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The Comunicano Daily for Tuesday May 27, 2014

The Comunicano Daily

Imagine if Qualcomm or Intel bought out T-Mobile in the USA? That's potentially what's going on in Taiwan where Foxconn is looking to broaden their business interests and vertically consolidate their holdings by putting a stake into a Taiwanese mobile operator. Given their ties to companies like Apple and others for whom they build mobile electronics this would give them the same kind of insight that Samsung and LG have with their close ties to the South Korean operators. Now--on to the NEWS...       Foxconn to buy $390 million stake in Taiwan telecom operator in 4G push Credit: Reuters/Pichi Chuang The logo of Foxconn, the trading name of Hon Hai Precision Industry, is seen on top of the company's headquarters in Tucheng, New Taipei city, December 24, 2013.     [continue...]       In Australia there's has been an outbreak of iPhone Ransomware attacks. People are reporting how their phones are being held hostage..       Australian Apple iDevices hijacked, held to ransom Australian Apple devices, including the iPhone, are being hijacked by a hacker and held ransom. Photo: Getty Images Owners of Apple devices across Australia are having them digitally held for ransom by hackers demanding payment before they will relinquish control.     [continue...]       In the past Apple would be secretive about its plans around the annual WWDC that's being held in San Francisco next week...Not any more. These controlled leaks about the Smart Home efforts seem to be everyone's big story...Oh, and yes, some company is already called iHome.       Apple is planning to launch a Smart Home platform at WWDC next week, says the FT According to a report in the Financial Times, Apple is planning to launch a sweeping "Smart Home" platform built into iOS at the WWDC conference next week, one that will turn the iPhone into a remote control for a range of appliances and services     [continue...]     How would Apple's smart home system work? Summary: After CarPlay, Apple's next push into the Internet of Things market could be home automation. Apple is reportedly planning a major push into home automation with a new software platform and partner program that's looking to make iOS the control centre for connected devices in the home.     [continue...]       In the world of startups it's always fun to watch who is following which companies. A new site out of the UK called "The White List" is doing the following on Twitter....       The White List tracks which startups investors have their eye on When an investor decides to put money into a startup, effectively putting a stamp of approval on that company, the tech industry pays attention to the startup's next move. But what if we get a sense of who investors are interested in earlier by watching their behavior on social networks?     [continue...]       Technology is impacting travel every day. Two key areas are going to be at work surrounding Internet of Things (iOT) which was called M2M only a few months ago driven by the wearables, sensors and beacons based world as well as the cloud. In the end the whole concept of a better experience for the traveler will be the desired end game.       Travel Tip: How Wearable Technology Will Change Travel Between online booking, flight-tracking apps, and boarding passes in our smartphones, travel is tied to portable technology. Now wearable technology may be changing how we travel. You've heard of Google Glass, which is a smartphone-slash-computer that you wear like a pair of glasses. You can find directions, use Facebook, and take video while you're on the go.     [continue...]     Cloud IT technology will transform airport experience, Amadeus report finds Airports are increasingly looking to cloud-based IT systems to improve their operations, according to a new paper released by travel technology firm Amadeus. The report 'IT makes sense to share: making the case for the cloud in common use airport technology' - identifies the case for adoption of cloud technology for the airports of the future.     [continue...]       Companies are leaving the era of want ads behind as social networks take on the role of publisher, and friends recruiting friends. Market leader Zappos has eliminated all other forms when it comes to attracting new hires.       Online shoe seller Zappos is zapping job listings to try a social-media hiring strategy. A few months ago, online shoe retailer Zappos did away with job titles for its 1,500 employees. Now, the company is taking the ax to job postings. Zappos, based in Las Vegas, plans to hire at least 450 people this year, but candidates won't find out about those jobs on LinkedIn.com, Monster.com or the company website.     [continue...]       IT giant Cisco is making moves into the Software Defined Networking sector as their foray into mobile continues. Our guess is Cisco goes on the acquisition trail in that area very big, very soon to battle others who have already demonstrated they're more than just about PowerPoints and slideware.       Cisco Drops the S-Bomb SAN FRANCISCO -- Cisco Live -- A top Cisco executive dropped the S-bomb at Cisco Live Sunday, touting the company's SDN message. David Ward, Cisco's SVP engineering, CTO and chief architect, also said "shit" a few times, which is not something I've heard before at an opening keynote of a customer conference for a $49 billion multinational corporation.     [continue...]       In flight Wi-Fi isn't a fad.  For many of all ages and income levels it's an essential tool when flying but not only for email and web surfing. The stats don't lie.       The Majority of Flyers Use In-Flight Wi-Fi For Entertainment and Personal Use As in-flight Wi-Fi becomes much more pervasive, passenger adoption of it is increasing. But user habits are still to be studied and defined. We decided to ask U.S. in-flight Wi-Fi users about their habits and patterns of usage to better understand how they use it. Using Google Consumer Surveys, we asked U.S.     [continue...]       Who is making investments? Where did they come from? LeWeb calls it a tech mafia. To us, well it's more of those who made it finding ways to get more new ideas going. The face of investment in startups is clearly changing....       Christian Hernandez Gallardo: Meet the European Tech 'Mafias' | LeWeb Blog Valley lore often refers to the " PayPal mafia ", the group of early PayPal employees that went on to found and fund many of today's leading technology companies: Peter Thiel and Facebook, Reid Hoffman and LinkedIn, Jeremy Stoppelman and Yelp, Chad Hurley and YouTube and Elon Musk and the Iron Man suit...     [continue...]

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The Comunicano Daily for Wednesday May 21, 2014

The Comunicano Daily

Our client Truphone has turned the mobile world on its head today with the launch of Truphone World literally made the most traveled parts of the world one country. Add in local numbers in eight of those, really competitive rates for calls, text and data and you see the value. Read on here or read and watch TMC's Rich Tehrani's coverage. There's plenty more in the new today about other Comunicano clients. Vobi, an early stage collaboration and conversation startup also caught Tehrani's eye plus lots going on with the funding of Silent Circle, growth in crowdfunding and more...       Truphone Takes on the World Global mobile network operator Truphone is expanding its enterprise offering in a big way, adding 66 countries to its roster of eight in which users can pay local rates and share up to half a terabyte of data with their co-workers. The international roaming provider supports what it calls the Truphone Ltd.     [continue...]       The investment in Silent Circle will likely cause some eyes to roll but with Blackberry no longer being the enterprises first choice in handsets the opportunity for something else that's secure and uses Android as the core OS could be a very interesting play.       Privacy can be lucrative - Silent Circle just pulled in $30M in funding Proving there's money in privacy these days, secure communications firm Silent Circle has announced a $30 million funding round from investors including Ross Perot Jr and Cain Capital. What's more, Perot and Sir Peter Bonfield, once upon a time the head of British Telecom, have joined Silent Circle's advisory board.     [continue...]       Crowdfunding is a space that covers Crowd Equity and Rewards Funding. The space is getting more and more interesting and attractive to all kinds of serious investors as evidenced by just who is putting the money in to drive growth.       Early Crowdfunding Player Indiegogo Brings On Famous New Investors As the nascent industry of crowdfunding matures, some big-name investors are getting involved. Indiegogo, an early player, said an all-star list of tech entrepreneurs and venture capitalists is now backing the company.     [continue...]     The World's Bank: How Crowdfunding is Disrupting Old Banking By Julie Hanna and Reid Hoffman In San Francisco, Teresa Goines is breaking down deeply entrenched cycles of poverty and crime, one bowl of peanut butter stew at a time. Old Skool Café, the 1940's supper club she started, gives jobs to at-risk and former gang youth.     [continue...]       The DEMO Conference was once THE place to be. Well now they are returning to their roots, but making the entry free to seed stage companies in hopes to restore luster to the once marquee event.       DEMO Is Now Free For All Seed-Stage Startups By Erick Schonfeld At DEMO, we are committed to finding the very best products and startups to show the rest of the world what is possible when new technologies, great design, and entrepreneurship combine to solve big problems. We know that great ideas can come from anywhere.     [continue...]       The news about changes coming to the way healthcare is applied was one of the key themes at last weeks WLSA Convergence Summit. Now Forbes is picking up on the notion.       Healthcare Beware! New Intruders are Coming - Introducing the New Gold Rush As the healthcare industry is transforming and becoming more consumer driven, the "5 Ps" are becoming the hub of the industry: prevention, personalization, prediction, preemption and personal responsibility. As a result, there is a rush of new stakeholders who are entering the game and changing many of the rules. Who [...]     [continue...]       VoLTE (voice over LTE) is getting its push as Verizon Wireless is looking to make the V stand for video. Over in France Bouygues Telecom (who wants to merge with Orange now) is also deploying VoLTE really soon.       Verizon's voice-over-LTE service will include Facetime-like video calling at launch AT&T may have beat Verizon off the starting line when it took its new voice-over-LTE service live this week, but Verizon said on Tuesday it plans to finish the VoLTE race strong.     [continue...]       There's a growing trend towards Voice over LTE. Now we're seeing Verizon Wireless getting ready with their own video calling service.           Bouygues jumps on VoLTE bandwagon   In the latest of a rash of VoLTE announcements, French carrier Bouygues Telecom said it would start carrying the first voice and video calls over LTE later this year with a view to commercial launch of the service in 2015.       [continue...]       If IOT (internet of Things) is going to grow it seems it will need its own network.  A company in the Bay Area, SigFOX is rolling out a LOW SPEED network to do just that. This is a boon to developers as the ideas coming along don't all need LTE as evidenced by what AT&T has shown at their recent showcase events.       SigFox Installing a Cellular Network for the Internet of Things in San Francisco and Silicon Valley    San Francisco is set to get a new cellular network later this year, but it won't help fix the city's spotty mobile-phone coverage. This wireless network is exclusively for things. The French company SigFox says it picked the Bay Area to demonstrate a wireless network intended to make it cheap and practical to link anything to the Internet, from smoke detectors to dog collars, bicycle locks, and water pipes.       [continue...]     AT&T Innovation Showcase Features Trackable Luggage, Big Data Visualizers At AT&T's Innovation Showcase in New York City Friday, the company showed off a variety of projects being developed within AT&T Labs. The event's general theme was the shift to more cloud-based networks and the greater interconnectivity of devices (the horribly titled, " Internet of Things").     [continue...]       MiFis and Dongles/USB sticks are losing traction in Australia, and likely everywhere in the world according to a report. Most of the data that's being accessed is coming from tethered smartphone or tablets it seems.       Australians shunning dedicated mobile broadband devices: Telsyte Summary: Despite ever-growing amounts of mobile data being consumed, Australians are increasingly choosing to tether mobile phones and use public Wi-Fi over purchasing a mobile broadband device, a survey from Telsyte says. Australians are shunning mobile Wi-Fi modems and turning to smartphone tethering and public Wi-Fi hotspots for their internet, new research reveals.     [continue...]       In an effort to aussage the challengers to the new non-neutrality network approach of the FCC's Chairman, the spin machine is at work saying "we'll look into it" surrounding the Netflix interconnection war.        FCC Will Look Into Netflix's Peering Complaints, Chairman Says The FCC will look into issues raised recently by Netflix and other companies about Internet traffic delivery, chairman Tom Wheeler said at a hearing Tuesday, as he faced a bipartisan chorus of complaints about his recent net neutrality proposal.     [continue...]       Time for a good laugh. BlueJeans Network pokes fun at Cisco's latest news in collaboration.       Blue Jeans mocks Cisco's me-too cloud videoconferencing service with hilarious video "Dudes, we forgot the cloud!" Blue Jeans, which calls itself the "#1 cloud-based video conferencing service," is mocking Cisco's announcement yesterday of "Collaboration Meeting Rooms," a cloud-based service that will bring costs down to "tens of dollars" per month. That is, of course, where Blue Jeans has already been for more than a year.     [continue...]

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The Comunicano Daily for Tuesday May 20, 2014

The Comunicano Daily

There's all kinds of news coming out in all sorts of sectors as the USA warms up for a three day Memorial Day Weekend the our cousins in the UK do the same with a Bank Holiday this weekend. Clearly Apple is in the middle of a make over while Cisco begins to turn up the heat to continue to be a force in the Enterprise market....Around the world HD Voice and Voice Over LTE seems to have gotten its start and looks to be taking hold with even AT&T getting into the act in parts of the USA with some tests...Down under, Telstra is linking up with FON to create not only a network of WiFi hotspots but to give their customers access to WiFi in other countries which makes me think Fixed Mobile Convergence may not be dead at all. In other news Sprint gets whacked with a fine over "Do Not Call", some think the Internet of Things is a Bad thing..GoPRO to IPO and a whole lot more is below.       Fake Steve Jobs on Jimmy Iovine as the New Steve Jobs It may not be the headphones or the streaming. Does Tim Cook think Jimmy Iovine is the next Steve Jobs?     [continue...]     Angela Ahrendts' plan for the future of Apple Retail: China emphasis, mobile payments, revamped experience When Ron Johnson finalized his decision to move from leading Apple's retail strategy to become the Chief Executive Officer of J.C. Penney, the executive jumped in his car to drive to Steve Jobs' home and notify the Apple co-founder in his living room of the decision.     [continue...]     Cisco CEO Predicts 'Brutal Consolidation' Coming in IT Sector By Chris Preimesberger | Posted 2014-05-19 Email Print Chambers: "Architectures will make the difference" in developing server, storage and networking systems that will power the Internet of Everything.     [continue...]     Cisco hopes to put a $1500 videoconferencing device on every desk Hot on the heels of its lower-priced videoconferencing gear for conference rooms, Cisco is now hoping to sell personal videoconferencing devices on every company desktop. But at an estimated street price of $1,000 to $2,000 per device, this is a tough prospect.     [continue...]     This year's hottest tech properties have a mobile, cloud feel   What a great time to be in technology, EY report shows. If you are a company immersed in SMAC solutions -- social, mobile, analytics and cloud -- you're an appealing acquisition target, a new analysis shows.       [continue...]     AT&T launches first HD Voice handset for Voice over LTE: Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini Last week we noted that AT&T's first markets for HD Voice over its LTE network would be live on May 23. The carrier still plans to launch the service and will offer a compatible phone on the same day. Customers will initially need the Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini handset to place or receive HD Voice calls.     [continue...]     SingTel to launch world's first full-featured Voice over LTE service SINGAPORE - SingTel has become the first telco here and globally to lead the charge in providing a full featured Voice over Long Term Evolution (LTE) service. With this service, dubbed 4G ClearVoice, 4G customers can look forward to clearer voice calls and faster connection times.     [continue...]     Telstra building a larger Wi-Fi network in Australia TELSTRA is creating one of the world's largest Wi-Fi networks in a plan worth more than $100m, to boost connectivity in Australian cafes, shopping areas, stadiums and transport hubs. Whether you are a Telstra customer or not, the aim is to offer Australians access to two million Wi-Fi hot spots in five years.     [continue...]     Twitter's reported interest in SoundCloud may not have been about the music The suggestion of Twitter buying SoundCloud, as floated by Re/code on Monday, has elicited strong reactions. Some see it as a potential bad deal for Twitter; many have worried about Twitter ruining SoundCloud's low-ad user experience. All this discussion may not be worth much anyway - Der Spiegel reports that Twitter considered the buy but decided against it for now.     [continue...]     GoPro Files For $100M IPO With 2013 Revenue Of $985.7M, Up 87.4% From The Year Prior This afternoon GoPro filed its S-1 document with the SEC, detailing its financial performance as it looks to go public. The company states that it will raise up to $100 million in the offering, trading on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol 'GPRO.'     [continue...]     Sprint hit with largest-ever 'Do Not Call' fine Sprint is paying a $7.5 million fine for violations of 'Do Not Call' requests, federal regulators announced Monday. When it comes to "Do Not Call" requests, Sprint apparently hasn't gotten the message. The Federal Communications Commission announced Monday that the wireless carrier will pay a $7.5 million fine for failing to honor requests from consumers to opt out of phone and text-message marketing campaigns.     [continue...]     Groupon will provide almost all of its merchants with iPad-based cash registers Coupon-providing middleman Groupon is going to provide a point-of-sale device to nearly all of its merchants. According to a press release posted on Monday, the checkout system, called Gnome, will be iPad-based and will cost $10 per month, and any business that offers a deal through Groupon will be expected to use it.     [continue...]     The Dark Side of the Internet of Things | Technoccult     Another one from me at Wired: The Internet of Things is coming. And the tech cognoscenti aren't sure that's a good thing. For years, the prospect of an online world that extends beyond c     [continue...]

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