Wireless Blog

Federal authorities are calling it the largest hacking and identity theft case yet.

This year's event promises to highlight more inventive mobile applications than ever before as demand for space in the Developers Pavilion has exceeded expectations.

The Olympic flame arrived in Beijing Tuesday, August 5. The last torchbearer lit the fire cauldron at the historic Temple of Heaven in Beijing, marking the beginning of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing (NBC Olympics, NY Times Event Tracker and Olympic Theme, MP-3).

The Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics will take place on 8/8/08 at 8 p.m. The number 8 carries great significance in Chinese culture as a symbol of prosperity.

It was the longest Olympic torch relay in history, traveling 137,000 kms (87,000 miles) via 433 different torchbearers, across six continents in 129 days. The torch arrived back in the capital late Tuesday, after an emotional run in Sichuan province, the site of China’s deadly May 12 earthquake which killed almost 70,000 people and left some 5 million homeless.

Some 2,500 athletes from 205 countries will battle for 302 medal events at the Games of the XXIX Olympiad, running August 8 to August 24, 2008 in China. Some 20,000 journalists, 10,000 security personnel and 800,000 vistors will jostle for a view while an estimated 2 billion people are expected to watch the Olympic Games on television (in a variety of screen sizes). Wikipedia has a backgrounder.

China is spending approximately $160 billion for public works’ improvements and the event’s venues, including refurbished and new roads, subways, and sports’ stadiums. Sales of the remaining available tickets are being handled by each country’s National Olympic Committee.

The six main venues have been 85% funded by US$2.1 billion (RMB¥17.4 billion) in corporate bids and tenders. The largest architectural pieces will be the Beijing National Stadium, Beijing National Indoor Stadium, Beijing National Aquatics Centre, Olympic Green Convention Centre, Olympic Green, and Beijing Wukesong Culture & Sports Center.

The 2008 Summer Olympics features 28 sports and 302 events, spread out over seven cities, as far north as Shenyang, down to Hong Kong in the south. About 200,000 accreditations will be issued for athletes, officials, media and others, serving more than a million pages of information daily just on the back end.

IT planning for the Games began in 2003 with the creation of a master plan. The Games utilizes two main cores of IT infrastructure, a Games Management System (GMS), which supports planning and operation of the Games, including staffing, accommodation, travel, and medical operations; and the Information Diffusion Systems (IDS), which includes timing and scoring by Omega.

Atos Origin has the primary responsibility integrating, managing and securing the vast IT system that relays results, events and athlete information to spectators and media around the world. A Wireless INFO service will be available for the first time that will allow all journalists to navigate through the INFO2008 database from their own laptop.

Lenovo has provided 10,000 computers, including KTS 660 desktops; Thinkpad T60 and E680 laptops; 5,000 results terminals, 4,000 printers and 1,000 servers.

The 2008 Beijing Olympic Games will embed RFID on every event ticket, and help security personnel monitor Olympic hotels, venues, distribution centers and hospitals. The technology also supports a food safety tracking system.

By using IP networks, combined with Wi-Fi and other wireless technologies, Beijing can expand its video surveillance network at the Olympics beyond wired areas

The Beijing Olympic Games are expected draw some 20,000 press for the 17-day event, with 5,600 written and photographic press, 12,000 for Rights’ Holding Broadcasters (RHBs) as well as an additional 10,000 non-rights’ holding journalists.

The International Olympic Committee owns the broadcast rights for TV, mobile, and the Internet for the games. TV rights are sold to broadcasters who can guarantee such coverage in their respective markets. The current estimate is that some 220 countries, or territories, will be broadcasting the games with the estimated broadcast revenue projected to be US$1.7 billion.

The International Broadcast Center (IBC) is the heart of the Olympic broadcast operations and headquarters for the world broadcasters. Beijing Olympic Broadcasting (BOB) controls press access.

Rights Holding Broadcasters include: European Broadcasting Union (EBU), National Broadcasting Company (NBC), Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Seven Network Ltd. (Australia), Japan Consortium (JC), Organización de Telecomunicaciones, Iberoamericanas (Mexico), Television New Zealand (New Zealand), Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union (ABU), African Union of Broadcasting (AUB), Arab States Broadcasting Union (ASBU), Korean Broadcasters Association (KBA), Chinese Taipei Broadcast Pool (CTBP), Caribbean Broadcasting Union (CBU) and South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC).

In the United States, NBC owns the exclusive U.S. media rights to the Olympic Games and
will present 3,600 hours of Beijing Olympic coverage, the most ambitious single media project in history. NBCOlympics.com will feature approximately 2,200 total hours of live streaming Olympic broadband video coverage, the first live online Olympic coverage in the United States.

The NBCOlympics.com site is powered by 160 Sun servers, using Intel Xeon x64 processors, the Sun Fire X4450 and Sun Fire X4150 servers. A rack full of these units would provide 320 processor cores, 320 hot-swappable hard drives, 640 DIMM slots, 120 PCI-E slots, and 160 Gigabit Ethernet connections.

For online viewers, NBCOlympics.com uses Microsoft’s Silverlight 2 player. In addition to supporting Windows Media Video 9, Microsoft’s version of the VC-1 compression standard, it features a number of enhancements optimized for the Olympics.

A “Live Video Control Room” offers up to four video streams simultaneously of the same or different events — one large picture and three smaller pictures — with the option to go “full screen” or “swap” a smaller view for the larger one at any time. You can also e-mail and share video links. With up to 16 events occurring simultaneously, NBCOlympics.com plans to cover the action with as many as 20 simultaneous live streams. Including redundancy for each one — that’s 40 simultaneous streams.

Limelight Networks is the primary delivery network used by all video content on the NBCOlympics.com web site.

How big might the Olympics get? Rob Bennett, general manager of entertainment, video and sports at Microsoft’s MSN portal said the system is designed to handle 600,000 concurrent streams or more, with backup content-delivery networks in place should demand go through the roof.

NBC will supply coverage on seven NBC Universal networks: NBC, USA, MSNBC, CNBC, Oxygen, Telemundo and Universal HD, as well as NBCOlympics.com. According to the company, that is 1,000 hours more than the combined coverage for every televised Summer Olympics in U.S. history (Rome 1960 - Athens 2004, 2,562 hours). NBC has contracted SES NEW SKIES for occasional use services out of Beijing which has also been contracted by the BBC in the United Kingdom, the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) as well as Brazil’s TV Globo.

NBC Olympics.com will have exclusive competition video of complete runs and routines, with real-time results and medal counts. NBC has profiles on the athletes, video clips and photos online with many free video clips also available at Google Video. MSNBC.com also has an Olympics news section that covers event results.

But what if NBC doesn’t have what you want? The BBC promises seven streaming Internet feeds for UK-based websurfers (or those using UK-based proxies). There’s also the CBC for “Canadians” and the ABC for “Australians”. Meanwhile, there’s already plenty of “unofficial” Olympics video on YouTube.

The Beijing Olympics are the most commercialized in the history of the games. It will likely to go down as the high-water mark of the Olympic sponsorship program, says Business Week. NBC is paying about $800 million for broadcast rights to the Olympics in the U.S. and expects to bring in $1 billion in ad revenue across all platforms.

Companies have paid an average of $866 million, or about $72 million apiece, to sponsor the Turin and Beijing Games, almost one-third more than the $663 million total paid to back the Salt Lake City and Athens Games in 2002 and 2004, and up from $579 million for the Nagano-Sydney cycle in 1998 and 2000, says Ad Age. CBS paid $50,000 for the U.S. broadcast rights to the 1960 Winter Games in Squaw Valley, California.

Lenovo has created 100 athletes’ blogs (right), in an attempt to align itself with some less mainstream sports, such as field hockey and modern pentathlon. It gave the athletes laptops and video cameras to chronicle their preparation for the games. BBC Bloggers, CBC Columns and Blogs and NBC Bloggers, especially those from the athletes, might be difficult to stop by the great firewall of China. Advertising Age and Ad Week keep running tabs.

Panasonic provided P2 solid-state memory devices as well as DVCPRO HD (tape) and DVCPRO50 recording equipment for the 2008 Games as well as the 2006 games. More than 20 Panasonic billboards with athletes in action help to project the Olympic mood right from the airport. Their giant Astrovision screens supply venues with live action.

DIRECTV will feature more than 1700 hours of coverage — including over 800 hours in HD. Plus, with their on Demand on channel 1008, you have access to over 500 titles, including athlete profiles, Beijing previews and more.

DISH Network will add two high-definition specialty channels to its HD line-up solely dedicated to the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games. In addition, DISH Network is offering a number of Video On Demand (VOD) titles and will offer its subscribers more than 800 hours of NBCU’s HD 2008 Beijing Olympic Games content. Comcast and Charter also have HD VOD plans, with 15-20 daily updates and highlights sorted by sport, while Comcast promises more than 700 hours of HD on NBC HD, Universal HD and USA HD, plus multiple live NBC feeds on Comcast Central.

Verizon’s EV-DO based Vcast, will offer daily Olympics highlights, breaking news, results and medal standings. ATT’s MediaFLO Channel will have dedicated coverage while Mobilcast will deliver Olympic updates to phone users in the United States and Canada.

Additional Olympic coverage is available from ABC News, ESPN, The CBC, CBS Sportsline, Fox Sports, USA Today, Sports Illustrated, Time, Google News, Yahoo Olympics, Yahoo’s Olympic Blogs, News feeds and Olympic Trivia. Mobile services using Google Mobile and Yahoo’s Go Mobile also feature lots of info and entertainment.

Yahoo on Tuesday launched a number of shortcuts to present Olympics-related information through Yahoo’s search engine. The shortcuts package up information such as the overall medal count, a country’s specific medal count, and information for individual athletes. Google is adding additional features too in addition to GoogleNews, Blog Search and Google Maps and Google Earth.

International Broadcast Coverage is available from Italy (broadcasters), Australia (broadcasters), China (broadcasters), France (broadcasters), Germany (broadcasters), Spain (broadcasters), Japan (broadcasters), Korea (broadcasters), many other countries and non-US networks.

Related Dailywireless articles include; China Showcases TD-SCDMA at Olympics, China Mobile Goes TD-SCDMA , Olympics on ATT MediaFLO Channel, Olympic Marketing Metrix, Olympic Mesh, China Mobile Goes TD-SCDMA, WiMAX Now ITU Standard, HSPDA in China, Cell Data on a Single Channel, UMTS TDD: The Other Broadband Standard, TD-SCDMA Joint Venture and 2006 Olympics Unwired.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs conceded on Monday what Apple's customers have been saying for a few weeks now: The company's MobileMe service, launched in conjunction with the iPhone 3G, was a failure. In an e-mail to employees, Jobs said the service, intended to allow users to sync e-mail and other apps with their new iPhones, was "not our finest hour."

While Jobs was "right to acknowledge the problem," the reports of outages and other failures were so widespread, "He didn't really have much of a choice," noted Greg Sterling, principal analyst with Sterling Market Research.

From the launch, MobileMe suffered a number of problems, including long initial downtimes, an e-mail outage that caused the loss of users' messages, an inability to contact the service to sync, data corruption, and time delays in syncing.

Not Up to Standards

In his e-mail, Jobs identified several things that "could have been done better." For starters, he said, the service was "not up to our standards." MobileMe "clearly needed more time and testing."

Jobs has concluded that Apple made two key mistakes with the system, both related to chewing off more than it could chew. "Rather than launch MobileMe as a monolithic service, we could have launched over-the-air syncing with iPhone to begin with, followed by the Web applications one by one -- Mail first, followed 30 days later (if things went well with Mail) by Calendar, then 30 days later by Contacts," he said.

In addition, Apple should have simply delayed MobileMe until after the iPhone 3G launch, which already included the launch of iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store. "We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence," Jobs said.

Can Apple Do Online Services?

Intriguingly, Jobs concluded that the company has "more to learn about Internet services. And...

The fiercely competitive airline business is turning to technology in the battle for customers.

Since American Airlines began testing Wi-Fi service on live flights in August 2007 and JetBlue Airways began its BetaBlue project in December 2007, other airlines are following suit, including Delta Air Lines and Virgin Atlantic Airways.

On Tuesday, Delta said it would roll out Wi-Fi access to passengers on its entire fleet for a fee. JetBlue, which has been collecting customer feedback, also plans to expand the service throughout its fleet.

"We are still interviewing customers and surveying them to find out what matters most to them," said Alison Eshelman, a spokesperson for JetBlue. "In June we expanded connectivity services to allow for AOL Mail, Gmail, Windows Live Mail, and Microsoft Exchange e-mail accounts."

A major difference between Delta's offering and JetBlue is price. Delta passengers with wireless-enabled laptops, PDAs and smartphones can access the Internet, personal e-mail, and virtual private networks at $9.95 for three hours or less, or $12.95 on flights longer than three hours. JetBlue, however, said its service is currently free.

Will Wi-Fi Fly?

Aircell, the company equipping Delta with its Gogo Inflight Internet service, said these services are taking off.

"It is no longer, is this something we should be thinking about? It's in the mode of who has the right solution, who has proven or is in the process of proving they can bring this product to market," said John Happ, Aircell's executive vice president.

Currently, Aircell is testing its Gogo service on 15 American Boeing 767-200s that are mostly transcontinental flights over the three-hour mark. "That fleet is done and ready to go and are prepared for launch, which is eminent," Happ added. "They are the first contract and first airline that will be in commercial service."

Aircell officials said the service will also...

Delta announced yesterday that it would begin offering wireless Internet service - for a fee - on its domestic flights this fall.

T-Mobile announced today the launch of its 1700MHz AWS 3G network in Las Vegas. Customers with new AWS band phones will be able to use the 1700MHz spectrum for voice and UMTS 3G data services.

Las Vegas as the second city to receive T-Mobile’s AWS band 3G service following New York City. T-Mobile promise that it will add “at least” 20 more coverage areas to its 3G network before the end of the year.

T-Mobile has invested more than $37.5 million in infrastructure and spectrum to bring its 3G service to the Las Vegas market, according to Neville Ray, senior vice president, engineering operations.

Phones that support T-Mobil’es 3G will automatically find the 3G network. T-Mobile also said that it will be expanding its 3G footprint to 20 additional markets by the end of the year, and is preparing to announce an HSDPA-capable phone and “new and compelling data-centric, all-in-one devices.” Phone Scoops says T-Mobile did not elaborate as to what those devices would be.

But C/Net speculates it will offer the Samsung SGH-T639, Samsung SGH-T819, Nokia 6263, and
Nokia 3555.

By the end of the first quarter of 2008, 123 million mobile customers were served by Deutsche Telekom worldwide — 30.8 million by T-Mobile USA.

The company, however, said it expected customer losses to increase again in the third quarter, even as cash flows are expected to improve in the second half of the year.

Spyware, viruses and worms continue to plague most organizations, but security challenges tied to the use of handheld devices and mobile and remote computing are growing at a rapid pace, new research commissioned by the Computing Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) reveals.

Meanwhile, managing employees' mobile devices is becoming even more challenging and is overextending already strained IT departments, according to a nationwide survey conducted by Visage Mobile of almost 600 mobile users. Managing mobility has expanded from an IT issue to one that affects the many stakeholders throughout the entire enterprise, from finance and human resources to every manager and employee.

Based on data returned from the latter survey, the majority of employees are uninformed and disengaged when it comes to monitoring and managing their corporate-issued mobile assets. More than 60 percent of respondents said their company does not have a formal policy for mobile devices.

Seventy-four percent of respondents said they do not have access to their corporate wireless bill, while more than 60 percent waited three weeks or longer to be issued their mobile devices after being hired.

Not surprisingly, 80 percent of respondents are using their corporate issued mobile device for personal use, while eight percent of respondents have had a corporate-issued device with potentially sensitive enterprise data either lost or stolen.

The CompTIA survey of more than 2,000 individuals found that viruses and worms, cited by 54 percent of respondents, and spyware, selected by 51 percent, continue to be the top two information security threats faced today.

Security issues related to hand-held devices, and to mobile and remote workers, are clearly emerging concerns, according to the CompTIA study. More than 50 percent of respondents said security threats related to use of hand-held devices have increased significantly compared to one year ago.

Threats related to mobile/remote computing and handheld devices can include simple user...

On a recent holiday morning, I waited nervously in a pack of cyclists at a shopping mall parking lot outside Frankfurt, Germany, suited up in helmet and Lycra and waiting for the starting gun. I didn't have a prayer of winning the bicycle race, an amateur "everyman" competition staged in conjunction with a pro event on the same day. But I did have something I'm pretty sure no one else in the peloton did: Nokia Sports Tracker.

I was testing the free software program Nokia developed for handsets equipped with global positioning, such as the N82 phone that the Finnish handset maker lent me. Shortly before the start, I fired up Sports Tracker by pushing a couple of buttons on the handset. As the tangle of several thousand cyclists pedaled carefully away from the starting area and gained speed, the software used the GPS capability to track my position, speed, and even altitude.

Precisely 2 hours, 8 minutes, and 19.6 seconds later, I rolled across the finish line. I finished in the middle of my age group over the hilly, 38-mile course -- for me a good showing. But I was almost as excited to see if Sports Tracker had worked as advertised. Immediately I clicked "stop," and with another push of a button, wirelessly uploaded the data to Nokia's Sports Tracker site [sportstracker.nokia.com].

Maps: Nokia vs. Google

Later, sitting in front of a PC, I was able to track my route on a map and even superimpose it on satellite images of the terrain. It was a fun way to relive the experience since I hadn't taken any pictures with the N82's 5-megapixel camera. [Photography is not a good hobby to pursue at the same time you're pedaling.] But if I had, the software would have uploaded the images and embedded them on...