With Azure, Microsoft is trying to strike a balance between giving customers the ease of a platform as a service and the customization that power users need to build tailored applications — both in-house and in the public Azure cloud. In the wake of the Redmond giant’s developer conference, where it detailed more of its plans, it became clear that Azure is striving to be a general purpose cloud offering for enterprises that doesn’t make developers sweat the small stuff or compromise on bigger things. Continue »

Verizon Test

WiMAX Test

Sprint held a happy hour last night to show off the WiMAX launch in here Austin, Texas, so I wandered over for some BBQ and broadband. I want to love WiMAX, but I can’t get excited about the promise of upload speeds of some 400 kilobits per second, which are only a wee bit more than what my Verizon 3G connection delivers. However, on the download side things are decent for a wired network and awesome for a wireless one. Continue »

The iPhone has not only changed the way people consume data on their mobile phones — thanks to its touchscreen, and the myriad of apps that make grabbing such info from the web on a small device easy — it’s changed assumptions as to which devices consume the most data on mobile networks. Bytemobile, a company that provides equipment for carriers to help deliver video and data to mobile devices using less bandwidth, issued a report today that shows the difference in data consumption by device among carriers that have the iPhone and carriers that don’t. It’s pretty significant. Continue »

Even though we’re inching ever-closer towards consumption-based broadband, not all ISPs are implementing metered or tiered plans as a way to punish users who clog their pipes. For example, Verizon plans to may one day move to a consumption-based model as a way to generate additional revenue, not because of any network constraint. Brian Whitton, executive director of access technologies at Verizon, spoke with me earlier this week about that company’s fiber network — and why he believes every other ISP is going to have to embrace a fiber to-the-home strategy, too: Continue »

Salesforce.com today announced Salesforce Chatter, an application that provides a social network for enterprise businesses. Salesforce Chatter incorporates social networking and real-time connection features as well as integrates Facebook and Twitter status updates, making it unique from other enterprise collaboration offerings from Cisco and Microsoft, which revolve more around traditional IM screens, video conferencing and presence awareness inside an email program. For internal use, Salesforce Chatter gives employees profiles, feeds and groups. With the Salesforce Chatter platform, developers will be able to build social enterprise applications that can contain status updates, create Facebook apps, and hook into APIs from Twitter so enterprises can track comments about their brand or from their employees. As employees use more social-networking applications while at work, the security of those applications and how to harness them for corporate use have become increasingly common concerns in IT.

The Asia-Pacific region is getting ever-closer to faster mobile broadband, with network operators in Japan, Singapore, Australia and Indonesia readying their Long Term Evolution networks. Today NTT DoCoMo, Japan’s largest mobile operator, affirmed its plans to deploy LTE in 2010; it also said it would shut off its 2G network in March 2011 since most subscribers now have 3G phones. NTT DoCoMo had previously said it would keep the 2G network running until December 2012. Speaking at the GSM Association’s Mobile Asia Congress 2009, Ryuji Yamada, president and CEO of NTT DoCoMo, said LTE data cards will be ready in 2010 and handsets will be ready in 2011. Continue »

Qualcomm holds about a quarter of the patents required to make the Long Term Evolution wireless standard happen on mobile devices and networks, according to an ABI Research report published earlier this week. Other big holders include Interdigital, with 18 percent; Huawei, with 10 percent; Nokia and LG, with 9 percent each; and Samsung, with 7 percent. Which basically means Qualcomm may not be the patent shark that it could be with the CDMA 3G standard, but it’s still going to make some serious money with LTE. In fact, Len Lauer, COO of Qualcomm, confirmed that the company’s royalty rate for LTE would be about 1 percent lower than the royalty it charges for 3G. Continue »