The deal should go through in the second half of the year, the companies said in a statement on Monday. According to a separate blog post by Yusuf Mehdi, strategy head at Microsoft’s interactive entertainment division, the sale will allow Microsoft to “commit 100 percent of its focus on consumer TV strategy with Xbox” – bear in mind that the next-generation Xbox is expected to be unveiled in the coming months.

Mediaroom is a telco-oriented, customizable IPTV platform that should be a good fit for Ericsson, a company that already sells networking equipment and services – including IPTV equipment and services – to telcos. There are more than 40 existing Mediaroom customers, including AT&T (who brands it as U-verse) and Deutsche Telekom (Entertain). According to the statement, Ericsson will have a market share of over 25 percent if the deal goes through.

As is customary for such sales, the deal will be subject to regulatory approval in various countries. Microsoft’s Mediaroom division employs 400 people, who are based in Mountain View, California.

According to Ericsson SVP Per Borgklint, “future video distribution will have a similar impact on consumer behavior and consumption as mobile voice has had”, and the transferring staff that coming with the platform will give Ericsson “senior competence and some of the most talented people within the field of IPTV distribution”.

Here’s an excerpt from Mehdi’s post:

“We are proud of the world-class engineering and business achievements within Mediaroom. They have a rich history of driving innovation in IPTV. As early pioneers, they built the infrastructure to stream video on limited bandwidth, and today they enable multiscreen entertainment experiences for pay TV subscribers. Mediaroom has contributed to the evolution of TV and powers 22 million set-top boxes today in 11 million subscriber households.

“With the sale of Mediaroom, Microsoft is dedicating all TV resources to Xbox in a continued mission to make it the premium entertainment service that delivers all the games and entertainment consumers want – whether on a console, phone, PC or tablet.”

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Evernote Premium’s existing features include higher upload limits, offline note availability, added note-sharing options and better note search. But now Premium subscribers can also search documents, spreadsheets and presentations that are attached to notes, as long as the documents in question were created in Microsoft Office, Apple iWork or OpenOffice.

At the same time, Evernote also unveiled a major new version of its Android app, bringing a refined user interface and shortcuts that sync across devices, and also the Page Camera feature that iOS users got six months ago.

The initial result of the Telekom tie-in is not in itself unique by any means – many Orange and Taiwan Mobile customers, for example, also got a year’s free Premium access last year. However, the use of the term “strategic partnership,” along with the companies’ insistence that this Premium deal is only “the first part” of that arrangement, suggest more to come.

For Evernote, such deals mean more reach and entrenchment, which comes at an opportune time given Google’s entry into the same market with Keep and the rise of other rivals such as Wunderlist.

For Deutsche Telekom, the partnership is a continuation of the telco’s strategy of bundling the premium versions of popular web brands as a way of making its own services more attractive: it does much the same with Spotify for one of its youth-oriented tariffs.

“At Deutsche Telekom, we count on partnerships to pave the way for innovations,” Telekom business development SVP Heikki Makijarvi said in a statement. “Our goal is to offer highly innovative and unique services with the easiest access possible. The cooperation with Evernote is an excellent example of two companies combining their strengths for the benefit of our customers.”

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That final piece of regulatory approval came from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, which, according to a statement, told the two operators on Wednesday that “there are no unresolved national security concerns with respect to the transaction and that [the committee] has therefore concluded its review”.

The merger has already sailed through other regulatory pitstops, first the Justice Department then the FCC (without the commission even seeing the need to hold a vote). Some institutional MetroPCS shareholders oppose the deal, however, so it’s still not a sure thing – we will see the final outcome after a MetroPCS board meeting on April 12.

If the merger goes ahead, Deutsche Telekom will hold a 74 percent stake in the combined company. It is therefore unsurprising that incoming Deutsche Telekom CEO Timotheus Höttges would become chairman of the board, as MetroPCS revealed on Tuesday.

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While public cloud services, including content delivery networks (CDNs), are usually very reliable, no one is perfect. Outages happen, and as a result some companies find themselves looking into multi-cloud strategies to ensure redundancy (and to optimize performance and cost). The issue is that cloud costs and resource allocation are complex — hence the emergence of a new breed of cloud mediation services such as Rightscale and Cedexis.

DT is preparing two complementary services in this space. The first is NetAnalyze, which draws on the billion network measurements that DT’s “community” takes every day, spanning 32,000 networks in 230 countries. Webmasters can put the NetAnalyze tag on their site and visiting customers will then automatically generate anonymized measurement for metrics like throughput and response time.

Then NetOptimize kicks in. When a customer requests the website from wherever they are located, NetOptimize will use the NetAnalyze metrics to determine which provider will deliver the content most quickly, and automatically route the content accordingly. Pricing for this load-balancing service is pay-per-use. The result, in theory, is better performance and lower risk of outages, and also better price-to-performance ratios, given the ability to hop between different providers according to needs.

DT’s website also touts the fact that such multi-sourcing approaches make it easier to avoid vendor lock-in. The company says NetAnalyze and NetOptimize make it possible to “form a unified strategy across multiple platforms (cloud, data center or CDN)”.

A glance at the NetOptimize portal (which appears to default to Japanese, at least from my end) shows that the service covers numerous clouds and CDNs. On the cloud side, we have locations for Amazon EC2, Google App Engine, GoGrid, InstaCompute, Internap AgileCLOUD, Joyent, PhoenixNAP, Profitbricks, Rackspace Cloud, Softlayer and Windows Azure. For CDN, there’s Akamai, Azure, BitGravity, CacheFly, CDN77, CDNetworks, CDNVideo, ChinaCache, ChinaNetCenter, CloudFlare, Cloudfront, Edgecast, Fastly, Fastweb, Highwinds, Internap AgileCAST, Internode, Level3, Limelight, NetDNA, Ngenix, OnApp, Pacnet, UPX CloudCache and Yacast.

I’ve asked DT for further details of the service, such as when they intend to officially take the wraps off it, and will add their response when I get it.

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Joyn (technically known as Rich Communications Services or RCS) is an industry-wide initiative designed to counter third-party applications such as WhatsApp by augmenting the traditional voice-and-text functionality offered by the carrier. It doesn’t make a huge amount of sense unless your contact’s carrier also supports it – and so far, only users in Spain and South Korea can be sure that theirs does.

Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom are the two biggest carriers in Germany, though, and both now support Joyn. That means quite a lot of people in the country will be able to use the service, the features of which are free. As in other deployments, initial usage will have to be through a special app – the Android version is available now, and iOS will follow soon – while upcoming handsets from manufacturers such as Samsung and Nokia will have Joyn baked in.

It’s too early to tell how successful Joyn will be at this early stage. It will certainly have a tough time in the U.S., where so far only MetroPCS has set it live. In South Korea, though, operator SK Telecom said in February that it had garnered a million Joyn users in just a couple of months since launch.

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Fon is a community of people who submit their Wi-Fi hotspots for inclusion in a global pool. By doing so they become “Foneros” who let others use their Wi-Fi connections for free, and in exchange they get to do the same around the world. Due to ISPs’ terms and conditions, which generally forbid letting strangers onto customers’ connections, this idea works best in concert with the ISPs themselves – BT in the UK was a trailblazer here, and DT is certainly one of the biggest ISPs that Fon has landed.

The DT offering is called WLAN TO GO, and through it DT’s customers who offer up their own connection, will gain access to around 8 million hotspots worldwide. As DT itself has 12 million broadband lines and around 12,000 Wi-Fi hotspots, there’s clearly scope for major expansion of Fon’s reach too – this deal doesn’t just cover Germany, but also DT’s local subsidiaries in Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, Slovakia and Hungary.

For DT, there’s an extra motivation too: if its customers start using more hotspots, they will theoretically use less mobile data – a boon for networks feeling the strain of bandwidth hogs such as mobile video. Here’s how DT CEO Rene Obermann put it in a statement this morning:

“The partnership with FON fits perfectly with Telekom’s network expansion strategy. The astonishing increase in data traffic calls for network optimization and expansion, as well as the implementation of new high-speed networks.

“By the year 2016, we want to set up more than 2.5 million additional hotspots in Germany with the WLAN TO GO offering. With our technology mix of mobile communication, fixed lines and Wi-Fi, we can gradually introduce our customers to the benefits of internet access anywhere and anytime.”

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The deal, which is subject to regulatory clearance, should close in April. If that goes ahead, the customers will be moved off the O2 and BE Broadband brands and become Sky customers. Sky (40 percent of which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp) would then become the UK’s second-largest ISP, behind BT and ahead of Virgin Media.

Telefónica will get £180 million for its broadband business, plus an extra amount — up to £20 million — upon the “successful delivery and completion of the customer migration process”.

Here’s what Sky CEO Jeremy Darroch had to say:

“Sky has been the UK’s fastest-growing broadband and telephony provider since we entered the market six years ago. From a standing start in 2006, we have added more than 4.2 million broadband customers. The acquisition of Telefónica UK’s consumer broadband and fixed-line telephony business will help us accelerate this growth.

“We believe that the O2 and BE consumer broadband and telephony business is a great fit, with customers used to high-quality products and strong levels of customer service. We look forward to welcoming these new customers to Sky and giving them access to our wide range of high-quality products, great value and industry-leading customer service.”

This deal is not hugely surprising, in that O2/BE has a shrinking customer base (as ISP Review notes, that base peaked at 671,000 customers and currently sits at around 560,000). However, it may prove to represent more than consolidation in the UK’s fixed-line market.

European mobile carriers are itching to carry out more mergers, particularly in highly competitive markets. The UK is about as competitive as it gets. With Deutsche Telekom and France Telecom having already merged their UK operations (formerly T-Mobile and Orange) into EE, I would now frankly be surprised if we didn’t see the newly mobile-only O2 UK merge with one of the others. Based on the complementary nature of their recent 4G spectrum wins, Vodafone would be a good fit.

This is shaping up to be a very exciting year in the UK communications market.

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The smart city concept, which is closely related to the “internet of things”, is reliant on pervasive connectivity, drawing on what has traditionally been known as machine-to-machine (M2M) technology to hook up everything from traffic lights to public transport vehicles to the local broadband network. This usually involves the use of cellular networks.

The idea there is to be able to analyze sensor-based data from all these sources so as to better coordinate them and make cities more efficient, both to live in and in terms of energy use. For example, sensors in parking bays might help drivers find a space more easily, cutting down on the emissions that might come from driving around unnecessarily.

IBM has been working on this type of technology for a while, as have other companies such as Microsoft, Cisco Systems and Intel. Today’s deal allows IBM to plug its data-wrangling capabilities into Deutsche Telekom’s established global M2M ecosystem – DT will also handle details such as SIM card access management.

“M2M is a technology with enormous growth potential as it adds real value to our daily lives, both in business and privately,” Thomas Kiessling, Deutsche Telekom’s chief product officer said in a statement. “Our joint Smarter Cities initiative gives us the opportunity to work with cities across the globe and offer them valuable end-to-end solutions that help support public welfare as well as their economic growth in the future.”

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What we do now know, though, is that Hrvatski Telekom, the leading Croatian ISP that is majority-owned by Deutsche Telekom, has just launched a Fon tie-in. The offer was revealed today, according to local blog Netocratic. I’ve asked DT whether this is a precursor to rollouts in other countries, but they declined to comment.

Fon is a crowdsourced Wi-Fi network that came out of Spain half a dozen years ago. The deal is this: if you hook up a Fon device to your router and share a segment of your bandwidth wirelessly with others, you become a ‘Fonero’ and you get to use other people’s connections for free when you’re on the move. (In some cases you can also take a cut of the fee non-Foneros pay for using your connection, but that doesn’t seem to be happening here.)

The idea has really taken off when ISPs are involved — ISPs’ terms and conditions tend to forbid the sharing of connections, so it helps when they buy into the idea. BT was the first big win for Fon back in 2007, in an extensive arrangement that also saw the U.K. provider become an investor in Fon.

In the case of Hrvatski Telekom, customers who take up the offer will be gaining access to Fon’s 7.8 million hotspots around the world, and Foneros from elsewhere will now find more places to log on when visiting Croatia.

However, there seems to be no indication of Fon’s network integrating with Deutsche Telekom’s own, extensive hotspot network in quite as deep a way as happened with BT — with the British operator, Fon was so tightly integrated with BT’s OpenZone network that the two services got rebranded as one (BT Wi-Fi) last year. That probably makes the Hrvatski Telekom deal a bit more low-level, like those Fon has struck with other European carriers such as SFR, KPN and MTS.

Still, it’s a first for Deutsche Telekom, and it could very well be the precursor to deeper involvement with the scheme. After all, the German giant has a track record of using its Croatia operations as a testbed, most recently for its TeraStream cloud-based IP network architecture.

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What’s more, T-Systems said it also plans to make all its business processes “cloud-capable”, and to simplify its organizational structure accordingly. But what exactly does “cloud-capable” mean? Is this cloudwashing, or a real technological shift?

(L to R) Max Cooter, Editor, Cloud Pro; Chris Swan, CTO, Client Experience, UBS; Juergen Urbanski, VP of Cloud Architectures, Cloud Technologies and Enabling Platforms, T-Systems Structure Europe 2012 JULIADEBOER PHOTOGRAPHY http://www.juliadeboer.com

Let’s look at those recent ‘cloud’ contract wins. The big one is a record-breaker for Deutsche Telekom in terms of duration: T-Systems will provide IT services for the Singapore Sports Hub complex for the next 21 years. It’s a public-private partnership with the Singaporean government, and it will involve the provision of CRM, ERP, access control, a user portal and an event management tool.

Over in Brazil, T-Systems will host business-critical applications for the Casa & Video retail chain, in a deal that covers SAP services, card payments and IT infrastructure for online shopping and teleshopping (these are described as “data center services from the cloud”). And in Switzerland, T-Systems has scored a contract extension with air travel service provider dnata, taking in SAP infrastructure again, as well as computing capacity.

These are just the wins T-Systems is talking about now. Others in recent months have also included BP (a Microsoft Exchange 2010 deployment), car-maker SEAT (data center and ICT infrastructure services) and Shell (SAP again).

I personally think it would be fair to look at that rundown and conclude that a lot of it — most of it — just comes down to plain old managed services. After all, that’s what telcos have traditionally been good at, so this is in many ways evolution rather than a transformation.

Nonetheless, it should give you a pretty good idea of what analysts mean when they talk up telcos’ chances in the ‘cloud’. T-Systems certainly sees it as a distinct avenue for the future: the division calculates that that €1 billion in cloud takings during 2015 will represent one seventh of that year’s total revenues.

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