National Express. The company, which inherited the pioneering system developed by Icomera and previous franchise incumbent, GNER.

Among those offering WiFi on trains are Virgin Trains, Capitol Corridors Joint Power Authority (US Train Operator), VIA Rail (Canada), Swiss Rail, NSB (Norwegian Rail), GNER, SNCF, SJ, Deutsche Bahn, Danish Rail, Lloyd’s Register Rail, and NS Trains. System integrators include; Icomera, Nokia Siemens Networks, Moovera, Nomad Digital, Parsons Corporation, WiFi Rail and others.

San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit is in talks with WiFi Rail to provide system-wide wi-fi service after a successful trial program. Phase three of the demonstration program was completed recently.

Other transit connectivity stories on Dailywireless include; Portland Commuter Rail Readies Wi-Fi, Portland Commuter Rail Wi-Fi, Mobilizing WiFi on Trains & Cars, Chrysler Rolls Out U-connect, Hotspot for Bedouins, TrainFi On the Move, PePWave Mobility: Connectivity for Vehicles, Belair Radios: On the Move, The Connected Bus, Kyocera KR2 Mobile Router, TrainFi: One Million Served, and Free TrainFi in UK.

July 22, 2008 Millicom International Cellular S.A. has agreed to acquire 100% of Amnet Telecommunications Holding Ltd.

The Lenovo ThinkPad SL400 is the latest addition to the ThinkPad family and promises to offer features and performance at a fraction of the cost of other ThinkPads.

Motorola Inc.'s shares slipped nearly 4 percent Monday on fears the company lost market share in the second quarter and had to cut prices deeper than analysts feared to stay competitive.

The Google LatLong Blog today announced walking directions on Google Maps.

Now they’ll give you step-by-step directions for the portion of your trip on foot and point you to public transit in your area.

Walking directions are a new feature for Google, and while I’m pretty excited about it, there are some rough edges that compel us to release it in “beta.” Walking directions work well for short trips in urban areas, but we don’t always know if a street has a sidewalk, or if there’s actually a special pedestrian bridge for crossing a busy street. There are still a lot of pedestrian pathways we don’t know about, and they might save you some time if you find them.

Search Engine Land points out that Ask.com was the only search engine to offering walking directions, but they recently killed off their mapping product. Yahoo and Microsoft both currently do not offer walking directions.

In the pointless rumor department, MacDailyNews says an Apple tablet could be coming this October.

Think MacBook screen, possibly a bit smaller, in glass with iPhone-like, but fuller-featured Multi-Touch. Gesture library. Full Mac OS X. Slot-loading SuperDrive. Accelerometer. GPS.

Sounds like a wish list.

Michael Harrington has his own; We Want A Dead Simple Web Tablet For $200. Help Us Build It.

I’m tired of waiting - I want a dead simple and dirt cheap touch screen web tablet to surf the web. Nothing fancy like the Dell latitude XT, which costs $2,500. Just a Macbook Air-thin touch screen machine that runs Firefox and possibly Skype on top of a Linux kernel. It doesn’t exist today, and as far as we can tell no one is creating one. So let’s design it, build a few and then open source the specs so anyone can create them.

Here’s the basic idea: The machine is as thin as possible, runs low end hardware and has a single button for powering it on and off, headphone jacks, a built in camera for video, low end speakers, and a microphone. It will have Wifi, maybe one USB port, a built in battery, half a Gigabyte of RAM, a 4-Gigabyte solid state hard drive. Data input is primarily through an iPhone-like touch screen keyboard. It runs on linux and Firefox. It would be great to have it be built entirely on open source hardware, but including Skype for VOIP and video calls may be a nice touch, too.

The N800 is now $219 at Amazon. The $200 OpenMoko Neo FreeRunner is getting unpacked, photographed, and examined.

Nokia’s Internet Tablet OS (abbreviated ITOS by the community) is an operating system for the Nokia Internet Tablet. It is often referred to as “Maemo“, in reference to the name of the Nokia-sponsored Maemo project that oversees its development. Like Nokia’s Maemo, OpenMoko uses GTK+ as well as OpenedHand’s lightweight Matchbox window manager.

TabletPC Talk, Internet Tablet Talk, and Linux Devices have more.

“No matter who you are, or where you live, or how much money you make … you will need, and you are entitled to have these tools [broadband Internet] available to you, I think, as a civil right,” said FCC commissioner Michael Copps during a Monday appearance at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

With online video, music and other large files increasingly testing the limits of broadband networks, the commission’s five members appeared before a nearly full McConomy Auditorium yesterday afternoon for a public hearing on broadband expansion and regulations.

Rep. Mike Doyle, D-Forest Hills, a member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, organized the hearing. Cynics might say the field hearing itself was an exercise in political pacification, opines C/net. Doyle is the vice chairman of the House Commerce Committee’s telecommunications and the Internet panel, which oversees the FCC.

Qik has opened its beta program, letting anyone with a compatible cell phone broadcast their own videos on the Web. Qik (pronounced “quick”) opened its doors to all comers Monday, moving from the invitation-only alpha it began late last year to an open beta program.

The company also announced new features, distribution partners and supports more handsets. It now supports Symbian and Windows Mobile devices on GSM and CDMA networks. That covers multiple carriers, including AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon and Sprint. Support for the iPhone is promised for the future.

Opening the service for a public beta means users are no longer subject to approval from Qik staff — anyone can sign up and begin streaming immediately.

Qik software (FAQ), lets you stream video directly from a mobile handsets. Live videos can be utilized with Facebook and Twitter or embedded on a web page.

Qik’s new player lets users view video thumbnails and play them directly. They can also chat from within the player. The new Groups feature enables members to create groups and micro-communities to which they can stream their videos. With Events, users can create their own event, whether it’s a family cookout or a corporate function, and invite others to join the event.

Qik says latency has been reduced to between 1.5 and 3 seconds. Users can now subscribe to Qik from an RSS reader on their phone or Nokia’s podcasting application. When they subscribe to a favorite Qikker, users will receive feeds directly to their mobile phones and can play the videos directly from the readers.

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The service is now linked to MySpace, Facebook and Orkut, the social networking service run by Google, so users are able to stream live video to their site. Broadcasters can chat directly with viewers on Facebook.

The cost of streaming content from a mobile phone is still an issue. It could cost users big bucks for data transfers.

“Consumers are already paying for the service when they stream video from their cell phone”, said Yankee Group’s Anton Denissov. “It will tax the networks because they aren’t built for this. They were built for voice, not these huge video files,” he said. As the networks become more congested, Denissov said he foresees an increase in fees, charges and limits from operators.

The biggest question may be how Qik will monetize its service. Advertising is one way, but online businesses have struggled to get viewers to watch ads, says TechNews World.

PC Magazine and Computerworld tested cellular modems for AT&T, Verizon and Sprint cellular networks.

But, if your carrier is feeding a cell tower with a single (1.5 Mbps) T-1 line, don’t expect 1.6 Mbps out of a cellular modem, as EVDO Forums and EVDO Info explain. “It’s not the device itself that affects speed as much as (1) the device’s signal to the cell tower; (2) the load on that tower; (3) the internet backhaul to that tower, or a combination of all or some of the above”.

Without a two-year contract, AT&T’s top DataConnect plan costs $80/month, while Sprint’s average upload speed was 294Kbit/sec with Verizon turning in similar speeds. All the cellular carriers now have a 5 GB cap.

Competitors include; PocketCaster from ComVu, BlogTV, Justin.tv, Kyte.tv, Mogulus, Seesmic, Ustream, Vimeo, Yahoo Live and Zannel.

I can’t wait for Mobile WiMAX. Dailywireless has more on Mobile Livecasting.

Verizon Wireless has announced mobile banking for BlackBerry users.

The carrier introduced a mobile banking application that works on BlackBerry Curve 8330, BlackBerry Pearl 8130 and BlackBerry 8830 World Edition smartphones. The mobile banking application also is available on several Get It Now-capable phones, said the company.

The application allows customers to view account balances and transaction history, transfer funds between eligible accounts, view and pay bills and view the past five transactions completed on their mobile device.

Customers must have accounts with participating banks, which currently include Wachovia, Regions, SunTrust, USAA, Synovus, America First Credit Union, Arvest, Bancorp South, FirstBank, South Financial and BECU.

A new report from IMS Research says the time is right for banking to move to mobile phones. With more smartphones and greater penetration of data plans, there is growing demand for mobile banking services from consumers, operators and financial stakeholders, said IMS.

“There has been a marked increase in the level of activity of key players in the market from both the mobile and the financial companies in the past 12 months,” said John Devlin, lead analyst for the report. “In regions such as North America, Japan and South Korea strong partnerships are being formed between mobile operators and banks.

The report predicts cellular subscribers will grow 32% during the next four years, while mobile banking and payment services will grow by 662% during the same period.

The $250 CherryPal C-100, new “green” PC, consumes only 2 watts of power, compared with the 100 watts of some desktops. It is designed for “cloud computing“.

For software, the device ships with the OpenOffice.org productivity suite, Apple iTunes, a CherryPal-branded media player and instant messaging client. The computer’s OS, open source Debian Linux, is inaccessible to the user. The Mozilla Firefox browser provides the user interface. Local flash storage holds the most frequently used files. All files and software are synchronized with backups in cloud storage.

“Our goal was to offer a computer that has everything a desktop PC has today, but at a much lower price, consuming much less power and completely hassle free,” said Max Seybold, CEO of CherryPal (Mountain View, Calif.). It’s based on embedded Linux and stripped down to support Open Office, FireFox browser, iTunes, instant messaging and multimedia access.

The tiny, 10.5-ounce CherryPal has no keyboard or moving parts but includes USB and VGA connections, plus integrated 802.11g Wi-Fi and Ethernet ports. Four gigabytes of local flash memory for storage that acts as cache in addition to the 50 Gbytes of free cloud network storage.

“There are three cores in the MPC5121e, including an 800-MIPS [million instructions per second] main core, plus a multimedia core and a graphics processor core that offloads the main core,” said Mike Bryars, global manager for Mobile GT Computing at Freescale. Freescale’s mobileGT processor runs at just 400 MHz, but CherryPal claims that users will attain speeds comparable to desktop PCs as a result of the claimed efficiency of its cloud-based software model. Communications with the cloud are encrypted, upgrades are automatic and applications are claimed to be immune to viruses.

There is no contract for the CherryPal, nor any monthly fees, and 50GB of lifetime storage is included. The company says that the cloud will be ad revenue-supported starting in Q4 2008. CherryPal says units will be seeded to “Brand Angels” first. The $250 device is expected to be shipping later this month.

In other news, TiVo and Amazon are teaming up.

Owners of TiVo video recorders will see, in TiVo’s various onscreen menus, links to buy products like CDs, DVDs and books, says the NY Times. TiVo plans to begin offering this feature to advertisers and programmers in the months ahead, so that the chance to buy products and have them delivered will be presented to viewers during commercials and even alongside product placements during live shows.

TiVo’s purchase feature “is a harbinger of what television ultimately should become,” said Timothy Hanlon, senior vice president for Denuo, the media futures division of the Publicis Groupe. “But TiVo is only in around four million plus homes. From a national advertising perspective, if it doesn’t get beyond that base it remains nothing more than a curiosity.”

Since last year, TiVos owners have been able to download movies and televisions shows to their set-top boxes from Amazon’s digital video store, now called Amazon Video on Demand.