Panasonic Automotive buys streaming radio firm Aupeo
The deal – the financial terms of which remain a mystery – is important for both the connected industry and the Berlin start-up scene, which has long been holding out for a big exit. Read more »
9 in 10 Londoners will soon have free Wi-Fi in Tube stations
The UK’s second-largest mobile carrier, O2, has become the latest to sign a deal with Virgin Media in order to give its customers free internet access on the London Underground. Read more »
Qubit revamps analytics platform for ecommerce sites
The new version aims to provide a simpler interface for wrangling hundreds of data points per site visit. Qubit has also released research about browser user value, with IE users coming out on top. Read more »
The UK moves to preserve its digital history, paywalled content (and some tweets) included
The U.K.’s legal deposit rules, which require publishers to submit copies of all publications to national and other major libraries, have been updated to cover everything from blogs to tweets. Read more at paidContent »
Jolla’s Sailfish OS SDK installers are now out for Windows, OS X and Linux
Developers can now sink their teeth into the smartphone OS that picks up where MeeGo left off. However, the operating system will struggle to make its voice heard in a turbulent year for mobile. Read more »
Flexiant raises $5.7M to push its cloud orchestration tools into the U.S.
Flexiant targets service providers – particularly telcos – that want to become infrastructure-as-a-service wholesalers. It’s just starting to gain traction in Europe, and now it wants to push into the U.S. as well. Read more »
Yes, you should care about Bitcoin, and here’s why
Bitcoin is a complex subject, but an important one. Whether it succeeds or fails, it represents a crucial experiment in using technology to turn our financial system upside-down, and it will have important consequences. Read more »
Triposo’s iOS travel guides gain “opinion mining” data and faster OpenStreetMap rendering
photo: Triposo
The algorithmically generated travel guides have received a major update on the iPhone and iPad, with the Android versions set to receive similar upgrades at some point down the line. Read more »
Cisco wades deeper into small cell waters with $310M Ubiquisys purchase
Another month, another big acquisition to bolster Cisco’s portfolio for mobile carriers. This time it’s Ubiquisys, the highly-rated purveyor of small cells, SON technology and other operator-focused treats. Read more »
Vodafone shares dip as Verizon denies $245 billion takeover rumors
Verizon has unsurprisingly scotched Tuesday’s rumor of a record-breaking takeover – in concert with rival carrier AT&T, no less – of Vodafone. Voda’s shares have dropped a couple percent in response. Read more »
EE harnesses London cabs to tout its 4G prowess
The operator, which is still the only one in the U.K. to offer LTE, has launched a three-month promotion where passengers of some black cabs will get to surf through a 4G connection for free. Read more »
Google faces wrath of European regulators over unified privacy policy
photo: Shutterstock / vlad_star
Remember when Google drew together all its privacy policies last March? That move has now prompted investigations from privacy regulators across Europe, who say the company has ignored their recommendations. Read more »
CloudSigma goes all-SSD to boost HPC performance in the public cloud
The IaaS provider, which is a supplier to Europe’s performance-hungry Helix Nebula science cloud, has abandoned magnetic disks for solid-state storage, and all without raising its prices. Read more »
Liberty Global buys minority stake in Dutch ISP Ziggo for $810M
Liberty, the biggest ISP outside China, already owns the Netherlands’ second-largest cable provider outright. Now it’s bought a 12.65 percent stake in the largest. Read more »
Egyptian Navy arrests divers over major broadband cable cut
It looks like Wednesday’s internet slowdown in parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia may have been the result of sabotage, rather than the sort of accident that usually knocks out submarine cables. Read more »
Moxtra’s collaborative take on personal information management goes global
Set up by WebEx founder Subrah Iyar and launched in January, Moxtra offers an intriguing collaborative service for students and small businesses. Now it’s also available in 18 more languages. Read more »
What you need to know about the world’s biggest DDoS attack
At peak traffic of 300Gbps, the Spamhaus attack is probably unprecedented. But has it really had as big an effect as is suggested in some reports? Here’s what’s going on. Read more »
Here today, gone tomorrow: director of Nokia’s mapping platform joins SoundCloud
Sylvain Grande, who led the development teams behind the Here mapping and location-based services platform, will start in a new role at SoundCloud next week. He won’t have a direct replacement. Read more »
Ericsson is angling for Microsoft’s Mediaroom IPTV package, report claims
A Bloomberg report claims Microsoft wants to focus more on IPTV delivery through the Xbox platform. Ericsson already provides other IPTV services to hundreds of telcos, so Mediaroom may be a good fit for its portfolio. Read more »
DataStax pushes NoSQL into Europe with new London-based subsidiary
Having realized that 10 percent of its customer base is in the EMEA region, DataStax has launched a subsidiary there to further push its bundle of Hadoop, Cassandra and Solr. Read more »
Babbel raises $10M to step up language-learning fight against Rosetta Stone
The Berlin-based language-learning service wants to be big in the U.S., the rest of Europe and emerging markets. That doesn’t necessarily mean more acquisitions like that of PlaySay, though. Read more »
Less digging and more speed: how Europe plans to get back on the broadband track
The EU still wants to meet its lofty fast-broadband goals despite having had to slash funding, and it sees simplification of roadworks and 4G mast planning as key to achieving this. Read more »
Why the collision of big data and privacy will require a new realpolitik
photo: Corbis / Stanley Eales
People’s movements are highly predictable, researchers say, making it easy to identify most individuals from supposedly anonymized location datasets. As these datasets have valid uses, this is yet another reason why we need better regulation. Read more »
Google puts spectrum database to use in Cape Town white space broadband trial
photo: Flickr / Cillian Storm
Microsoft is testing white space technology in Kenya, and now Google is doing the same in South Africa. The company’s involvement extends to sponsorship and the use of its newly-launched spectrum database. Read more »
Evernote adds document search functionality to mark Deutsche Telekom partnership
Evernote and Germany’s Deutsche Telekom signed a strategic partnership, with the first fruit being a free year’s Evernote Premium subscription for Telekom customers. That Premium offering now has a new feature, too. Read more »
Why Bitcoin poses an interesting ethical conundrum for journalists
Reporters and bloggers writing about a company are supposed to disclose any stock they own in that firm. With currencies, that’s not the case. But what about Bitcoin? Read more at paidContent »
Why the EU is unlikely to crack down on Apple over its carrier contracts
photo: Shutterstock / Lisa F. Young
French carriers have reportedly made an unofficial complaint to EU competition authorities over Apple’s iPhone sales quotas. The Commission is unlikely to see this as a matter for an antitrust investigation. Read more »
Watch out, big CDNs: OnApp and its federation are coming for your resellers
OnApp now offers both real and virtual service providers a CDN business-in-a-box. And this is just the start: expect the same with storage and compute later this year. Read more »
Why Nuance sees the semantic web as a key to smarter natural language interfaces
photo: Albert Chau
Natural language user interfaces show great promise for a variety of situations, but Nuance Communications CTO Vlad Sejnoha sees a need for standard formats if new entrants aren’t to be blocked as data sources. Read more »
T-Mobile-MetroPCS merger: Now all that’s left is shareholder approval
The Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States has become the latest and final regulator to give the nod to the merger, although the resistance of some shareholders may still stand in the way. Read more »
A fifth of cars in North America and Western Europe will be app-enabled by 2017, analysts predict
photo: Life360
A new report from Juniper Research predicts big uptake for in-car connectivity, which may in turn drive big-data-derived revenue for telematics companies and car manufacturers. Read more »
Cloudera scores analytics-as-a-service deal with Germany’s T-Systems
The strategic partnership will see Cloudera’s enterprise Hadoop distribution, along with its Impala real-time query engine, running on top of T-Systems’ extensive cloud infrastructure in Europe and beyond. Read more »
Did British spies shoot down BlackBerry 10 for security reasons? Not quite
Both BlackBerry and the UK intelligence services have denied reports that the Z10 and its BlackBerry 10 software have been nixed for governmental use due to security fears. Read more »
SDN can turn the network into a big data “curator,” claims Juniper
photo: Albert Chau
Speaking at Structure:Data in New York, Juniper Networks product management lead Jennifer Lin claimed application developers working with big data could find great value in the software-defined network. Read more »
Amazon gets into hot water in UK over lewd Christmas card listing
According to the British advertising regulator, Amazon listings are ads. That’s why a listing for a rude greeting card has just resulted in a slap-down for the online retail giant. Read more »
Meet OX Text, a collaborative, non-destructive alternative to Google Docs
OX Text, which comes from former OpenOffice developers, will emerge in a couple of weeks as part of Open-Xchange’s app suite for service providers, although it will also be free to use under open-source licenses. Read more »
Crowdsourced location data firm Grafetee opens up to businesses and enterprise users
Grafetee, which makes it extremely easy to collect and display location-based data, is now offering more customizable, API-driven services to paying users, from bloggers to local authorities. Read more »
Google expands Chromebook availability to six more countries while doubling down in U.S.
Chromebooks are now on sale in Germany, France, Canada, Australia, Ireland and the Netherlands, while in the U.S. the devices can now be bought in 1,000 more Best Buy stores. Read more »
End of an era at ARM, as CEO Warren East retires
East will cease to be ARM’s CEO as of 1 July, and his position will be filled by current company president Simon Segars. Both engineers have been with ARM since the early 1990s. Read more »
European carriers are moving away from handset subsidies, analysts find
The shift away from subsidies is happening in earnest, as the growing popularity of expensive smartphones makes it less viable for carriers to mask the real cost of the handset. Read more »
