Idomoo creates personalized videos for businesses that want to communicate with their customers in an unusual, eye-catching way. This could be used for bills, loyalty points updates, custom offers or any other kind of customer communications – Idomoo provides its own B2B clients with links that can then be embedded in emails or in landing pages that are personalized for specific customers.

So far, clients have included mobile operators such as Brazil’s TIM Cellular and Portugal Telecom, as well as insurance firm Generali. Here’s the sort of video we’re talking about here:

The round of equity funding was led by New York investment firm Marker LLC and, according to Idomoo president and co-founder Yaron Kalish, it will be used to push harder into the North and South American markets, as well as Europe.

AT&T recently launched video billing for some customers. Personally, I’m not keen on the faux familiarity these kinds of videos exude, but I can certainly see why some marketers think it’s a great idea. And hey, some consumers may like it.

What I will say, though, is that Idomoo’s product is a perfect example of the build-it-and-they-will-come nature of modern connectivity. Video already accounts for a huge amount of internet traffic, but as people’s connections get beefed up it will make more and more sense to take what was previously text-based and lightweight and wrangle it into the video format. Expect to see more in this vein.

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The Google post said that the company is eager to work with the Waze community of users “who are the DNA of this app,” and to integrate the real-time traffic updates and other information that the network provides into Google Maps:

“We’ve all been there: stuck in traffic, frustrated that you chose the wrong route on the drive to work. But imagine if you could see real-time traffic updates from friends and fellow travelers ahead of you, calling out ‘fender bender…totally stuck in left lane!’ and showing faster routes that others are taking.”

This kind of integration is one of the reasons why many argued that Google should try hard to snatch the company out of Facebook’s hands (Apple was also at one point rumored to be interested in the company), since the addition of Waze’s real-time traffic info could make for a significant competitor to Google’s app.

Product team to remain in Israel

On the Waze blog, the company’s founders said that they agreed to the acquisition offer from Google because CEO Larry Page and the Google Maps team “share our vision of a global mapping service, updated in real time by local communities, and wish to help us accelerate.” The founders added:

“Nothing practical will change here at Waze. We will maintain our community, brand, service and organization [and] we will continue to innovate our product and services, making them more social, functional and helpful.”

Google’s blog post noted that the Waze product team would remain in Israel and operate separately “for now.” According to reports in the Israeli media, the issue of moving the company’s staffers to California was apparently a sticking point in the negotiations with Facebook, and a commitment to keep the company based in Israel may have made the difference for Google in the negotiations.

Waze, which has been growing rapidly, has a user base of about 50 million in 110 countries, who shared more than 90 million reports of traffic conditions, speed traps and other data on the network in 2012. The company has raised $67 million in venture financing from investors such as Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Li-Ka Shing and Blue Run Ventures.

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For those who may not have used it, Waze — which won our Launchpad event at Mobilize in 2009 — provides real-time information about everything from road closures and accidents to traffic backups and police speed-traps. The information is superimposed on a scrollable map, and there are also a number of social features built in, which allow users to see and share information, including messages, with other drivers. Waze even provides gas-price data.

Facebook wants to acquire mobile users

If Facebook does acquire Waze for $1 billion, as reported by Israeli media outlets like Calcalist and Ynet, it would be one of the biggest acquisitions the social network has ever made, rivalling the purchase of mobile photo-sharing service Instagram (which signed a deal for $1 billion but actually wound up being acquired for $750 million due to a drop in Facebook’s share price). And the rationale for the deal would be much the same as it was for Instagram — namely, acquiring and holding onto mobile users.

As my colleague Erica Ogg explained when the Apple rumors were floated earlier this year, Apple would also make a good fit for Waze, in part because the company’s mapping app is seen by many as an also-ran to Google’s more feature-rich service — which is why there was such an outcry last year when Apple suddenly cut off Google and switched iOS users to its own maps.

But while Apple would be a good fit, and Facebook has its own reasons for wanting a service like Waze, I think Google would be the real loser if it went to either of these companies, for the simple reason that Google Maps is a big part of the company’s mobile appeal — at least for me, and I would suspect for many others. My reliance on Google Maps was one of the reasons why Apple’s move irritated me and helped push me towards the Android platform, and Waze is good enough that it could help either Apple or Facebook leap-frog Google.

Google has the most to lose

I’ll admit that I was somewhat skeptical about the value of Waze until I tried using it on a long drive from Florida to Toronto earlier this year. I had looked at the service a few times, but it didn’t have a lot of data or users in Canada (it now has about 45 million users worldwide) and I didn’t see the appeal of the social elements. But when I started using it during this long drive, its utility quickly became obvious — and I stopped using Google Maps altogether.

I’m not yet sold on the ability to connect with other users through the app (unless they are friends already, which would make sense if you were on a trip together), but being able to see at a glance where there is a traffic jam — and even what speed people are going who are stuck in it — and where there’s a speed trap or a police car on the roadside was hugely useful. The gas price data also came in handy more than once.

Google Maps also has traffic data, and it is also based on real-time information, which comes from other users of the service who have their GPS location turned on. It is pretty accurate — but I don’t find it nearly as useful as Waze. I didn’t think enough people would take the time to enter information about things like traffic or speed traps into Waze to make it useful, but I was wrong. And Google doesn’t seem to have any plans to try and duplicate that, since it is more focused on automating that whole process, in typical Google fashion.

There’s no sign that Google has shown an interest in acquiring Waze, but I think the company would be stupid not to at least consider trumping Facebook’s offer. It could wind up losing its way, and a bunch of mobile users to boot.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Dunechaser and Waze

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As I wrote earlier this week, LTE-Advanced is a much-abused term, used increasingly throughout the industry to make LTE products seem much more significant than they actually are. Carriers and vendors have latched onto a single technique in LTE-Advanced standard to justify their use of the moniker.

Altair is no exception, though to be fair its new super-chips are more advanced that others. It’s incorporated into its designs two techniques from the LTE-Advanced standard: carrier aggregation, which bonds together disparate swathes of spectrum into one big super-carrier, and enhanced inter-cell interference coordination (eICIC), which will allow small cells and big macrocells to coexist in the same airwaves.

What’s more, Altair co-founder and marketing VP Eran Eshed said that whatever LTE-Advanced techniques its chips don’t support today will be supported in the future through software upgrades. “In contrast to competitive solutions, Altair’s solution is based on a very advanced and powerful SDR (Software Defined Radio) architecture which means that we have the ability to deploy a chipset and upgrade its features as standards evolve,” Eshed told me via email.

Perhaps the most notable detail in Altair’s new chip specs, though, is its use of envelope tracking. It’s an obscure little technology being developed by companies like Nujira and Quantance, but envelope tracking has the potential to significantly boost 4G-device battery life by tempering LTE’s innate power hunger. Eshed wouldn’t tell me whose envelope tracking technology Altair is using, but this is the first implementation of the technology I’ve seen in a chipset.

Correction: I was wrong about Altair being the first to support envelope tracking. Broadcom’s new LTE chip, announced last week, also supports the new technology.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user alphaspirit

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Israel has a thriving startup scene in general, but in particular it’s been a hotbed for mobile infrastructure startups, which have built off radio technologies developed by the Israeli military. The small country produced numerous broadband radio specialists like Alvarion and Ceragon Networks, but lately the startup scene has shifted its focus from building radios to developing network optimization technologies, producing companies like Intucell Systems, eVolution Networks, Flash Networks, Traffix Systems, Vasona Networks and WeFi.

The world took notice of those developments. Last week, Cisco Systems announced it is buying self-healing networking company Intucell for $475 million, while F5 Networks bought network-signaling outfit Traffix in February for an undisclosed amount. Carriers are also getting in on the action. In 2011, AT&T opened up one of its Foundry innovation centers in Ra’anana, Israel, to work directly with regional startups and developers. The IMA also is collaborating with Orange, Telefónica and Tata DoCoMo on other lab projects.

The Sprint project, however, is specifically focused on LTE. Though Sprint didn’t reveal too many details on the lab setup, it appears to be setting up a 4G test network in Tel Aviv, over which network startups can fine-tune their technology and developers can run their apps. Sprint, however, said it wouldn’t attempt to dictate what the startups do in the lab. Instead, Sprint said it is just providing the tools and network frame, while the participants are free to pursue whatever field they want.

“As a complement to our efforts to unlock innovation in the United States, this Sprint-sponsored LTE acceleration lab will allow startups and developers in Israel valuable access to dramatically speed up their time to market,” Sprint CTO Stephen Bye said in a statement.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Jim Barber

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Intucell has developed a very impressive self-optimizing network (SON) architecture, which turns the typically static cellular network into a dynamic system of constantly expanding and shrinking cells that can follow customers as they move between them. It uses distributed network intelligence to track the network’s health and the congestion level of each cell. SON then adjusts the transmission power of each cell, creating the best configuration for both coverage and capacity. Quite literally cell towers start following you.

In the near term, SON’s self-aware, self-configuring technology could produce networks that consistently deliver faster speeds and drop fewer calls. But in the long term, SON techniques like Intucell’s will become foundational technologies for the future heterogeneous network. We’ve been following the Israeli closely for the last two years and we included Intucell in our 2012 Mobile 15 list of most innovative companies in the wireless industry.

Intucell already has a few wins to its name, but none as important as Ma Bell herself. Back in February AT&T said it would implement Intucell’s SON technology throughout its 3G and 4G networks, which surely attracted Cisco’s attention. Bessemer Venture Partners, which took a big bet on Intucell by funding its entire $6 million Series A round, obviously wins big on the deal. Bessemer, a veteran of many telecom startups, ultimately introduced Intucell to many carrier prospects, including AT&T.

On the closing of the deal in the third quarter, Intucell will become part of Cisco’s Service Provider Mobility Group, joining other Cisco blockbuster acquisitions such as Starent Networks.

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According to a blog post from NYT public editor Margaret Sullivan, the paper’s new Jerusalem bureau chief Jodi Rudoren — who has covered Washington and other beats, and moved to the Middle East to start coverage for the Times earlier this year — had a “rocky start” to her new job as a result of some comments she made on Twitter and Facebook. Among other things, she was criticized for praising a book about Zionism, for linking to an article in a pro-Hezbollah Lebanese newspaper (without comment) and “schmoozing” with a Palestinian activist, and for making what some felt were insensitive remarks on Facebook about the Israel-Gaza conflict.

Will every reporter now get a social-media editor?

In her post, Sullivan praises Rudoren for being “responsive to readers [and] spontaneous and impressionistic in her personal writing style.” But those positive qualities then quickly get turned into negatives, as the public editor goes on to say that the Jerusalem bureau chief is also “not especially attuned to how casual comments may be received in a highly politicized setting… in one of the most scrutinized and sensitive jobs in journalism.” Says Sullivan:

“Now add Facebook and Twitter, which allow reporters unfiltered, unedited publishing channels. Words go from nascent, half-formed thoughts to permanent pronouncements to the world at the touch of a key. The result is very likely to be problematic.”

The result of all this is that Rudoren gets what amounts to a social-media editor of her own: an editor from the newspaper’s foreign desk has been assigned to “work closely” with the Jerusalem bureau chief on what she posts to Twitter and Facebook. The idea, says Sullivan, is to capitalize on the promise of social media’s engagement with readers “while not exposing The Times to a reporter’s unfiltered and unedited thoughts.” According to the public editor, this is a necessary step because the alternative would be to ignore social media altogether, and this would be unwise.

But is that really the only alternative the NYT had in this case — to ban its Jerusalem bureau chief from social media completely? Perhaps we should be grateful that the newspaper didn’t fire her immediately, as CNN did its senior editor and veteran Middle East analyst Octavia Nasr in 2010, after a single tweet in which she expressed admiration for a deceased Hezbollah leader. At the time, I wrote about how this showed a complete lack of understanding of the benefits of social media for journalists, despite the potential risks of criticism like Rudoren has been experiencing.

When I criticized the NYT’s latest move on Twitter, a former newspaper editor I know asked me why it mattered so much that a reporter’s tweets might be reviewed and potentially edited (or censored, depending on your viewpoint) by someone at the Times. After all, he said, newspaper stories are edited — so why not tweets and Facebook posts?

The problem, as John Cook has pointed out at Gawker, is that social-media tools like Twitter and Facebook get the vast majority of their power from the fact that they are what Margaret Sullivan seems to want to protect us from: namely, the unedited and unfiltered thoughts and opinions of a journalist. The more you edit them and try to filter out or smooth over all the bumps and blemishes, the more you rob them of that power — the power to connect human beings to other human beings as directly as possible. At that point, you might as well not do it at all.

It’s okay for journalists to be human beings

I understand that the Middle East is a powder keg — even Sullivan herself has inadvertently proven this, by adding a description to her blog post about Rudoren that one Palestinian activist says defamed him and requires an apology. So what is the appropriate response to what Rudoren did in that kind of environment?

The Times seems to feel that it needs to homogenize and sterilize its correspondent’s views as much as possible, so as not to risk offending anyone unnecessarily. But it should be obvious to just about anyone that virtually any comment at all is going to offend someone in that kind of situation. Why not allow its bureau chief to discover those limits and danger zones herself, in real time, in the full view of the newspaper’s readers? Will this be uncomfortable, possibly even painful? Yes. Will it also be valuable and potentially positive in the long term? I believe that it will.

The reason why there is so much sound and fury about media transparency and allowing reporters to express opinions like normal human beings is that the idea of journalistic objectivity has become a fig leaf of epic proportions: readers arguably don’t believe in it (if they ever have), and therefore they assume that journalists have opinions they are simply hiding or pretending not to have. Could that be why public trust in the media continues to be so consistently abysmal?

What the foreign editor of the NYT should say to his new Jerusalem bureau chief is exactly what Katie Rosman has said she was told by a senior editor at the Wall Street Journal about using social media: namely, don’t be stupid. And more than that, he should tell Rudoren that she has his full support in trying to find a balancing act between being open about her opinions and taking heat for them — and that the paper believes it is an important battle worth fighting, regardless of the public flak that ensues.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Hoggarazi and Rosaura Ochoa

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One concrete example of this emerged within days of the Israel Defense Forces launching what they called Operation Pillar of Defense (which came complete with its own Twitter hashtag). According to several reports, the Israeli army asked citizens not to post the details of attacks or troop movements on social platforms such as Twitter, Facebook or Instagram because they might inadvertently reveal the location of specific targets. One political blog that was briefed by the IDF as part of its media strategy wrote:

“Bloggers, tweeters, and Facebook friends of Israel were reminded by our IDF contacts not to say exactly where rockets have landed or even when/where alert sirens have blared… The siren and landing reports are helping the terrorists hone their aim, making it a bit easier to target/kill civilians.

It’s one thing to say the troops are building outside of Gaza, and its something totally different reporting that you saw a tank moving down main street at 3pm… that information can tell Hamas where (and when) a land action may be coming.”

Information flow has been democratized

Anyone over a certain age or with a knowledge of military history will no doubt see the similarities between this and the “Loose Lips Sink Ships” propaganda campaigns of World War II, which warned citizens of the U.S. and other Allied countries that spreading specific information about military attacks could threaten the war effort. But that was aimed at a much smaller phenomenon — namely, people talking to others who might have connections to the military. Now, anyone with a smartphone is capable of publishing not just a few sparse details about an attack but specific longitude and latitude co-ordinates, images, video and more.

Think about what happened when the U.S. Navy Seals targeted Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden at his compound in Pakistan: a computer programmer named Sohaib Athar spent a couple of hours live-tweeting details of that attack without even knowing what he was doing. If the Navy had been involved in a more prolonged attack, those details could have easily helped Al-Qaeda determine how many troops were involved, what types of aircraft, what kinds of weapons, and much more. That kind of data can change the nature of a military campaign, especially when combined with “big data”-style algorithms and mapping technology that is now commonplace.

Every war is now a social-media war

And while the Israeli military may think that it is somehow controlling the flow of information with its live-blog or its Twitter account or its Tumblr propaganda campaign, it is just one stream in a giant ocean of data flowing from individuals who are both observing and participating in the attacks — including soldiers who are posting photos of themselves to Instagram and Facebook, pictures of drone missions that are being aggregated through a site called Dronestagram, and many other similar examples. Everything that is geo-tagged becomes a potential source of crucial information about the Israeli action and the response by Hamas.

Part of my interest in this phenomenon is just the way that the media we use helps shape the world around us, but I’m also fascinated because my father was a Canadian Air Force officer who worked with NATO on designing what are called “command-and-control systems,” including the military version of modern information theory — in other words, figuring out how information flows can affect military strategy.

In the not-so-distant past, crucial information flowed primarily from the top down, and battlefield data was hard to accumulate or distribute efficiently, apart from the usual word of mouth and rumor-mongering engaged in by soldiers. The internet and social tools have altered that structure significantly, however, despite the military’s best efforts to regulate them. And during a real-time campaign, social media may be a great way of distributing the government’s marketing message about the conflict, but it’s also a great way for anyone involved to publish what could be critical details of an attack — and that is difficult, if not impossible, to defend against.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Rosaura Ochoa

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One of the most obvious examples of this occurred very early in the attack, when the Israel Defence Forces’ official Twitter account posted a tweet that warned Hamas leaders not to “show their faces above ground” because the army was about to launch missiles into their area of the Gaza Strip. This arguably qualifies as a direct and specific threat of violence, which is against Twitter’s terms of service — but so far the tweet remains, and the IDF account has not been sanctioned (there were some reports that it had been suspended, but those appeared to involve another unrelated account). In fact, the IDF account is marked as officially “verified” by Twitter.

We recommend that no Hamas operatives, whether low level or senior leaders, show their faces above ground in the days ahead.

—
IDF (@IDFSpokesperson) November 14, 2012

When does Twitter decide to block content?

So far, Twitter hasn’t responded to a request for comment on how it is handling the Israeli conflict and the fact that it is playing out live on the network — complete with photos of rocket attacks, burned-out buildings and even dead bodies (I’ll update this post if and when Twitter responds). The company has often spoken of its responsibility as the “free-speech wing of the free-speech party,” but for the most part that has involved promoting the rights of individual users in the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street protests, not the interests of governments and armies.

Arguably, Israel would be well within its rights to ask Twitter to remove or censor tweets by Hamas, which is defined by the Israeli government as a terrorist organization. If Twitter has selectively censored tweets by Nazi sympathizers after a request from the German government — using the new powers it introduced earlier this year — then how would it justify not giving Israel the same ability to block Hamas tweets, or filter them based on certain geographical limits?

And it’s not just Twitter, of course: the Israeli army has been uploading videos of rocket attacks to YouTube as the campaign has been unfolding, and some are fairly graphic — including one that blew up a car carrying the head of the Hamas military wing. That video was removed Thursday morning by YouTube, and it appeared that the site might have decided it breached their terms of service, but then the company said it had removed the video by mistake and it was reinstated.

Threats of violence and shocking images are also something that Facebook has been known to remove, but for now at least the network says it won’t be removing content posted by the Israel Defense Forces — which includes an app that curates photos from Instagram, many of which the army said were taken on the ground during its attack on the Gaza Strip.

Our new information gatekeepers are inscrutable

But according to Mike Isaac of All Things Digital, the Facebook spokesperson he heard from didn’t say why the content from the Israel Defense Forces was being left up, or under what circumstances it might be taken down — leaving the question open of what Facebook would see as offensive content in the context of a war. And that reinforces the same problem that has arisen before with Facebook and other similar social networks as a platform for speech: namely, they are effectively a series of black boxes when it comes to decision-making around what gets removed.

When YouTube removed the initial IDF video, it wasn’t clear whether that was an editorial decision or one made in error by an algorithm. When Facebook deletes accounts belonging to Arab women who are fighting for their rights, it isn’t surprising that this is seen by some as censorship, even when it might just be an errant algorithm. And while Google and Twitter both put up lists of the requests they get from officials, the reality is that they remove or filter out plenty of content and never mention it. And when Google selectively blocks a video like “The Innocence of Muslims,” there is no court of appeal that will hear arguments about that decision.

So while it’s a great thing to have all these sources of information — assuming that you believe more information is better, even if it is coming from the communications branch of the army — it is almost all being hosted by proprietary services (although the IDF also has an active blog where it has been posting live updates and even infographics). And while they have all expressed their commitment to free speech in some form or another, they have absolutely no obligation to uphold that, or to tell users when information has been removed, or why.

We may have disrupted our old information gatekeepers — newspapers, television, even governments — but in many ways we have just exchanged them for shiny new ones. And they are just as inscrutable, if not more so.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Hoggarazi

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Social media, once thought of as a tool for bored nerds and marketing gurus, has taken on a whole new role it seems — one that could stand to change the face of modern warfare forever. As BuzzFeed notes in its round-up of Twitter posts from the Israeli army (a sentence I never would have imagined typing even a few years ago), the IDF actually warned Hamas guerillas not to show themselves on the Gaza strip or risk being killed in the attacks that began Wednesday morning, and the official Hamas account responded:

@idfspokesperson Our blessed hands will reach your leaders and soldiers wherever they are (You Opened Hell Gates on Yourselves)

—
Alqassam Brigades (@AlqassamBrigade) November 14, 2012

In the hours that followed, videos of rocket attacks on Hamas strongholds were uploaded to YouTube, and the IDF blog carried a minute-by-minute breakdown of what was happening — how many Hamas rockets it intercepted, a strike by the Israeli Navy, and so on. It looked very much like the New York Times live-blog The Lede, except that it was being published by a military force: the front of the website even looks like a traditional news blog or breaking news site, complete with the usual social-media buttons for sharing content on Twitter, Facebook and other networks.

Not that long ago, CNN was the archetype of war reporting with its real-time video of the war in Iraq. More recently it has become the province of breaking-news blogs like The Lede from the Times, with minute-by-minute updates — or of National Public Radio editor Andy Carvin, sifting through live reports from civilians in Tahrir Square in Egypt and using his Twitter stream like a crowdsourced newsroom. Now, we have to add to that the army as a media entity, as symbolized by the IDF’s official live blog, Twitter stream and YouTube videos. What more could a publisher want? There are even infographics and a hashtag.

Blogging pioneer Dave Winer has written about how social media allows “the sources to go direct,” and we have seen the power that can have when a newsmaker adopts Twitter or a blog, the way News Corp. billionaire Rupert Murdoch has or the Pakistani resident who live-tweeted the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. But there is perhaps no better example of taking that principle to its logical — if unpleasant — conclusion than what the Israeli Defense Forces did on Wednesday. How does that change the way that wars are waged, or experienced, or covered by journalists? It is certain to do all three.

In print, this looks like extremists. On Twitter, this looks mainstream. Dangerous how diff platforms lead to diff conclusions.

—
Andrew Katz (@katz) November 14, 2012

Governments and armies have always tried to influence the way their battles are perceived, whether by “embedding” journalists or by creating their own mouthpieces — people like Tokyo Rose and Axis Sally, who broadcast favorable messages as a way of destabilizing the enemy or turning the tide of public opinion (or both). But now, commanders and their political chiefs have tools at their disposal that would have been almost unthinkable even a decade ago: all the same tools that a newspaper or a TV network has, and probably more. Their message now lives or dies by the same principles.

As more than one observer has pointed out, the main issue when armies become media entities is how to sort out the truth from the marketing spin — and how to ensure that the other side gets fair treatment, even though it may not have as powerful a marketing department. Just as NYT media reporter Brian Stelter has said that having Rupert Murdoch on Twitter makes his job a lot harder, the advent of military publishers will likely force traditional war correspondents to up their game as well — and it will put even more emphasis on crowdsourced efforts like Andy Carvin’s Twitter newsroom.

@mathewi Feels like a watershed moment.

—
Jim Roberts (@nytjim) November 14, 2012

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Petteri Sulonen

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