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  • Smartphones Will Take Over GPS Market


    Cell phones will replace the personal navigation device (PND) as the primary GPS device by 2011, according to the research firm iSuppli.

    The firm predicts that by then, cell phones will account for 36 per cent of the GPS market, compared with 30 per cent for PNDs.

    PNDs today account for half of global navigational units sold.

    The report also forecasts price drops among PNDs that will lead to smaller manufacturers selling out to larger hardware companies over the next couple of years.

    The research comes as LG predicts smartphones will replace digital cameras.

  • LG Bets On Smartphone Cameras Replacing Compacts


    With 8-megapixel phone models already causing a stir LG says there’s no reason why camera phones couldn’t replace point-and-shoot cameras.

    At a briefing last week in London Jeremy Newing, LG’s UK head of marketing, made this point to Pocket-lint.

    While the topic was converging technology, the focus was on LG’s new KC910 mobile phone.

    It has an 8-megapixel camera, a host of image and video editing tools, Dolby sound and DivX compatibility.

    The megapixel race had switched from camera makers to mobile manufacturers, Pocket-lint’s Katie Scott was told.

    The launch of the Samsung i8510 in the UK earlier this month with what was claimed to be Europe’s first 8 megapixel camera phone was seen as an attempt to highlight shortcomings in the iPhone.

    A number of other handset vendors are preparing to launch similar high-end camera phones in time for the Christmas period.
    Sony Ericsson and Nokia are expected to launch big megapixel handsets in the fall.

    The fact Apple’s 3G iPhone only packs a 2 megapixel camera is regarded as one of its key weakness.

    John Barton, LG UK’s sales and marketing director, said he has already seen camera phones offering megapixel counts in the double digits.

    Among the other treats being envisioned by LG were HD video on your handset and speech recognition GPS technology.

  • Nokia Touch-screen Smartphone Expected Today


    An announcement is expected from Nokia today about the launch of a touch-screen device.

    Dubbed the “Tube”, the handset could be unveiled at a media and analyst event in London.

    It would be Nokia’s first touch-screen since Apple launched the iPhone last year.

    IMS Research recently published a report saying the current steady growth in sales of touchscreen-equipped mobile handsets will become even stronger.

    It forecasts that while fewer than 30 million touchscreen phones were sold in 2007, this will surge to over 230 million by 2012.

    Nokia wouldn’t comment on an unannounced product.

    Reports suggest the device will be closely tied to Nokia’s Comes With Music service, which will first be released in the United Kingdom and compete with iTunes and other music services.

    On September 2, Nokia announced that Carphone Warehouse will be the exclusive UK prepaid channel for the Nokia 5310 XpressMusic edition.

  • "Better-Then-Blu-ray" Movies For Select SIM2 Few

    SIM2 has teamed up with the US’s Entertainment Experience, LLC to offer just-released movie blockbusters as part of a home-cinema package.



    hdtv.biz-news.com spoke to the high-performance HD projector specialists to find out why they’ve launched what appears to be yet another HD format when the public is still wavering about Blu-ray.

    SIM2 has announced it is starting a “better-than-blu” home-theater package.

    The Italian firm has teamed up with Entertainment Experience, LLC to provide a hardware-software combination offering just-released movie blockbusters.

    Customers will get sent movies that are stored on a hard drive in a DCI format accepted by Hollywood studios.

    The HDD slots into a bespoke media server – a Digital Entertainment Center – and the movie can then be watched on SIM2’s top-selling C3X 1080 projector.

    It might seem a strange decision to launch what appears to be yet another HD format when the public is still wavering about Blu-ray.

    Especially when a huge contention with it is the high price of Blu-ray discs and players.

    But Alan Roser, managing director of SIM2 UK, said the intention was neither to challenge blu-ray nor appeal to the mass-market.

    “It’s not mainstream and it’s not intended as a replacement for Blu-ray,” he said.

    So who will buy the home-theater package?

    Roser said the high-end home theater delivery system was being aimed at its 3-chip DLC projectors rather than less expensive single-chip products.

    He said home theaters of this type were often set up in a dedicated home cinema with a curved and acoustically transparent screen.

    “We do not believe there is any value in this for budget projectors. This is really a high-end service – it take things up to the next stage.”

    With SIM2’s C3X 1080 projector costing around USD $33,000 and US sales in the “low thousands”, it’s definitely a niche market.

    But as the world’s smallest three-chip DLP projector, the C3X 1080HD projector is capable of imaging at up to 1920x1080p at 45 mbp/s.

    To complete the package, customers need to buy a USD $10,000 media server and then pay USD $40 for each movie.

    Major blockbusters will be available within a “short time” of their release – and before they are out on Blu-ray.

    Digital Entertainment, LLC has said that the solution’s movie content ultimately will encompass more than 4000 major titles from multiple studio and distribution partners.

    Commercial Digital-cinema Technologies In The Home

    Roser said while Blu-ray was “absolutely stunning” for 95 per cent of consumers, those with the means to watch HD on giant wide screens had to have the very best – even if that meant a significant investment.

    “The important thing is to get this wonderful technology within a wonderful platform,” he said.

    Roser said the movies will be encoded in a DCI-like format that gives them a higher bitrate and better depth of colour than Blu-ray Disc.

    The package will be available “soon” in the US and it will be rolled out to other markets once complications with international licence agreement schedules are resolved.

    “It’s all a question of time. It’s all about the licensing and getting studios comfortable with content because they are concerned about piracy,” said Roser. “It’s also about keeping theater owners happy.”

    As few people can afford to install this “better-than-blu” home-theater package, that shouldn’t be too difficult.

  • Company Secrets Sold With Smartphones


    Salary details, financial data, bank account details, sensitive business plans, notes from board meetings and personal medical details are being discovered by buyers of second hand smartphones.

    Nearly a quarter of re-sold smartphones contain sensitive data, according to research carried out by the BT, the University of Glamorgan in Wales and Edith Cowan University in Australia.

    BlackBerry owners were the worst offenders for discarding their handsets with sensitive company and personal information.

    The survey of over 160 used gadgets found that in a number of cases BlackBerries were left unprotected, despite having security features like encryption built in.

    Buyer Got More Than Bargained For

    In one example, a Blackberry was examined that had been used by the sales director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) of a major Japanese corporation.

    It was possible to recover the call history, the address book, the diary and the messages from the device.

    The information that was contained in these provided the business plan of the organisation for the next period, the identification of the main customers and the state of the relationships with them, the relationship of the individual with their support staff and so on.

    Forty-three per cent of the smartphones examined contained information from which individuals, their organisation or specific personal data could be identified, creating a significant threat to both the individual and the organisation.

    The high-end handset are increasingly being adopted and used by organisations to support mobile workforces – yet only 35 per cent of companies have a mobile device security strategy in place.

    Even on less sophisticated devices, 23 per cent of the mobile phones examined still contained sufficient individual information to allow the researchers to identify the phone’s previous owner and employer.

    Businesses Unaware of Data Security

    The research highlights a lack of awareness amongst businesses about the amount of data that can be retrieved from mobile devices.

    The situation is made more complex as most of the devices are provided by a supplier as part of a mobile communications service.

    When they reach the end of their effective life, in most cases somewhere between one and two years, they have little or no residual value and they are not, in most cases, given any consideration with regard to the data that they may still contain.

    For a significant proportion of the devices that were examined, the information had not been effectively removed and as a result, both organisations and individuals were exposed to a range of potential crimes.

    These organisations had also failed to meet their statutory, regulatory and legal obligations.

  • SecureLogix Offers Free VoIP Security Tool


    SecureLogix Corporation has announced that its releasing a free suite of custom Voice-over-IP (VoIP) security assessment tools.

    Downloadable from the company’s Web site, the tools can be used to assess susceptibility to a wide variety of SIP threats, including Denial-of-Service (DoS) and Man-in-the-Middle attacks, eavesdropping, audio insertion and deletion, and even call teardown.

    Earlier versions of some of these tools, developed by Mark Collier, SecureLogix’s CTO and VP of engineering and R&D team member Mark O’Brien, were released along with publication of the book Hacking Exposed: VoIP, which Collier co-authored.

    Collier and his team have enhanced these tools and simplified their use.

    They have also developed a number of others while completing publicly funded research into current and future threats to VoIP systems, protocols and application services.

    These new VoIP security assessment tools compliment the company’s voice network security scanner that identifies modem vulnerabilities in traditional circuit-switched networks, also available for free download from the SecureLogix website.

    Almost all organizations deploying VoIP maintain a significant amount of legacy voice infrastructure, especially at the voice network edge where it connects to long distance service providers.

    The combination of these VoIP and legacy scanning tools provides a comprehensive approach to identifying critical voice security vulnerabilities across an organization’s entire mix of VoIP and legacy infrastructure and systems.

    Collier said this full voice network security approach was unique to SecureLogix.

  • Intel to help VoIP virtualisation


    New CPUs from Intel based on the upcoming Nehalem core architecture will improve VoIP virtualisation.

    The new processors will be targetted at the virtualisation and communications sectors, according to a report in Comms Dealer.

    Intel has released some new details of its upcoming CPU range, including its new Xeon 7400, claiming a 40 per cent performance in Hyper-V performance in VMWare tests.

    Virtualisation – running multiple operating systems on one server – can reduce the hardware footprint and increase power efficiency.

    However Comms Dealers said many IT managers are reluctant to virtualise business critical applications like VoIP and unified communications, citing reliability and performance concerns.

    It said the new processor family also includes significant improvements to instruction sets for handling multimedia.

    Intel claims that these will enable high definition video conferencing using the H.264 codec on laptops.

  • Europe's VoIP Services Growing Rapidly


    VoIP services in Europe are growing at a blistering pace and reshaping the fixed-line market, according to a report from TeleGeography.

    Consumer IP telephony subscribers reached 25.3 million at year-end 2007, up from 15 million in 2006, and only 6.5 million in 2005.

    As a result, revenues were projected to top USD $5.7 billion in 2008, up from USD $4.2 billion in 2007.

    Prices for triple play service in the US are approximately 70 per cent higher than in Europe, which accounts for VoIP adoption in Europe growing far faster than in the US.

    While customers continue to flock to VoIP services, market penetration in the 13 countries surveyed varies greatly.

    France leads the way in adoption of VoIP, as TeleGeography estimates that 42 per cent of the population has a VoIP line, while Spain’s VoIP uptake is only 2 per cent.

    All adoption statistics are based on fixed-line replacement VoIP installation, excluding VoIP soft clients like Skype.

    Skype has more subscribers in Europe than any individual provider of handset-based VoIP services, but the revenues and traffic volumes generated by Skype’s subscribers are lower and have a much smaller impact on incumbent’s revenues.

    Expect continued strong growth in VoIP revenue in Europe, as there are several large markets with low penetration currently, including Austria and Spain.

    TeleGeography’s European VoIP & Triple-Play Research Service is the authoritative source of data on consumer VoIP services and service providers in western Europe.

  • Security Boost to TiVi Phone Mobile VoIP Software


    Tilts Visiem (TiVi) says it will be offering an “unbreakable” level of caller authentication and voice and video encryption in its mobile VoIP software client "TiVi Phone" after linking up with Philip R Zimmermann’s Zfone Project.

    The newer versions of TiVi Phone have a Phil Zimmermann’s ZRTP software library built in upon a commercial licence agreement between Tilts Visiem and Zfone.

    TiVi said this meant users enjoyed better privacy when using the mobile version of the software.

    The SIP-based application is downloadable from TiVi.com and usable in a 3-day trial mode, however permanent activation of the encryption feature requires purchasing a software key.

    Ivo Kutts, CEO and co-founder of Tilts Visiem, said TiVi Phone bundled with ZRTP was unique for several reasons.

    • it’s inexpensive in comparison to all known alternatives and older technologies
    • it’s easy to install and run by any smartphone owner
    • it’s one of the first encrypting VoIP applications for mobile phones.

    Kutts said that, in addition, ZRTP cryptography offered the ultimate protection against eavesdropping and identity spoofing during a VoIP call.

    "Zfone is the leading light in today’s secure VoIP communications because its algorithms and source code – developed by Phil Zimmermann and his colleagues – are publicly available and open to peer review,” he said. “This contrasts with the unverifiable security claims by Skype."

    Tilts Visiem’s VoIP/messenger products first appeared on the international market in 2003 in the PC version.

    In 2006, the company added mobile VoIP clients for Symbian, Windows Mobile and Pocket PC platforms, already including free, IP-based video calling.

    The TiVi VoIP solutions, intended for next-generation networks, are sold to integrators and competitive carriers in Europe, Asia and North America.

    The ZRTP protocol has some cryptographic features lacking in many other approaches to VoIP encryption.

    Although it uses a public key algorithm, it avoids the complexity of a public key infrastructure (PKI).

    It uses ephemeral Diffie-Hellman, and allows the detection of man-in-the-middle (MiTM) attacks by displaying a short authentication string for the users to verbally compare over the phone.

    The TiVi team had been looking for an industry-leading cryptography solution for several years before it met PGP’s author Zimmermann at San Jose’s VON 2007 event.

    Specialists in proprietary and interoperable VoIP billing solutions and end-user software, they said they were particularly aware of the imminent switchover to internet telephony and the proportionally growing demand for secure VoIP communications.

    This meant that more and more businesses and individuals realise the need to protect their legitimate interests and privacy, since unencrypted voice or video calls transmitted over the public internet can be intercepted by a variety of third parties.

    Phil Zimmerman said that as users transitioned from traditional phones to VoIP, there was a dramatically increased risk of being wiretapped by just about anyone, including criminals who seem to have their way with the rest of the Internet today.

    “TiVi Phone can protect individuals, companies, and government officials from eavesdropping by criminals,” he said.

  • Skype For Asterisk Version Announced


    Skype and Digium, creator and primary developer of Asterisk, the open source telephony platform, have announced the beta version of Skype For Asterisk.

    The move will allow the integration of Skype functionality into Digium’s Asterisk software and enable customers to make, receive and transfer Skype calls from within their Asterisk phone systems.

    Stefan Öberg, vice president and general manager for Skype Telecom and Skype for Business, said: “Throughout our individual histories, Skype and Asterisk have each disrupted conventional communication methods through innovative, cost-effective solutions.

    “We are excited to be working together with Digium to offer small and mid-sized businesses an even more powerful communications solution to conduct business worldwide.”

    Specifically, the beta version of Skype For Asterisk is an add-on channel driver module that integrates Skype Internet calling with Asterisk-based telephony products.

    Skype For Asterisk also complements small and mid-sized business users’ existing services by providing low rates for calling landline and mobile phones around the world.

    Danny Windham, CEO of Digium, said: “Working together with Skype, our goal is to help businesses boost productivity and reap the rewards of feature-rich telephony software, all while saving a substantial amount of money.

    “The Skype For Asterisk beta program is a first step towards adding Skype capabilities to Asterisk-based phone systems and enabling them to reach more than 338 million Skype users.”

    The beta version of Skype For Asterisk will enable business users to:

    • Make, receive and transfer Skype calls from within Asterisk phone systems, using existing hardware.
    • Complement existing services with low Skype global rates (as low as 2.1US¢ per minute to more than 35 countries worldwide).
    • Save money on inbound calling solutions such as free click-to-call from a website, as well as receive inbound calling from the PSTN through Skype’s online numbers.
    • Manage Skype calls using Asterisk applications such as call routing, conferencing, phone menus and voicemail.

    Following the beta period when the product is released, Skype For Asterisk will be sold and distributed by Digium and its worldwide network of resellers.