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Patent Wars: Nokia seeks sales block of BlackBerry devices in US

Kevin C. Tofel — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 16:00:56 +0000

At a time when it could really use a break, Research In Motion can’t catch one. Nokia is seeking a U.S. ban on BlackBerry sales for any devices that use the 802.11 wireless LAN standard, according to Computerworld. The standard is better known as Wi-Fi, and most BlackBerry smartphones use it. Nokia is now asking a U.S. District Court in California to enforce a sales ban; the result of a nine-day arbitration event held in September between Nokia and RIM.

Research In Motion can possibly put an end to the ban before it even begins by working out a royalty rate with Nokia. Per the filing, Nokia says “[RIM] is not entitled to manufacture or sell products compatible with the WLAN standard without first agreeing with Nokia on the royalty to be paid for its manufacture and/or sale of subscriber terminals compatible with such standards.”

The timing of a potential sales ban is about the worst it can be for RIM, which is struggling to rebound from its lost smartphone dominance. Demand for smartphones is on the rise — more handhelds are sold than computers, for example — but RIM hasn’t benefited from such demand. Consumers, and even enterprises, have opted for phones running iOS or Android.

RIM hopes to turn things around early in 2013 with the release of new smartphone products and its BlackBerry 10 platform after a mostly failed attempt at making BlackBerry touch-friendly two years ago. Until that happens, the company needs to sell handsets and add users to its BlackBerry services in order to maintain any of the momentum it has. A sales ban on current devices would blunt that momentum before BlackBerry 10 even arrives.

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Coping With the Loss of Hard Drive Space

Nick Santilli — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 19:33:55 +0000

Does anyone remember when Lacie came out with its Big Disk 1TB drive not that long ago? It seemed like the nerd’s Holy Grail, but at about $1,200, it wasn’t necessarily a “run-right-out-and-buy” scenario. Just a few short years later, you can pick up a 1TB drive for as low as about $60 if you shop around for a deal. Despite storage becoming so cheap, it’s still a good practice to keep tabs on your hard drive’s capacity. With more and more rich media being made available, that available space can dwindle before you know it. I’ll help you arm yourself with the tools to figure out where that space is going and how to maintain and protect it in the future.

Checking Your Current State of Affairs

First, go to the Finder, right-click on your hard drive, and select “Get Info.” Under the General heading, you’ll find the details on your drive’s Capacity, Available, and Used space. It seems like I’m always shocked at how low that Available space number is, despite my best efforts to keep my Mac’s storage well-groomed. Media files (music, movies, photos) tend to be the main culprit, but Applications and other documents and support files may be to blame as well. The key is in identifying exactly what is taking up that space before you take any sort of action.

Disk Visualization

Disk visualizers are the way to go. They give you an easy way of looking at which folders contain the heavyweight files that you may or may not need (or can at least backup to an external drive if your hard drive space is at a premium). Grand Perspective and Disk Inventory X are somewhat old-school in their visuals, but are free. JDiskReport is a long time favorite of mine (also free) but in 10.6, it requires Rosetta to be installed as it’s not a Universal app for OS X. (The OS installs Rosetta for you, but if you don’t want extra background chaff, this may be a deal breaker for you.) OmniDiskSweeper is also free, but doesn’t have much in the way of visuals. WhatSize has been around for a while, and has a nice user interface and some great features to remove files once they’ve been found. It’ll set you back $12.99. Then there’s DaisyDisk, which looks stunning and works very nicely, although doesn’t have all the nice-to-have removal features. DaisyDisk goes for $19.95

Getting Rid of the Extras

As an extra tip, there are some system type files that are notorious for taking up lots of unnecessary space for many users, a major one being language packs. OS X ships with support for many different languages. There are some solutions out there for easily getting rid of those language packs to reclaim some storage space — just make sure you read the fine print so you don’t break anything!

Printer drivers are another thing that OS X comes loaded-down with. The premise is noble — make it easy for Mac users to use nearly any printer, but that convenience comes at a cost. If you regularly use only a couple of different printers, you may want to look into removing the dead weight drivers.

And lastly, a tip for iPhone/iPod/iPad users: iTunes keeps full backups of your iDevice stored within iTunes. I discovered recently that as I’ve upgraded my iPhone hardware over the years, my number of backups as grown, and taken up several extra gigabytes of storage. It’s probably worth curating those out-of-date backups while you’re at it.

Maintenance

Great! By now you’ve hopefully identified many of the files that are eating up space on your precious hard drive. You’ve either determined them deletable, necessary, or candidates for backup. So how do you maintain the space that you’ve reclaimed and/or have left? Unfortunately there’s no all-encompassing solution (that I’ve found yet), but the following are some applications which offer good solutions for keeping on top of your hard drive using maintenance practices.

Hazel (which we’ve written about plenty) can watch folders for you and perform intricate actions that you decide upon and build based on your criteria, and costs $21.95 — well worth it! AppZapper ($21.95) is the uninstaller that OS X lacks. CleanMyMac is a well-rounded system maintenance solution for cleaning out unused system caches, and other bloat-type files that build up over time. It costs $14.95 for six months or $29.95 for lifetime use. A smallish shareware utility called Singular identifies duplicate files on your hard drive. It was updated recently, but the developer’s main website is currently down, and I don’t recall the cost. Lastly is Squeeze. It doesn’t remove files like the rest, but it does work on compressing your drive’s files to save space. It’s sort of magical, and costs $12.95.

Bloated hard drives — whether from your own files, or the system’s — can impact the performance of your system. Using these tools to maintain that available space will not only help keep your Mac running well, but also keep you informed of the space you have, so you’re not caught by surprise when you run low on storage. Good luck waging war on your hard drive!

Nokia Nabs Novarra for Better Browsing on Low-end Phones

Stacey Higginbotham — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 18:08:45 +0000

Nokia said today that it has agreed to purchase Novarra — a Chicago company that attempts to deliver a faster browsing experience for feature phones — for an undisclosed amount. I covered Novarra two years ago in a story about the rush of companies attempting to deliver a build once/run anywhere web site or widget for mobile phones (yes, this was back in the widget days). I said at the time that:

On of the more interesting approaches is being taken by Chicago-based Novarra, an eight-year-old company that is working with carriers including Vodafone, U.S. Cellular and 3 Hong Kong to deliver the web to any phone, even low-end handsets. Novarra offers an appliance for carriers or a service that essentially offloads 80 percent of the data processing associated with downloading a web site to servers run by the carrier or Novarra. This cuts down on the amount of data traveling over the carrier network, and makes load times faster. Content providers such as Yahoo also use it to deliver lighter applications for mobile phones. Novarra powers Yahoo’s oneSearch via mobile.

I also shared Novarra’s stats that showed carriers using the technology reported a between $5 and $15 increase in average revenue per user, which is nothing to scoff at. There are still only 400 million smartphones among about 4.6 billion total mobile subscribers, which means anything that delivers a better browsing on feature phones is still of interest, despite the digerati’s fascination with Android and the iPhone.

Plus, Nokia has long had a huge presence in the developing world, which it may be losing to cheaper handset providers. Building another path to revenue in countries where phones are the primary source for access to the web just makes sense, especially since Nokia can’t seem to pull itself together to compete with the high-end smartphones.

Mobile World Congress: Don't Call It a Phone Show

Stacey Higginbotham — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 15:57:19 +0000

Mobile World Congress, which kicks off Monday in Barcelona, is the place to be for everyone who’s anyone in the mobile phone ecosystem, and increasingly that includes everyone whose anyone in the technology industry. Over the last few years the event and the industry have shifted from being about mobile phones to being about always-on connectivity. Mobile broadband has changed the value of the mobile ecosystem and thus the players who care about it.

For example, keynote speakers this year include a U.S. cable company talking about its wireless deployment; Shantanu Narayen, president and CEO of Adobe, presumably defending Flash; and Google’s Eric Schmidt taking about the search engine’s plans to rule the mobile world and the usual array of operator and handset executives.

So what can we expect from the show? Here’s a list of the big topics and what they means for the end user who just wants to surf the web anywhere he or she is:

Better, faster, cheaper chips for mobile devices. Qualcomm, Marvell, Texas Instruments and a range of other silicon vendors will announce everything from applications processors that can deliver enough power for true HD video to silicon that integrates multiple radios on a chip. For the average Joe this means devices coming out in the next two years will pack more of a visual punch and surf the web at lighting speeds on whatever network is available. I think we’re also going to see more ways to extend our mobile devices, such as pico projectors and chips to enable wireless transfer of content off the phone, but that’s going to still be an early adopter technology in 2010.
New software and gear from deep-packet inspection companies. Wi-Fi offload was all the buzz last year as mobile data use from iPhones and other smartphones threatened to swamp operators’ networks. Wi-Fi offload is still hot, but it’s not going to be the star — policy management is. For normal people this means that pricing for your mobile bits is going to change. Carriers will have the tools from Bridgewater Systems, Sandvine, Camiant and others to parse your mobile habits into the type of application you’re using (VoIP, downloading video, streaming, etc.) and the time of day, and start billing you differently based on those factors.
Phones lose their luster as they gain functionality. This is a phone show, even if Nokia, the largest phone maker isn’t bringing a new one to the party, but while plenty of them will launch, the excitement will be around smartbooks, tablets and a host of other devices that incorporate mobile broadband, but maybe not voice. However, the phones that are launching will likely be faster and cooler than the current hunk of metal and plastic in your pocket, with better screens, app stores and features that make it easier than ever to start surfing the web. Plus, those features will start moving down market into cheaper phones thanks to new chips and software.
New network operators change the market. Your wireless provider no longer has to be a phone company. Cable providers are getting into the game with mobile broadband offerings that in some cases beat out the wireless ones. For example, Bend Broadband in Oregon has the nation’s faster wireless network, even if it’s not used for vocie. And later this spring Cox, a U.S. cable provider, will launch its own wireless network aimed at offering subscribers mobile broadband rather than mobile voice. The impact of these players could be profound. Faster speeds (and maybe that policy software that can help guarantee levels of service) could make VoIP a real alternative to actual voice handsets. Or consumers might pick up a cheap prepaid mobile phone for voice and carry around an iPod touch-like device on the cable network for web inquiries.

In other words, it’s gonna be big.

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Image courtesy of Flickr user andy_c

This article also appeared on BusinessWeek.com

Stat Shot: How the iPhone Changed the Handset Market

Stacey Higginbotham — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:43:15 +0000

The change in the mobile phone market caused by the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 has slightly cut the profits for the handset industry overall, but has most severely affected Nokia and Sony Ericsson, according to data released today from Deutsche Bank. The investment bank issued a note showing how Apple and Research in Motion, the maker of the BlackBerry, garner most of the profits in the handset industry despite their relatively small market share.

The report also shows an incredible loss for Nokia, which saw its share of handset profits cut in half by the shift in the handset market that occurred after the iPhone was released. In 2007 Nokia made about 60 percent of the profits in the industry, and in 2009 it had about 31 percent. Meanwhile the adoption of mobile broadband (and likely the fact that the iPhone is a consumer-focused device only available from one carrier) has helped RIM take about a fifth of the overall industry profits in 2009 as more corporations and people tried to access email and the web on their phones.

However, 2009 represented a bad year for the average industry profits, which the bank believes will rise in 2010 and 2011. Part of that might be a better economic climate, but it’s also likely that after a few years of playing catch-up with the iPhone, the handset makers now have something that can compete with it thanks to Android and more web-friendly phones. The real questions ahead for handset makers are which ones will fall by the wayside thanks to the overall shift in the market? Palm and Sony Ericsson aren’t due for a comeback based on this data and Motorola’s overall share of the profits isn’t much to build a business on.

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iPad: Around the Network

Josh Pigford — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 23:54:11 +0000

In addition to our own coverage of the recently launched iPad, our fellow GigaOM sites have also been writing up their fair share of great perspective on Apple’s latest product launch.

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What’s Next for YouTube? Self-Serve Overlay Ads

Ryan Lawler — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 23:00:52 +0000

YouTube might reach profitability this year, which means it’s time for parent company Google to figure out ways to make it even more profitable. That might happen by making it even easier for small advertisers to build overlay ads to run over YouTube videos, according to a patent filing spotted by GoRumors.

In a patent application entitled “Video Overlay Advertisement Creator,” Google outlines the “methods and systems for creating video overlay advertisements suitable for use with digital videos.” The system basically allows advertisers to specify the attributes of an overlay ad through a browser-based user interface, which would be communicated back to the YouTube server. The server would then provide a preview of the ad in the advertiser’s browser. In other words, it lets advertisers build their own overlay ads, without having to hire an agency to do so.

An image of what Google has in mind is embedded below:

The ability for advertisers to create their own video ads could lead to an increase in the number of small and medium-sized businesses advertising on YouTube, which previously didn’t have the resources to create the ads themselves or the cash to hire someone to create the ads for them. As Google writes in the patent application, “The conventional techniques for development of such multimedia advertisements are complex, requiring resources beyond the means of many small to medium-sized organizations.”

By opening up advertising on YouTube to companies that previously weren’t capable, Google could democratize video advertising business in much the same way that it democratized search advertising through AdWords. It could also create a brand new revenue stream and possibly monetize user-generated content that big brand advertisers don’t want to be associated with.

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What's Left of Nortel Today?

Stacey Higginbotham — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 17:25:56 +0000

Ciena today announced that it had jumped all of the regulatory hurdles in its $769 million buy for the metro Ethernet assets of Canadian telecommunications company Nortel, bringing the company’s year-long dismemberment through the bankruptcy courts closer to the end. According to a Nortel spokeswoman, the company has some patents and its joint venture with LG Electronics left.

The LG joint venture was created in 2005 and offers IP phones and unified communications equipment. Nortel put its portion of the JV on the block in May. The scope of the remaining patents, which include some potentially valuable LTE patents, is unclear. But as we end the year it’s worth taking a look at one of the first victims of what we believe will be an ongoing consolidation of the telecommunications equipment industry. Nortel’s demise brings to a close more than 100 years of operations for the company, which started out in 1895 as Northern Electric and Manufacturing supplying telephones (and later gramophones!) to Canadians.

Jan. 14: Nortel files for bankruptcy with $4.5 billion in debt.

Feb. 20: It becomes clear that Nortel will sell itself in pieces rather than emerge from bankruptcy as a whole company.

Feb. 25: Nortel cuts 3,200 employees, bringing its workforce down to 25,000.

March 31: Radware buys Nortel’s application delivery business for $18 million. Nortel bought that business in 2000 for $7 billion.

July 28: Nortel gets court approval to sell its CDMA business and LTE Access assets to Ericsson for $1.13 billion after some drama involving a bid by Research in Motion, the maker of the BlackBerry. Nokia Siemens Network was also a potential bidder. The deal is completed on Nov. 13.

August 10: Nortel’s CEO Mike Zafirovski quits.

Nov. 23: Ciena beats out Nokia Siemens Networks for Nortel’s metro Ethernet assets with a bid of $769 million.

Nov. 25: Ericsson and Kapsch emerge as successful joint bidders for Nortel’s global GSM/GSM-R business, and on Dec. 2 received court approval to pay $103 million in cash for the assets.

Dec. 8: Nortel completes the sale of some of its Carrier Networks business associated with the development of next generation packet core network components to Hitachi for $10 million.

Dec. 18: Nortel completes the sale of its global Enterprise Solutions business, as well as its government equipment business and DiamondWare subsidiary, to Avaya for $900 million.

Dec. 23: Nortel agrees to sell its Carrier VoIP business to privately held Genband for $282 million.

Image courtesy of Ashwin Kumar’s Flickr stream.

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Blame the Nokia-Apple Spat on Convergence

Stacey Higginbotham — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 18:52:04 +0000

Nokia N97 and iPhone 3GS

Apple today filed a countersuit against Nokia, which sued it back in October over alleged patent infringement on several forms of wireless technologies that Nokia licenses to others. Apple’s retaliatory suit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court in Delaware and covers 13 patents Apple holds, illustrates in legal language how the convergence of wireless voice and personal computing is shaking up the mobile market.

Nokia, a leader in wireless voice, and Apple, a leader in personal computing, both have patents related to the technology needed to make today’s smartphones, according to the filing. Apple is arguing that Nokia won’t license its wireless patents to Apple on fair and reasonable terms, and that Nokia is using its wireless patents as a way to force Apple into a cross-licensing deal around its computing technology. From the suit:

This attempt by Nokia to leverage patents previously pledged to industry standards is an effort to free ride on the commercial success of Apple’s innovative iPhone while avoiding liability for copying the iPhone and infringing Apple’s patents.

TheAppleBlog has more on the spat, but it appears to be little more than a bargaining tactic since both parties have something worth licensing. The question is whether Nokia is asking for too much, or Apple is offering to pay too little. As companies increasingly put out connected devices and bring computing to even more of our existing gadgets, expect more of these types of suits and cross-license spats. Especially if one player feels it’s at a disadvantage in the changing market.

Image courtesy of William Hook via Flickr.

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Like That Little Engine, Nokia Siemens Thinks It Can Make It

Stacey Higginbotham — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:55:53 +0000

Nokia Siemens, a telecommunications equipment joint venture, plans to lay off up to 5,700 employees, or 7-9 percent of its work force, in order to cut about $740 million in costs. The company, which is a joint venture between Siemens and cell phone maker Nokia, will also whittle down to three business units from five. But you wouldn’t really get it after reading the headline on its press release which states, “Nokia Siemens Networks Targets Improved Financial Performance, Return to Growth.”

Look, I get that you probably don’t want to title your press release, “We’re Laying off 5,700 Workers,” but the headline chosen is too divorced from reality for my tastes. Emphasize the positive by all means, but the title amounts to wishful thinking, especially given the incredible difficulties the entire telecommunication equipment market faces. Remember Nortel? Like that “Little Engine that Could,” Nokia Siemens may think it can, but this isn’t a children’s story, and it might not have a happy ending.

With intense competition coming from European competitors Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson and even more fierce rivalry from the upstart Asian vendors, Huawei, and ZTE, selling telecom equipment is getting more cutthroat. The company is dragging down its backers, with Nokia marking down $1.4 billion of its investment in the joint venture during the most recent quarter, despite efforts a year ago to cut costs. Cutting costs is only going to take Nokia Siemens so far, and it’s not likely to get it over the hill into profitability and growth.

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