Ericsson is a keen HetNet proponent and the Swedish networking giant has just launched a commercial trial of what it calls the City Site “integrated solution” in Nanning, the capital of China’s Guangxi region, alongside China Mobile. The four-meter-high (13-foot) package includes a standard Ericsson base station in this case, along with an integrated multidirectional antenna.

The “Omni Antenna” in question is rather short-range (up to a couple of hundred meters) and relatively close to the ground, which fits in nicely with what Ericsson is trying to achieve here: network densification, a central tenet of HetNet architecture.

HetNets will need to involve not only a variety of cell sizes and types – from macro-cells to pico-cells to Wi-Fi offload points — but also cells at different levels and layers, in order to solve the challenges presented by specific locations. Tall buildings are a challenge when you’re trying to serve thousands of people on street-level, and this kind of thing may be part of the solution.

But densification isn’t the only thing that’s going on here. Ericsson’s City Site design also allows add-on modules for video ad screens, clocks, touchscreen real-time information displays and so on. The company told me this could “provide high performance broadband coverage together with fulfilling a city’s needs for de-clutter, aesthetics and add-on applications like information or advertising.”

This is a good indicator of how we can expect to see our ever-increasing mobile broadband requirements change the cityscapes around us. I’m not sure it really amounts to de-cluttering, though — ads aside, there’s something to be said for discreetly sticking cells on lampposts and other existing street furniture.

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Truecaller is an international phone directory of sorts that covers both fixed-line and mobile phones. It picks up numbers in two ways: by partnering with national phone directory services, and by getting users of its apps to upload their own smartphone address books.

The idea is that, when a user sees an incoming call from a number they don’t recognize, they can use Truecaller to check who it is. The company maintains a community-driven list of known spammers, so miscreants get flagged up quickly.

Truecaller spokesman Kim Fai Kok told me on Tuesday that, while the user-base spans 128 countries, the vast majority of those 10 million users reside in India. Although this was initially surprising, it does make sense given the company’s platform trajectory.

“We developed first for Nokia,” he said. “Nokia smartphones have always been big in India, and when people move onto Android and iPhones they bring the good apps with them.”

The service’s popularity in India has not been without controversy, with reports last year pointing out that some senior politicians were in Truecaller’s database despite having unlisted numbers – this was down to the ability of Truecaller’s users to upload their personal address books, which clearly contained those numbers in some cases. That said, the company points out that its customers use numbers to look up names, not vice versa (unless the numbers come from public directories anyway), making this less of an issue than it may at first seem.

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The Swedish companies, which are already collaborating in an electric vehicle charging consortium, revealed their deal on Monday. It appears Ericsson’s ‘Connected Vehicle Cloud’ platform will be powering in-car communication, apps and infotainment services, and that the comms company will also be acting as systems integrator and managed services provider over the coming seven years.

Volvo enterprise architecture director Jona Ronnkvist told me that this will be an upgrade, rather than replacement, for the manufacturer’s existing Sensus in-car platform. It will be rolled out in all of the company’s cars in the coming years.

Volvo is Ericsson’s first customer to take on the Connected Vehicle Cloud. Interestingly, while Ericsson systems integration chief Paolo Colella told me the platform can be pretty open if the customer so wishes, it seems Volvo’s implementation will be semi-closed. In a release, Volvo said it will partner with “internet radio providers, road authorities, cities’ governments, toll-road operators and others” for functionality.

There have been reports that Spotify (also a Swedish company, of course) will be one of the first services to roll out on the system. I’ve heard this independently too, but when I spoke to Volvo enterprise architecture director Jonas Ronnkvist he refused to confirm or deny the tie-in. He did, however, say the first applications to show up on the system would be infotainment-skewed, rather than for aftermarket sales and services.

And those aftermarket sales and services are going to be a big part of Volvo’s upgraded Sensus. One of the great things about modern cars is the way in which their built-in sensors can pick up on problems before they become serious failures – Volvo is very keen to push the ability to then make online service bookings straight from the car, based on those diagnostics.

One interesting aspect of the deal is Volvo’s choice of Ericsson for systems integration and managed services. In the U.S., carriers such as Sprint and Verizon have been pursuing this role, but it seems Ericsson can offer something extra in terms of time-to-market.

“Ericsson is a global provider to operators,” Ronnkvist told me. “They are a perfect fit to support our global launch of connectivity services. We’re not focusing on this country-by-country.”

However, to some extent Volvo will be approaching different markets in different ways. In some countries the services may rely on built-in in-car connectivity, while in others the driver’s smartphone will provide the necessary internet access.

Either way, the system can always fall back to the customer’s phone – and in any case, it looks as though the apps will be mostly hosted in the cloud anyway, making the technology built into the vehicle less relevant than it might otherwise be.

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For those who need reminding, Minecraft is to digital gaming as Lego is to physical gaming – a sandbox effort that lends itself as much to the demonstration of engineering prowess as it does to standard gameplay. 13th Lab, which also hails from Sweden, is an augmented reality outfit that uses a technique called simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), also employed in autonomous vehicles such as the Mars Rover.

Minecraft Reality isn’t the first attempt to bring Minecraft worlds into the real world through augmented reality, but it’s certainly the most advanced. As this video shows, Minecraft addicts can insert their creations into their environment in a pretty fixed, non-floaty way – all the way from small objects up to entire buildings:

The $1.99 app comes with some Minecraft creations preloaded, but people can upload their own for other users to see when they pass the chosen location.

Now, this isn’t just a one-off for 13th Lab. Indeed, in many ways it’s a demonstration of the company’s new Pointcloud SDK, also launched on Saturday. The SDK is free to download for any developer who wants to build this kind of AR functionality into their iOS app (Android’s on the horizon too) and, according to 13th Lab CEO Petter Ivmark, it’s a vast improvement on the previous iteration.

“Before we had a version which is pretty limited in scale and performance compared to this new one,” Ivmark told me. “We’ve taken everything up a notch, in terms of how big an area you can map. Now we can do full rooms, big areas like that. We’re working to scale this indefinitely, basically. There are a lot of valuable things you can think about if you’ve got sub-centimeter accuracy in the real world.”

The company, which also produces a Pointcloud browser for iOS, has pretty big ambitions. Ivmark talks of making a mobile device’s camera even more important than the GPS chip when it comes to navigating the world. The technology certainly must have impressed Mojang – there have been very few partnerships around Minecraft, despite the game’s extreme popularity. (One, amazingly, is with the United Nations.)

And if this tie-in can get people using augmented reality for more than just marketing-related stuff, all the better.

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With 150,000 downloads of Foap’s iPhone app, and more than 1.6 million images uploaded today, the process was lagging. And that sort of defeated the point of a simple iOS app that turned anyone into a paid photographer. The standards for approval were too opaque to some Foap users. And though 910,000 images have been approved for sale, founders David Los and Alexandra Bylund are now turning the approval job over to its community.

Now all Foap users will be able to review any photo submitted. Once an image gets at least five ratings it will be approved or rejected by the community if the average score is at least 2.5 out of 5 points.

The originally cumbersome approval process wasn’t the only revelation, however. Once proving that their model was working, they wanted to expand the people selling images into Foap beyond their 55,000 active users. The amateur iPhoneographer demographic is huge —  there are far more iPhone 4S, iPhone 4 and iPhone 5 users in the world than had already joined Foap. But the founders also wanted to keep it iPhone only. So the founding pair decided to create a greater incentive for Foap’s army of iPhoneographers to get their friends to join the community too: by offering commission.

Every photo license on Foap costs $10. For every one sold, the photographer gets $5, while Foap keeps $5. But now, if you invite a friend, you get 10 percent of each of their photos that are sold. Your newly invited friend the photographer still gets their $5, though — your 10 percent “commission” comes out of Foap’s take.

But the idea is not to just add anyone who can wield an iPhone camera. It’s to invite people who are actually good photographers. And that in turn is yet another way to improve the quality of images available on Foap — images that are purchased by media and travel companies typically for stock use.

In addition to these feature improvements, on Tuesday Foap will announce it has closed a $500,000 round of funding from Jade Global Investments, based in Seoul. That’s on top of the $250,000 in total funding the startup has from angel investors and a grant from the Swedish government.

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Magine is a service offering premium live and time-shifted TV channels through its iPad, iPhone and internet TV apps and its website.

While in its current beta, the outfit is offering 16 premium channels for free in Sweden. Live streams can be rewound over the air and, from Magine’s conventional linear EPG, viewers can scroll right back to call up catch-up shows up to a month old.

“We transcode all the channels in real-time, then put it through DRM and upload it in real-time to our cloud storage, and out through any CDN,” co-founder Mattias Hjelmsted tells paidContent. The system works on top of Amazon’s S3 hosting.

Although channels streamed through Magine can be slung to an Apple TV box through AirPlay, its pitch is that this is pay TV for an era in which the network and handheld devices have become powerful.

“You don’t really need a set-top box,” Hjelmsted said. Instead, broadband, WiFi and users’ existing devices can handle the strain, taking out plenty of box-related capex cost usually associated with a pay-TV provider.

Through its on-the-cloud mix of catch-up and live, the service also blends TV formats. “The user doesn’t really need to think about whether it’s live or VOD,” Hjelmsted said. “It’s a hybrid between the two.”

To its 3,000 beta users, Magine is currently offering free access to its paid TV bouquet. But, from Q1, the “beta” label will come off and the service plans to begin charging, just as a typical pay-TV provider does, though it will retain a free tier for conversion. “We speak with our users and the willingness to pay is very high,” Hjelmsted says. With channels like CNN International, whose owner Turner Broadcasting System stringently licenses only to paid-up licensees, he will need to be right.

The 35-strong company is helmed at CEO by Erik Wikström, an entrepreneur who previously founded part of the company that now comprises the big European digital marketing agency LBi and who later turned to investing in Asia.

The outfit funded itself until March, when it raised angel investment from friends, family and wealthy Nordic families.

While preparing for full launch at home, the outfit is also aiming to strike deals to operate in the UK and Germany, retaining former Channel 4 future media and technology head Jon Gisby to advise on UK opportunities.

If there is an opportunity for Magine to build an own-brand business, it may nevertheless be challenged to front up against big incumbent pay TV operators like BSkyB, Virgin Media and Sky Deutschland, which are each bringing their bouquets’ channels to similar apps and services and enjoy greater scale at consumer level.

But the TV product itself is simple and effortless to use, much like its Stockholm neighbour Spotify has done for music.

Magine recently hired one of Spotify’s first execs, Andreas Liffgarden, who helped broker the outfit’s important Telia Sonera carriage partnership, as its Sweden general manager. And Mattias Hjelmsted reckons Stockholm is still a great place in which to innovate.

“Why is Stockholm such a good base for technology?,” he asks. “It is a very helpful ecosystem where everyone helps each other to get things going. If you fail, there is a safety net to just pick up again.

“Also, we are in a country that’s not big enough only to create business ideas for Sweden, so you have to create products for international right from the start.”

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That’s how I feel about HowDo, which has just left private beta and announced some heavyweight backers along the way.

The company (Swedish for now, but in the process of moving to Berlin) has an iOS app that lets you create short instructional storyboards. Basically, you use your iPhone to shoot a series of stills, then record an eight-second voiceover for each picture. The result is playable through the app or online.

Here, for example, is co-founder Nils Westerlund explaining how to quickly dry a wet sock.

So what’s wrong with just shooting a video and sticking it on eHow?

“We think videos take too long to create and also to watch,” co-founder Emma Rose Metcalfe told me. “This is exciting as a way to share something.”

True. One of the key advantages of HowDo’s mechanism over video is its chapter-like experience, which lets the viewer skip through the boring bits. It also obviates the need for editing (and, for the HowDo team, it seriously cuts down on cloud storage requirements).

The app is, of course, very social. In fact, it doesn’t offer search or tagging, relying instead on the idea that you will figure out whose guides you find entertaining or useful, and just keep following what they produce.

I reckon search is a serious omission for a service like this, but it’s clearly not enough of a gap to deter investors. Along with the move into public beta, HowDo has just revealed a “significant seed round” (no numbers) that’s led by Wellington Partners and that also takes in serial angel Peter Read and Horizon Ventures, the investment vehicle of Hong Kong-based Hutchison-Whampoa magnate Li Ka-Shing.

“When the concept and prototype was shown to me, I wanted to be part of this project to make this a global platform,” Wellington partner Daniel Waterhouse said in a statement. “There isn’t really anything like this out there and I believe that HowDo, with its simplicity in design and easy-to-use functions, will become a reflex action when you want to share, discover or develop a new skill.”

It’s true that the user experience of HowDo is very, very smooth – as it should be, given the founders’ background in UX design. The service looks good, and it is certainly easy to create and consume HowDo storyboards.

But, as I suggested above, something about HowDo feels ‘not quite there yet’.

That may be down to the fact that eHow and YouTube already have the how-to instructional video down pat. Then again, with its decision to veer away from search in favour of social discovery, it feels like the HowDo founders are trying to achieve something different – something that may only make sense once the service becomes widely used.

What I do think is that the mechanics of HowDo hold great promise for other applications. A citizen journalism app, for example, could also utilize the picture-plus-soundbite framework.

There’s something in this thing. It may just take a while to surface.

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One of the big issues with the concept is the size and wearability of the recording device, which is why an upcoming product from a Swedish company called Memoto is so exciting. They launched a Kickstarter project earlier today and achieved their $50k goal within five hours. At the time of writing they had almost doubled that amount, and are now into a $150k stretch goal phase where backers will get to choose a new colour for the postage-stamp-sized device.

Here’s Memoto’s Kickstarter video:

According to Memoto CEO Martin Källström, who was previously head of the blog search engine Twingly, the company has already benefited from a €500k seed round from Passion Capital and angels such as Amen CEO Felix Petersen. That was enough to start paying the Memoto team – now the Kickstarter cash will see the device become reality.

Not only that: Källström also sees the Kickstarter success as validation for the idea ahead of a Series A round this winter.

How does it work?

The Memoto device measures 36x36x9mm and contains a five-megapixel camera, a GPS unit, an accelerometer and 8GB of storage – enough for two days’ worth of photos, seeing as the device takes a photo every 30 seconds. It will cost $279, or nothing for early backers who give $199 or more.

The user will need to hook the device up to their computer every couple of days, both to upload the photos and recharge the battery. The photos will go onto Memoto’s servers and be made accessible for time-lapse-style playback through smartphone apps.

Crucially for security, the photos will be encrypted and inaccessible even to Memoto’s analytics systems while the user is not logged in. During that log-in time, Memoto’s systems will be able to pick out key frames that represent “moments”, for example the four hours where the user is sitting in front of their computer – these are the frames that will be shown when the user is trying to sift through everything they did on a certain day.

The company reckons each device will generate 1.5TB of data a year (although they will of course be able to delete what they don’t want to remember). Users will pay an annual subscription for the photos’ storage, providing Memoto with a second revenue stream on top of device sales.

“If there weren’t a customized storage service available, it would be a big problem for everyday consumers to keep all the data on-hand in a safe and secure way,” Källström told me.

Keeping memories alive

So, what happens if the user falls on hard times and can’t keep up with their subscription fees? Would that mean the digital equivalent of losing your memory?

“We see that the photos we are storing will be very valuable data and we will do everything to make sure that no mistakes or unfortunate circumstances will cause any data loss,” Källström said. “There will be three ways to get the data down from our storage service: you can download individual images through the app interface in full resolution, you can download in bulk, and there will also be an API where third-party developers can build their own lifelogging apps.”

And what about those patents? Källström reckons the idea of a wearable camera is now well-established enough that there are “no patents hindering new applications in that space”.

Hopefully he’s right. What we’re looking at here is a realization of Microsoft’s old SenseCam project, made realistic – if still a bit pricey – for consumers. Even Gordon Bell is quoted in Memoto’s press release as endorsing the thing.

“A small, wearable, geo-aware camera with pictures going to the cloud is just what we need for life-logging of life’s events. I’m anxious to try the Memoto camera,” Bell said.

High praise indeed – now Memoto just needs to live up to those expectations. We’ll see after the commercial launch early next year.

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TeliaSonera is basically getting hit from two sides. Not only is the economic climate taking its toll on European operators, in some countries like Spain, people are even ditching their mobile phones. But even before the recession hit, most European operators faced the problem of saturation. Every man, woman and child has a mobile device – in many cases more than one — leaving no new customers to sell to.

That problem is particularly acute in TeliaSonera’s core Nordic markets. Finland and Sweden are home to Nokia and Ericsson and have long been hotbeds of mobile innovation and rapid adoption. It was in those countries that device penetration levels first topped 100 percent in the previous decade.

So TeliaSonera’s subscriber base isn’t growing; neither are its revenues. However, its costs are increasing as those subscribers do more with their devices. TeliaSonera was the first operator in the world to launch LTE, and mobile data traffic on its network has ballooned. Furthermore, customers are moving away from TeliaSonera’s traditional voice services to VoIP applications like Skype, cutting deeper into the carrier’s revenue stresses. That led to TeliaSonera’s controversial decision this summer to charge customers extra for using over-the-top communications services.

TeliaSonera CEO Lars Nyberg justified these new policies as necessary steps operators need to take to adjust to the new wireless world order. He said in the carrier’s earnings statement:

“Our customers’ behavior is changing rapidly and we must change our business models from being voice to data centric. As an example, we launched new subscriptions in Sweden in September where our customers can continue using Skype and other mobile IP-telephony services just like before. At the same time, we have adjusted our data prices to better meet the growing demand for data communication.”

In the next few weeks we’re probably going to see a lot of poor earnings reports from European operators, many of which are facing the same issues of poor economic conditions and market saturation.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user kaarsten

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“We are getting about seven petabytes of new photo content every month and that’s growing,” Parikh told GigaOM senior writer Stacey Higginbotham during a Q&A on day two of the conference.

“We get 300 million photos up every day from our users. All of these trends are just getting bigger every day and every week.”

The figures show how Facebook now dwarves dedicated photo services like Flickr, which last year said it stored a total six billion images, and its own Instagram, which has four billion.

Parikh lifted the lid on how the demands are about to get seasonal: ”Halloween is one of our biggest photo upload days of the year – we’ll probably get between one or two billion photos uploaded in a single day.” Consider how Facebook doesn’t immediate trash even deleted images and you’ll get a sense of the social network’s storage challenge.

So, early next year, Facebook will open its third data center, in Luleå, northern Sweden. Not only will the facility benefit from coastal access, there’s also an energy-saving quirk from the near-Arctic location…

“Ten months of the year is so cold, we don’t have to run any chillers,” Parikh said. “It’s’ going to be free air cooling – we open up the windows and cool all the equipment.”

Facebook is aiming to take 25 percent of its energy from clean, renewable sources by 2015. The Luleå data center will be its first that won’t use server hardware from OEMs. Which is bad news for big server vendors like Dell or HP.

The Scandinavian location is also designed to serve a Facebook audience that is 80 percent outside of the U.S. and growing. “One of the hopes is, we want to improve performance for all users in Europe and surrounding areas,” Parikh said.

But the project involve Facebook partnering with local carrier TeliaSonera on an 8,000km fiber ring: “We want to make sure the network connectivity is not going to be a bottleneck.” After coming all that way to the cold, it would be a shame to slip up on the ice.

Check out the rest of our Structure Europe 2012 live coverage here, and a video recording of the session follows below.

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