Alcatel, Elle launch trendy phones

Two leading French brand names, telecommunications giant Alcatel and fashion label Elle, have come together to launch the first fashionable lifestyle mobile phone in Malaysia and Asia-Pacific.
Alcatel marketing director for the Asia Pacific region, Gregory Fermanian, said both companies planned to launch more innovative products in Malaysia, which he considered as a mature market.
“The partnership with Elle is the first of our trendy line of phones to hit this market,” he said during the recent product launch.
The new phone, which incorporates stylish features, such as a make-up mirror for women, has been made available locally from end-March.
Fermanian said the phone was a hit in Europe since its launch last year, and would be introduced next in Thailand after its inaugural Asia-Pacific debut in Malaysia.
Called the Elle No 1 Glam-Phone, the mobile phone caters to needs of career-minded women, according to Alcatel and Elle.
Retailing at RM799 for mobile phone subscribers and RM699 for Maxis members, the phone is powered by Maxis Hotlink and available through its agents and outlets.
“Alcatel envisages that the mobile phone market in Malaysia is now ready for a different appeal that targets the fashion industry,” Fermanian said.
“We will be looking at the response to this product for the possibility of further launches with products of a fashionable outlook,” he added.

Linux Looking Like the Enterprise Way to Go

"With the advent of v2.6, [Linux] has become much more reliable, scalable and robust," says Hans Sparkes, head of enterprise Linux with IT services company Unisys. "Before that it just wasn't good enough. A year ago, Gartner was saying 'evaluate it'; now they're saying 'implement it.'"

The open source Linux operating system is making steady inroads into the world's application servers , where it's supplanting Unix and Windows as the environment of choice. That's received wisdom, but what's the reality?

A study by research group Peerstone at the end of 2004 showed that while two-thirds of ERP (enterprise resource planning) users were running their software on Unix platforms, that operating system (OS) -- and Windows too -- is slowly losing ground to Linux variants.

Intel's Server Rise

At the time, 20 percent of ERP users expected to ditch Unix, and most of those were going toward open source. That fact is recognized by ERP suppliers like SAP (NYSE: SAP) and Oracle (Nasdaq: ORCL) , which have mostly made Linux a key plank of their software strategies.

So, why are people drifting away from Unix toward Linux? Has Linux matured enough to be considered for mission-critical manufacturing systems?

Time was when Unix ruled the roost in high-performance servers for key business applications. In fact, it still has the bulk of the market, but there have been changes in recent years that are eroding its dominance. The first of these is the rise of the Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) architecture.

"Intel inside" may be a familiar slogan for desktop PCs , but the same processor architecture has become widely used in business systems where its standard nature has led to it being spoken of as a commodity. That's in contrast to Unix processors, which are unique to each server supplier, as are flavors of the Unix OS.

Simpler but Not Free

Driven by the evolution toward commodity hardware , Microsoft's (Nasdaq: MSFT) OSes had begun to erode Unix's dominance. But then came Linux. Originally derived from Unix, Linux was developed with similar high-performance characteristics and can run on Intel processors. However, until just a couple of years ago, it was only suitable for non-mission critical applications such as Web serving.

That changed in 2003 with the development of version 2.6 of the Linux kernel -- the core of the OS -- which could now run on servers with 32 processors instead of just two or four. That's what made high-performance application serving possible.

"With the advent of v2.6, it has become much more reliable, scalable and robust," confirms Hans Sparkes, head of enterprise Linux with IT services company Unisys (NYSE: UIS) . "Before that it just wasn't good enough. A year ago, Gartner was saying 'evaluate it'; now they're saying 'implement it.'"

The impulse for such a ringing endorsement is that Linux's ability to make use of commodity computing platforms has brought serious potential for savings. Linux is often thought of as "free," but what is actually free is the kernel. To use it for application serving, you have to buy a "distribution," which is a full-blown OS developed on top of the kernel. The real advantage of Linux, however, comes from the potential to simplify your infrastructure and its management.

Just Do It

"With Linux being available on Intel boxes, you can break the link between the OS and the hardware," says Sparkes. "Many businesses have lots of servers inherited from many stages in their life, but by standardizing on Linux on Intel, you can take the numbers down dramatically and achieve a lower cost per transaction."

One company that has taken advantage of Linux's ability to replace Unix is Shrewsbury-based automotive pressings manufacturer Stadco -- something of an early adopter. It was back around the turn of the millennium that the company decided to trial Linux for its QAD ERP software. At the time, the company was involved in a joint venture that was setting up a plant in Brazil, and this was the perfect opportunity to try Linux, says Group Systems Manager David Lloyd.

"It proved successful," he says. "It didn't fail, was robust and performed well, so we decided that the next new business we established would be run on Linux."

Now the company runs QAD on Linux at three of its UK plants and one in Germany, with its newly opened plant in Powys being the latest. At first, it used Red Hat (Nasdaq: RHAT) Linux distribution but has now standardized on IBM (NYSE: IBM) rack-mounted servers, which come with SuSe Linux.

"In moving from Red Hat to SuSe, we only found one piece of scripting that didn't work -- and we put that right within hours," says Lloyd. "We've used it to run mission critical servers, and it's proved itself."

In fact, so impressed was Stadco that the company has since also developed browser-based engineering management, estimating, preventative maintenance and breakdown management systems all on Linux. Some tribute

Intel's New Pentium D Equipped with DRM Capability

Digital content control now may be possible through your PC's hardware.

Microsoft and the entertainment industry's holy grail of controlling copyright through the motherboard now comes closer as Intel said it is embedding digital rights management within in its latest dual-core processor Pentium D and accompanying 945 chip set.

Officially launched worldwide on May 26, the new offerings come digital-rights-management-enabled and will, at least in theory, allow copyright holders to prevent unauthorized copying and distribution of copyrighted materials from the motherboard rather than through the operating system as is currently the case.

While Intel steered clear of mentioning the new DRM technology at its Australian launch of the new products, Intel's Australian technical manager Graham Tucker publicly confirmed Microsoft-flavored DRM technology will be a feature of Pentium D and 945.

"[The] 945g [chip set] supports DRM, it helps implement Microsoft's DRM ... but it supports DRM looking forward," Tucker said, adding the DRM technology would not be able to be applied retrospectively to media or files that did not interoperate with the new technology.

However, Tucker ducked questions regarding technical details of how embedded DRM would work saying it was not in the interests of his company to spell out how the technology in the interests of security.

Other Features

The situation presents an interesting dilemma for IT security managers as they may now be beholden to hardware-embedded security over which they have little say, information or control.

Conversely, Intel is heavily promoting what it calls "active management technology" (AMT) in the new chips as a major plus for system administrators and enterprise IT. Understood to be a sub-operating system residing in the chip's firmware, AMT will allow administrators to both monitor or control individual machines independent of an operating system.

Additionally, AMT also features what Intel calls "IDE redirection" which will allow administrators to remotely enable, disable or format or configure individual drives and reload operating systems and software from remote locations, again independent of operating systems. Both AMT and IDE control are enabled by a new network interface controller.

"We all know our [operating system] friends don't crash that often, but it does happen," Tucker said.

Intel Come Clean?

Intel's reticence to speak publicly about what lies under the hood of its latest firmware technology has also prompted calls to come clean from IT security experts, including Queensland University of Technology's assistant dean for strategy and innovation, IT faculty, Bill Caelli.

"It's a dual-use technology. It's got uses and misuses. Intel has to answer what guarantees it is prepared to give that home users are safe from hackers. Not maybes, guarantees".

Caelli said it was "critical Intel comes clean" about how the current DRM technology is embedded into the new CPU and chipset offering.

Microsoft was unavailable for comment at press time.

Mobile TV next big money spinner, but who profits?

Global mobile phone operators hope mobile TV will be the next big money spinner, but if South Korea is anything to go by, their optimism may be misplaced.

As mobile call rates sag in established markets, operators in Asia, Europe and the United States are gearing up for mobile TV broadcasting, a market that could be worth $8.4 billion by 2010, according to London-based Informa Telecoms & Media.

Despite industry excitement, analysts say carriers may end up with only a fraction of this potentially huge pie, while content providers grab the lion's share.

"I think content providers and broadcasters may be the two parties that will benefit from mobile broadcasting," said Eleana Liew, Gartner's telecoms analyst in Singapore.

"You don't need mobile operators' networks to broadcast. The value that operators give to customers is very low."

Unlike existing TV services for mobile phones or video downloads provided over fast 3G networks, live mobile TV technologies like Korea's DMB, Europe's DVB-H and Qualcomm Inc.'s MediaFlo all bypass mobile networks.

The new system allows an unlimited number of users to watch TV at the same time, which is much cheaper than on-demand video.

How the returns are split may be key to whether this will become a new revenue stream for operators or yet another service that largely benefits third parties.

Ringtones -- music or sounds used on incoming calls -- generated $5 billion in 2005 worldwide, according to Informa Telecoms & Media, but the music industry took the lion's share.

Profits or public service?

Ten months after flat-rate satellite digital media broadcasting (DMB) for mobile phones started in South Korea, it accounts for less than 0.2 per cent of total revenue at the country's top mobile operator SK Telecom Co.

Content providers and a TV network vendor scoop up 75 per cent of SK's revenue generated from its DMB service.

Mobile operators say they had no choice but to agree to the split because they need subscribers in a near-saturated market.

"For telecoms operators, mobile TV is a public service rather than an income generator," said Stan Jung, an analyst at Woori Investment & Securities.

So far this has not discouraged other countries from starting the service. Japan started real-time broadcasting for cellphones on April 1, while Italy and the United States are expected to follow suit later this year.

"We really hope content makers would be modest with their pricing as mobile TV represents a growth opportunity also for their industry," said Juha Ronakainen, director at Nokia's multimedia unit.

Mixed fortunes

While operators search for business models that work in their favour, handset makers are upbeat because subscribers will need new phones to watch TV.

The phones used for the new services, which typically cost $500 to $700, are expected to expand the $115 billion global handset industry's revenue by $5 billion to $7 billion annually, Prudential Financial estimates.

Some content providers also stand to make easy money just by repackaging existing content for mobile media.

"In many cases, we're talking about taking a television show and telescoping it into what's called a mobisode ... The cost of doing that is very marginal and the revenue is almost all incremental," Tom Freston, CEO of Viacom Inc said at last month's Reuters Global Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit in New York. Viacom runs TV networks including MTV.

Though the service has been slow to catch on, expectations for the next few years are huge. One out of every 100 people now watches mobile TV in Korea, but the government predicts one-third of its 48 million population will sign up by 2010.

Gartner forecasts at least 10 per cent of global mobile phone users will subscribe to TV service by 2009, though it will depend on pricing and regulations in various countries.

Mobile phone TV also faces competition from Apple Computer Inc's video iPod and Japanese game maker Nintendo Co Ltd, which is to begin showing TV programmes over its popular DS portable game console this year.

The services may be adopted more slowly in the United States because most Americans drive and have less downtime outside of their homes than those in countries more reliant on mass transit.

"Japan and Korea have already shown people will buy profitable TV services. I just don't know that a similar dynamic will take place in the rest of the world," said Michael King, a US analyst for Gartner.

Despite headaches over revenue splits for mobile firms, some South Korean customers are happy with the service.

Lee Tae-suk bought a $700 phone with a TV receiver to watch Manchester United midfielder Park Ji-sung, the first Korean soccer player to appear in the English Premier League.

"I didn't want to distract my children from studying by watching a soccer game at night," said Lee, a construction firm manager in Seoul. "Now I can watch his games without concerns."

New technology uses human body for broadband networking

Your body could soon be the backbone of a broadband personal data network linking your mobile phone or MP3 player to a cordless headset, your digital camera to a PC or printer, and all the gadgets you carry around to each other.

These personal area networks are already possible using radio-based technologies, such as Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, or just plain old cables to connect devices. But NTT, the Japanese communications company, has developed a technology called RedTacton, which it claims can send data over the surface of the skin at speeds of up to 2Mbps -- equivalent to a fast broadband data connection.

Using RedTacton-enabled devices, music from an MP3 player in your pocket would pass through your clothing and shoot over your body to headphones in your ears. Instead of fiddling around with a cable to connect your digital camera to your computer, you could transfer pictures just by touching the PC while the camera is around your neck. And since data can pass from one body to another, you could also exchange electronic business cards by shaking hands, trade music files by dancing cheek to cheek, or swap phone numbers just by kissing.

NTT is not the first company to use the human body as a conduit for data: IBM pioneered the field in 1996 with a system that could transfer small amounts of data at very low speeds, and last June, Microsoft was granted a patent for "a method and apparatus for transmitting power and data using the human body."

But RedTacton is arguably the first practical system because, unlike IBM's or Microsoft's, it doesn't need transmitters to be in direct contact with the skin -- they can be built into gadgets, carried in pockets or bags, and will work within about 20cm of your body. RedTacton doesn't introduce an electric current into the body -- instead, it makes use of the minute electric field that occurs naturally on the surface of every human body. A transmitter attached to a device, such as an MP3 player, uses this field to send data by modulating the field minutely in the same way that a radio carrier wave is modulated to carry information.

Receiving data is more complicated because the strength of the electric field involved is so low. RedTacton gets around this using a technique called electric field photonics: A laser is passed though an electro-optic crystal, which deflects light differently according to the strength of the field across it. These deflections are measured and converted back into electrical signals to retrieve the transmitted data.

An obvious question, however, is why anyone would bother networking though their body when proven radio-based personal area networking technologies, such as Bluetooth, already exist? Tom Zimmerman, the inventor of the original IBM system, says body-based networking is more secure than broadcast systems, such as Bluetooth, which have a range of about 10m.

"With Bluetooth, it is difficult to rein in the signal and restrict it to the device you are trying to connect to," says Zimmerman. "You usually want to communicate with one particular thing, but in a busy place there could be hundreds of Bluetooth devices within range."

As human beings are ineffective aerials, it is very hard to pick up stray electronic signals radiating from the body, he says. "This is good for security because even if you encrypt data it is still possible that it could be decoded, but if you can't pick it up it can't be cracked."

Zimmerman also believes that, unlike infrared or Bluetooth phones and PDAs, which enable people to "beam" electronic business cards across a room without ever formally meeting, body-based networking allows for more natural interchanges of information between humans.

"If you are very close or touching someone, you are either in a busy subway train, or you are being intimate with them, or you want to communicate," he says. "I think it is good to be close to someone when you are exchanging information."

RedTacton transceivers can be treated as standard network devices, so software running over Ethernet or other TCP/IP protocol-based networks will run unmodified.

Gordon Bell, a senior researcher at Microsoft's Bay Area Research Center in San Francisco, says that while Bluetooth or other radio technologies may be perfectly suitable to link gadgets for many personal area networking purposes, there are certain applications for which RedTacton technology would be ideal.

"I recently acquired my own in-body device -- a pacemaker -- but it takes a special radio frequency connector to interface to it. As more and more implants go into bodies, the need for a good Internet Protocol connection increases," he says.

In the near future, the most important application for body-based networking may well be for communications within, rather than on the surface of, or outside, the body.

An intriguing possibility is that the technology will be used as a sort of secondary nervous system to link large numbers of tiny implanted components placed beneath the skin to create powerful onboard -- or in-body -- computers.

Microsoft claims EU breakthrough, rivals sceptical

US software giant Microsoft said there had been a breakthrough in its dispute with the European Commission at a hearing on antitrust fines levied by Brussels, but rivals and critics were sceptical.“As I said in the hearing, I believe that we have had a breakthrough,” Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith told reporters after the two-day hearing into the Commission’s plan to fine the company 2 million euros ($2.4 million) a day.
Europe’s top competition regulator accuses Microsoft of blocking competition by withholding information on its business software, while the company says it has done more than enough to aid rivals, most of them American.
At stake in the two-day closed hearing was whether Microsoft could convince the Commission not to impose the fines for non-compliance with its original March 2004 ruling. Participants outside the Microsoft camp said they heard nothing new in the company’s defence. “It was the same old stuff,” one said. “The Commission did not indicate in any way that it backed off (from) Microsoft.”
They were speaking on condition of anonymity after the EU hearing officer conducting the case ordered all parties to refrain from divulging the proceedings to the media.
A Commission spokesman said the EU executive would take time to reflect before deciding whether to proceed with the fines.
Brussels argues that Microsoft had not complied with a 2004 ruling that it had abused the dominant position of its Windows operating system to crush rival software makers.
Smith said Microsoft now had “greater clarity” on the antitrust case, helping to bring about a solution. His upbeat comments appeared to be the result of a late night meeting between Microsoft engineers and the independent trustee appointed to the case, to discuss in detail what more Microsoft could do to satisfy the EU regulators. The trustee and Microsoft have been in contact frequently, and supporters of the Commission said Smith’s comments suggested Microsoft realised it was not yet in compliance.
Participants said the trustee, Professor Neil Barrett, had made that point at the hearing on Friday. “He said they were not in compliance. That was the basic point he was making. It was clear as the light of day,” one said.