Wireless Blog

Harris Corp. has been awarded a six-year, $97 million contract for continued maintenance of the Federal Aviation Administration 's Weather and Radar Processor system.

Louis for the WISPA regional meeting on July 21 and 22. Keynotes will be presented by Julius Knapp, Chief of the FCC's Office of Engineering and Technology, and noted researcher Michael Calabrese of the New American Foundation.

Motorola's cell phone business, which as late as 2007 was riding high on the success of the Razr, is struggling to reshape itself.

Amazon said today that sales of its Kindle hardware has tripled since the price was reduced from $259 to $189.

Perhaps more interesting is their statement that downloaded kindle books have overtaken hardcover sales.

According to Amazon, 143 Kindle books have been sold for every 100 hardcovers in the past three months, and that ratio is 9:2 in the past month (with lower reader costs).

Other interesting points:

• Amazon sold more than 3x as many Kindle books in the first half of 2010 as in the first half of 2009.
• The Association of American Publishers’ reports e-book sales grew 163 percent in May and 207 percent year-to-date through May. Kindle book sales in May and year-to-date through May exceeded those growth rates.
• On July 6, Hachette announced that James Patterson had sold 1.14 million e-books to date. Of those, 867,881 were Kindle books.
• Five authors–Charlaine Harris, Stieg Larsson, Stephenie Meyer, James Patterson, and Nora Roberts–have each sold more than 500,000 Kindle books.

The Apple iPad, which has its own e-book store, started sales in April. Yet sales of the Kindle also grew each month during the quarter, Amazon said.

Owners of iPads and other mobile reading devices can buy Kindle books, which they can read on computers, iPhones, iPads, BlackBerrys and Android phones. But Kindle owners can read only Kindle content bought from Amazon. “Every time they sell a Kindle, they lock up a customer,” said Mike Shatzkin, founder and chief executive of the Idea Logical Company, which advises book publishers on digital change.

According to Forrester Research, retailers will sell 6.6 million e-readers this year. But Apple sold over three million iPads in just 80 days.

Apple Inc. may have addressed the iPhone antenna controversy with Friday's press conference and its free-bumper offer, but its rivals may still be capitalizing on the issue.

An unnamed new Bluetooth-equipped Apple product, first submitted to the Federal Communications Commission for review last October, was granted regulatory approval this week.

Want a collector's item? Consider a Nexus One smartphone, while supplies last. Once the search giant sells out its most recent shipment of the critically praised but sales-challenged handset, it will become a rare find for American consumers.

Still Available Abroad

"This week we received our last shipment of Nexus One phones," Google announced on its official blog Friday. "Once we sell these devices, the Nexus One will no longer be available online from Google. Customer support will still be available for current Nexus One customers. And Nexus One will continue to be sold by partners, including Vodafone in Europe, KT in Korea, and possibly others, based on local market conditions."

The announcement comes about two months after Google announced it was giving up its unique approach of trying to market the HTC-manufactured Nexus One only online. Buying the phone unlocked for $529 allowed customers to choose their own carrier, while a subsidized version was available for $179 with a two-year T-Mobile contract. Plans to sell the Nexus One at major retail outlets evidently did not materialize.

Google was long believed to be planning a Verizon Wireless version of the Nexus One, but announced in April that it would not. Instead, it recommended the Droid Incredible, also made by HTC and also based on the Android mobile operating system.

The inability for people to see what they were buying beforehand in a store, rather than rely on reviews, might have killed the Nexus One.

"People want to see and test the phone," said wireless analyst Ken Dulaney of Gartner Research. "Also, [Google] didn't work with the [carriers] on this, and that didn't work out. Apple made the same mistake on their first version [of the iPhone]."

High Expectations

The January launch of the Nexus One came after months of speculation that Google, after designing a winning operating system...

O’Reilly Media’s Open Source Developers Conference is taking place in Portland, Ore., this week with hundreds of speakers and lots to see and do.

Here is the OSCON Blog, the OSCON 2010 Schedule, Keynotes, Events, Health Information Technology, BOF Sessions, and a Cloud Summit. Some OSCON tutorials will be live-streamed, although they require a registration fee.

OSCON’s Mobile sessions explain how to target all major mobile platforms with open source.

• Android for Java Developers: A hands-on presentation that takes you through the anatomy of an Android application
• Building Native Mobile Apps Using Open Source: By using the open source Titanium platform, web developers can create apps for iPhone, Android and Blackberry using a single code base.
• Mobile App Development with PhoneGap: Learn how to use PhoneGap, an open source mobile development framework, to create platform-neutral mobile applications with HTML, CSS and JavaScript.
• Android: The Whats and Wherefores: Android Open-Source Lead Dan Morrill presents an overview of the Android open-source project.
• Building Mobile Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript: The pros and cons of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript vs native development. Learn how to use open source web technologies to design and build apps for today’s most popular mobile devices.
• Writing Zippy Android Apps: Tools and techniques to find performance problems and future developments.
• Face Detection on the iPhone: The OpenCV library is a collection of routines intended for real-time computer vision, released under the BSD License, free for both private and commercial use.
• Your Smartphone May Not Be as Open as You Think: Most open smartphones contain proprietary software and are subject to user restrictions.
• Open Source Telecommunications: Details of designing application interfaces that need to be used in a “listen only” mode.
• PhoneGap 101: PhoneGap has been widely recognized as a game-changer for mobile app development. The open source code has been downloaded more than 100,000 times and hundreds of apps built using PhoneGap are available in mobile app stores and directories.
• Cross-Compiling Android Applications to the iPhone: While similar in capabilities, smart phones differ greatly in the way native applications have to be written for them. Google’s Android is based on Java with an Android-specific set of widgets, while Apple’s iPhone only supports Objective-C as the programming language
• Building an Open Source Eco-System: Value of open source tools for mobile developers
• K-9 Mail: Forking Android for Fun and Profit (mostly Fun): K-9 Mail is an open source email client for Android.
• MeeGo – The Mobile Linux Platform: Understand some of the technical choices underlying the platform, and see their result.
• BlackBerry development for Web Application Developers: Follow along as a Perl developer shows you how.
• NPR: APIs, Mobile and Open Source: In its short two-year life, the NPR API has grown tremendously, from only a few hundred thousand requests per month to more than 40M.
• Instant Mobile Communities: Simple services can be deployed using very low bandwidth techniques like text over XMPP or text based browsing.
• Using SMS in the Developing World: RapidSMS is an open source project for messaging, data collection and co-ordination over SMS.

In a significant advance for open source cloud computing, Rackspace has announced OpenStack Computer. Robert Scoble explains it all. It means the end of lock-in for cloud customers. You can take your cloud-based apps somewhere else. Competitors who are using OpenStack can run their own (compatible) cloud infrastructure.

The Apache-licensed project will feature several cloud infrastructure components, including a fully distributed object store based on Rackspace Cloud Files, the company’s highly scalable storage engine.

For Amazon-style cloud computing under an Apache licence, NASA contributed technology that powers its Nebula Cloud Platform. Nebula is used for Mars images seen in Microsoft’s WorldWide telescope project. Community sponsors include 25 companies like Dell and Intel.

OpenStack’s mission is to “produce the ubiquitous OpenSource Cloud Computing platform that will meet the needs of public and private clouds regardless of size, by being simple to implement and massively scalable.”

The $400 million Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), funded by the National Science Foundation and now being built along the West Coast of the United States, will use Amazon Web Services with two 10 Gbps connections to Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

Underwater sensors, powered by 10 KiloVolt cables carrying 10 Gbps data from a Shore Station on the coast of Oregon, will “bug” the ocean, forming an undersea network stretching from Canada to California.

The Cascadia Subduction zone has regularly generated 9+ earthquakes with associated tsunamis and will be wired to Node 4, while Node 3 runs out to the Axial Seamount, an active undersea volcano 300 mi west of Cannon Beach. The 10GigE fiber runs from a Shore Station in Pacific City, Oregon to the Pittock Building in Portland, and on to the Ops Center at the U/Washington.

Hopefully, the Ocean Observatories CyberInfrastructure and access policies won’t devolve into a SAIC party, managed by vested interests in international waters with total freedom of laying submarine cables and scientific research on extremophiles and other life forms. SAIC is larger than the departments of Labor, Energy, and Housing and Urban Development combined, reported Vanity Fair (PBS video).

Nokia Siemens Networks said Monday that it has agreed to pay $1.2 billion for Motorola’s network equipment business. The all-cash deal is expected to close by the end of 2010.

The WSJ reports Nokia Siemens is making the acquisition primarily to boost its position in U.S. and Japan markets, but the deal will also provide economies of scale and synergies in areas such as mobile broadband. NSN hopes to better compete with market leader Ericsson and third ranked Huawei Technologies.

Nokia Siemens sought to buy similar assets last year from bankrupt Canadian vendor Nortel, but it was beaten out by rival bidders Ericsson and then Ciena Corp. Ericsson won Nortel’s CDMA and LTE assets for $1.13 billion.

Nokia Siemens, a joint venture between Finland’s Nokia and Germany’s Siemens said it expects to strengthen its business relationships with telecom operators like China Mobile, Sprint Nextel and Vodafone.

Approximately 7,500 employees are expected to transfer to Nokia Siemens Networks from Motorola’s wireless network infrastructure business when the transaction closes, the companies said. No layoffs are anticipated, the companies say.

Motorola’s decision to break up the company through the sale of its network equipment business was demanded by corporate raider Carl Icahn, reports the WSJ. It aims to increase the company’s market value.

Motorola is expected to split itself into two companies in the first quarter, with Motorola Co-CEO Greg Brown taking over the enterprise mobility and public safety units, and co-CEO Sanjay Jha running the mobile devices and television set-top box businesses. Brown said the Nokia Siemens deal doesn’t affect the timing of the split, and declined to say which business would get the $1.2 billion.

Nokia Siemens will take over most of Motorola’s network equipment assets such as its GSM and CDMA business, while Motorola will retain control of the less widespread iDEN technology and a number of other assets such as network infrastructure related patents.

Nokia Siemens is the world’s second-largest maker of wireless phone systems behind Ericsson and roughly even with Huawei, according to Redwood City, California-based researcher Dell’Oro Group. Motorola is the fourth-largest company in CDMA wireless systems, according to the researcher.

BEIJING, Jul 19, 2010 -- When the European Union launches an anti-dumping investigation on China's data cards, statistics released by south China's Guangdong province's customs show that the export price of China's wireless data cards didn?t drop but increased.