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Mobile Sports Report TechWatch: Facebook Phone, Dell Tablet Specs?

May 29, 2012 by

Toshiba has announced that it is getting out of the netbook market and will not be offering new ones, at least in the United States. This follows a trend that has been developing for some time as others have already discontinued their efforts, including Dell.

Toshiba said that it will instead be focusing on the ultrabook, an emerging class of notebooks that feature light, sleek form factors coupled with powerful processors, according to Liliputing. I suspect that the netbook category is going to be killed, at least in the US, by ultrabook from one direction and tablets in the other.

Dell Tablet specs leaked?
I am always a bit leery of publishing leaked information unless it was leaked to me personally but the piece over at Neowin looks pretty compelling. It appears that Dell is developing its forthcoming Windows 8 tablet around Intel’s Clover Trail dual core Atom processor and that the device will have a 10.1-inch HD display with 1366 x 768 resolution.

Other features include 2GB of memory and as much as 128 GB of SSD storage. An interesting feature looks to be a removable battery that allows users to choose between one that has a 6-8 hour life and a larger one that has 10-12 hour life.

Apple’s response to DOJ a good read
While I have not read the legal documents the people at Forbes have gone to the trouble and bring out some marvelous quotes from Apple’s filings and some interesting commentary about how they foresee the case progressing.

Not being a lawyer hinders any real objective opinion on my part but I think that the author of the piece, Philip Elmer-DeWitt, makes a pretty compelling argument on Apple’s side. Head over for his piece and a like to the Apple filing.

Crowdfunding site flaws?
I increasingly talk about crowd funding as it is an interesting method for small developers to get the initial funding needed to launch a product. However there is another side to the equation that is clearly brought out by Gizmodo — the failures.

It points out that companies that you see on its front page are ones that are getting funding, while ones that fail, or are on their way to failure, seem to completely disappear from the site, as it only wants to show winning or potential winning offerings.

Since, according to the article, Kickstarter gets a percentage of the amount pledged; this makes sense since only projects that get 100% of their request get anything. To see why some of them might have failed head over to Mashable for a short piece on crowd funding mistakes.

The Patent Wars continue

Microsoft wins round versus Motorola in Germany
Apparently Microsoft owns patents relating to how you splint one log text message into two smaller ones and Motorola has violated those patents. A German court ruled that Motorola’s technology to permit this feature infringes on Microsoft’s patents. It was reported that while Microsoft could ban Motorola products in the country it is instead seeking a license fee.

The two have been going at it tooth and nail for some time in the patent department with both sides scoring what appear to be major victories. I wonder of the license fee is the first step towards resolving their issues.

Apple tops in mobile PCs
The preliminary results are in for the NPD DisplaySearch’s Quarterly Mobile PC Shipments and Forecast Report is in and to the probably surprise of no one Apple is the top dog in this field. According to the report Apple shipped approximately 17.2 million mobile PCs in Q1’12.

This is a 118% increase over the same period from a year ago and of the total iPads represented 80% of Apple’s total, or 13.6 million units. For the industry as a whole the results were nowhere near as good with shipments growing 30% year to year, reaching 76.2 million for the quarter.

Cisco kills Tablet
In a move that surprised me because the product never appeared on my radar in the first place, Cisco is killing its Cius tablet. The networking giant had developed and introduced the tablet a year ago with the stated purpose of pioneering the business market with the product.

The tablet featured a 7-inch display and had a $750 list price. Sold via its channel partners it was obviously hurt by lower cost offerings from rivals that businesses increasingly allowed employees to bring in from home.

Facebook building smartphone?
The New York Times has reported that Facebook is once again dipping its toe into the smartphone market and has a project underway that should see a new product available in the market sometime next year.

According to the article Facebook has been actively hiring hardware and software engineers including a number that had worked on Apple’s iPhone. It had been reported a few years ago that Facebook had a development project for a phone but killed it.

Filed Under: Amazon, Android, Apple, Apps, Cisco, Dell, Facebook, Kickstarter, Mashable, Microsoft, Motorola, Smartphone, Startup, Tablets Tagged With: , , , , ,

Goodell: Wi-Fi Needed in Every NFL Stadium

May 24, 2012 by

At a press conference Tuesday NFL commissioner Roger Goodell left no doubts about where the league stands on Wi-Fi in stadiums: He wants league-wide networks in every NFL venue, so that fans “don’t have to shut down” their mobile devices.

Too bad the video from the NFL isn’t embeddable (hint, guys: sharing is good) but you can view it here to get Goodell’s no-questions-about-it take on Wi-Fi in stadiums as a neccessity. If you listen to the video you hear Goodell talk about all the things the NFL wants its fans to be able to experience digitally while at games — like access to the Red Zone channel, other highlights, and social media.

The devil, of course, is in the details and when asked about how much it would cost to equip every stadium with Wi-Fi, Goodell joked, telling the questioner “you sound like an owner.” While the cost of putting a wireless network will vary at each location, Major League Baseball has a similar impetus and has roughed out the cost at around $3 million per stadium, which is pretty much in line with what we’ve heard and seen.

While some NFL stadiums have Wi-Fi in various areas, like luxury suites, we’re not aware yet of an NFL venue with full blown Wi-Fi, like baseball’s AT&T Park in San Francisco. Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis got a bunch of upgrades for the Super Bowl but that was mostly quick-fix stuff like DAS, small cell antennas that are mainly a band-aid type solution for bandwidth and not something like full-blown Wi-Fi that can handle, say, multiple video streams.

As such Goodell admitted the Wi-Fi initiative wasn’t something that would arrive by the 2012 season, though there might be some test situations where Wi-Fi gets unveiled. Certainly there is no shortage of service providers like AT&T and Verizon who are interested in stadium networking, as are gear suppliers like Cisco, Xirrus, Meru Networks, and possibly others like Brocade, which has apparently signed a deal to be the networking supplier for the new San Francisco 49ers stadium.

The good news is for the industry and for fans — with approval from the top of the league, Wi-Fi in stadiums is now a priority. App developers, integrators and others — start your innovation engines now.

Filed Under: AT&T, Baseball, Boston Red Sox, Cisco, DAS, Live Sports Video Consumption, Major League Baseball, NFL, NFL Network, San Francisco Giants, Wi-Fi Tagged With: , ,

ExteNet Systems Scores Miami DAS Deal, Becoming a Player in Stadium Network Market

April 23, 2012 by

When it comes to in-stadium wireless networks, it turns out that teams and wireless providers aren’t the only players in the game. ExteNet Systems, a Lisle, Ill. startup, is rapidly scoring points by playing the “middleman” role, building out stadium networks at no cost to teams and making money by renting network access to the carriers.

Last week ExteNet announced it was the builder of the new Distributed Antenna System (DAS) installation at the new Marlins Park in Miami, with Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile USA already signed up as customers. And it turns out that ExteNet was also behind Verizon’s DAS deployment in and around Lucas Oil Stadium for the recent Super Bowl XLVI. Those deployments are just part of a new stadium-business push from ExteNet, which also put in a DAS system at the “Big House,” the huge bowl stadium at the University of Michigan, last fall.

Though ExteNet also provides in-building networks to some more traditional markets — like health care and hospitality, where large groups of people are seeking network access inside a confined space — it’s looking to add more stadium customers in the near future. According to CEO Ross Manire, a veteran of the networking industry, the boom in powerful handheld devices has created a “perfect storm” of capacity consumption that can’t be addressed by the historical cellular antenna architectures.

“You used to just worry about voice coverage,” said Manire in a phone interview last week. “But phones are really data terminals now, and the question becomes how do you manage strain on networks [at stadiums]. “In the past you may have been able to get a voice signal from a cell tower several blocks away. That doesn’t work now.”

The privately held ExteNet, which received a $128.4 million funding round at the start of 2010, thinks it can help both carriers and venue owners by providing “middleman” network services. The basic business model, Manire said, has ExteNet building and owning the stadium network, which it deploys at no cost to the team or building owners. It then charges carriers a “node activation fee,” a sort of monthly rent to let their services ride on the network.

If you’re not familar with how a DAS works, it’s essentialy a bunch of small cellular antennas that are mounted on ceilings and walls inside buildings, instead of on huge towers like traditional cellular antennas. A DAS network administrator provides normal cellular connectivity to users, and then connects those signals to the appropriate cellular vendor on the network’s back end. DAS deployments can also add Wi-Fi antennas to their infrastructure mix. ExteNet, like many DAS operators, can connect its back end to any number of cellular networks, meaning that fans don’t have to be a customer of a certain provider to get better in-stadium service.

The openness of ExteNet’s design may make it a better choice for stadium operators than an internal network designed and owned by a single carrier, since fans wouldn’t have to be customers of a specific carrier to get better service. ExteNet runs a network operations center 24/7 to provide support to all its networks, and signs a service level agreement (SLA) with both the stadium owner and its cellular partners to give both parties what they really want — happier customers.

“We’re seeing an incredible amount of attention from stadium and team owners, who need to provide a good [wireless] experience,” Manire said. “Fans believe they should be able to connect wherever they go. Of course that’s easier said than done.”

But now ExteNet may be part of making that connectivity a reality for more fans, going forward.

Filed Under: 4G LTE, AT&T, Cisco, DAS, Super Bowl, Wi-Fi Tagged With: , , , ,

Niners CEO Jed York Tweets: Networking Vendor Brocade is New Stadium ‘Networking Partner’

April 20, 2012 by

No more details than what we know on Twitter, but according to Niners CEO Jed York, networking vendor Brocade is the first “networking sponsor” of the new Niners stadium. The team broke ground for the new facility on Thursday, digging those ceremonial shovelfuls in the shadow of Great America in the Silicon Valley city of Santa Clara.

Here’s York’s tweet:

No word yet whether or not Brocade will be the title sponsor of the stadium but it is a huge loss for networking vendor competitor Cisco Systems, whose main campus is right down the street from the new stadium site. Brocade’s main Silicon Valley office is also close to the new Niners stadium. But this is a potentially big loss for Cisco, which has been trying to find a place at the forefront of Bay Area sports (you may remember Cisco’s failed efforts to help build a new stadium for the Oakland A’s in the East Bay city of Fremont) and has a special business group dedicated to building out in-stadium networks.

More as we hear more. Anyone inside Brocade (or Cisco), please let us know what you are hearing.

UPDATE: We replyed to Jed’s tweet, asking for more details… not much yet apparently. But it sure sounds network-based to us:

Filed Under: Cisco, NFL, Wi-Fi

Verizon Used Cisco Gear for Super Bowl Wi-Fi Network

February 15, 2012 by

Cisco Sports and Entertainment Solutions Group SVP and GM David Holland

Nobody’s talking yet about how much traffic it carried, but from a recent Cisco blog post we learned that Verizon’s Wi-Fi network used inside Lucas Oil Stadium for Super Bowl XLVI was a Cisco Connected Stadium deployment.

David Holland, the Sports and Entertainment Solutions Group SVP and GM at Cisco, revealed the partnership Tuesday in a company blog post where he claimed that the Super Bowl was the first time fans had used an in-stadium Wi-Fi network for the big game. Cisco representatives, however, declined to say just how well that network was used during the Giants’ win over the Patriots. If Verizon ever credited Cisco for being the gear behind the Wi-Fi network at the stadium, we haven’t seen it.

Verizon has also remained mum on just how much traffic traversed its in-stadium Wi-Fi network for the big game. In its follow-on press release Verizon did note that its own customers used “2.75 times more data than last year’s Super Bowl in Dallas and 4.5 times more data than a regular-season game at the stadium,” but without hard numbers it’s hard for us to judge how big a deal that really was.

Verizon did note that other cellular customers, and not just Verizon customers, were able to use the in-stadium Wi-Fi network during the game. And neither Sprint nor T-Mobile has yet to reveal any discrete traffic numbers from the game, unlike AT&T which provided a very detailed description of the cellular traffic its customers generated.

So the question of “how much wireless data did Super Bowl fans really use” remains unanswered. But as Holland said in his blog, it’s a practice that will quickly go from being unique to mainstream:

Most importantly it shows that this is headed mainstream, and a tipping point has been reached. Just as people walk into an airport today and expect to be connected to a Wi-Fi network, so fans in stadiums around the world are beginning to look for and demand the same thing.

Filed Under: 4G LTE, AT&T, Cisco, NFL, NFL Mobile, Sprint, Super Bowl, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless, Wi-Fi Tagged With: , , ,

LTE iPads, More Mobile Data: Who’s Going to Pay for All This?

February 14, 2012 by

Two stories in the news today — the potential of LTE-enabled iPads and new projections for mobile data growth — seemed to me to be closely related and both lacking a final explanation: Who’s gonna pay for all the new toys and bandwidth?

As sports fans know, the Apple iPad and its imitators are great devices for watching sports on the go. The screen is big enough to approximate a TV experience, and the device is light enough to not be a bother. And the 4G LTE networks from Verizon Wireless, AT&T and soon from Sprint will make mobile video better thanks to faster download speeds and overall better behind-the-scenes technology.

But my question again — who’s going to pay for all this? At what point do we decide we’ve got enough devices, and that we’re not going to pay premiums just to get content whenever we want it? Are the devices and services so alluring that consumers will simply find a way to budget for them, or are they giving other things up from their disposable income buckets? Or will we see a backlash soon?

For all the heat the two stories have generated in the tech news world, my guess is that both are slightly overrated. Since LTE data contracts still remain fairly expensive — right now Verizon is charging $80 a month for 10 GB of data, its highest plan for tablets — I think folks might buy an LTE-enabled iPad for the convenience but will probably go for the lower-priced plans and use Wi-Fi whenever they can, especially when watching things like sports. Some smart guy already reported that Verizon’s 4G LTE phones aren’t big sellers because there isn’t anything compelling enough to make people pay a premium for the service. I think the LTE iPads will follow a similar lukewarm adoption curve.

On the mobile-data projections there are already some signs that Cisco’s predictions have shot past reality; AT&T, for example, said that its most recent figures showed data use growing more slowly than previously predicted. With cellular services prices expected to remain constant or rise even higher, my guess is that people may want to consume mobile data at the rate Cisco predicts but budgetary pressure will keep it from happening until lower-cost Wi-Fi networks reach out to more places than coffee shops and airport waiting lounges.

What will be really interesting to see is what happens if the LTE iPads fly off the shelves and crowd the networks, bringing back the original iPhone network jams. Think that won’t happen? Want to bet on it?

Filed Under: 4G LTE, Apple, AT&T, Cisco, iPad, iPhone, Verizon Wireless, Wi-Fi Tagged With: , , , , , ,
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