When international wireless companies consider expansion to North America, the City of Ottawa invites them to join its 200-company, 18,000-employee-strong wireless sector with an endorsement from Richard Florida. Florida is the Director of the Toronto-based Martin Prosperity Institute and author of the international best seller Who's Your City?. He rates Ottawa as the "Best Overall" city in Canada on a "Creative Class Index" based on the 3Ts of economic development - Technology, Talent and Tolerance - topping other major metropolitan cities including New York, Boston, Washington, San Jose and London, England.
Ottawa's wireless sector includes public companies like DragonWave Inc. (wireless backhaul infrastructure), Bridgewater Systems (mobile personalization software) and March Networks Corp. (high-definition video surveillance applications) along with a growing number of new start-ups focused on the robust mobile applications sector that market research house Gartner estimates will expand to US$29.5 billion by 2013 from $6.2 million in 2010.
DragonWave is one of Ottawa's fast-rising wireless stars. Last month the company reported CDN$107.3 million of revenue for the first nine months of fiscal year 2010, an increase of 235 per cent compared with $32.0 million for the same period the previous year. DragonWave also expects revenue of approximately $170 million in fiscal year 2010 based on sales of its market-leading packet microwave solutions.
"Ottawa is pursuing wireless opportunities more aggressively than ever before," said Michael Darch, Executive Director, Global Marketing at OCRI. "We have abundant talent and important technology in nearly all aspects of wireless., Add Richard Florida's endorsement of Ottawa as "Best Overall" on his Creative Class Index to the mix and all the facts make Ottawa a very desirable location for wireless companies that want to be a part of Canada's Creative Economy Capital."
"I wholeheartedly agree Ottawa is an excellent North American location to establish and grow a wireless business," said Peter Allen, President and CEO of DragonWave, whose firm develops microwave gear that vastly increases the capacity of wireless networks under siege by huge new flows of traffic by BlackBerry, iPhone and Kindle-carrying users. DragonWave is a 21st century product of Ottawa's traditional 20th century telecom strength, having been founded in 2000 by four former Newbridge employees and financed in part by Ottawa technology magnate Terence Matthews. DragonWave then attracted Allen, a former Nortel executive, in 2004 after he launched another start-up.
Ottawa was recently named to the Top7 Intelligent Communities in the world by the Intelligent Community Forum (ICF). The city was recognized for its ability to respond and adapt to change, leverage collaborative partnerships and promote technology entrepreneurship. With 78,000 employees in its 1,850-company technology sector, Ottawa is Canada's capital city and is also home to a recession-buffering public sector. As the country's fourth-largest city with a population of 900,000, Ottawa's predominant languages are English and French, but many others are spoken on the streets. About 25 per cent of the city's residents are born in other countries, and more than 20 per cent of residents are visible minorities. Ottawa's natural environment is another important part of its identity. The city has 850 parks that contribute to Ottawa's green character, and many are home to some 45 major arts and cultural festivals that take place throughout the year. • Source: OCRI (16-2-10)
Leading the way for Ottawa, OCRI is the city's economic development agency. OCRI is the rallying point to bring business, education, research and talent together to create the winning economic conditions that allow Ottawa's knowledge-based companies to thrive locally and compete globally. At OCRI we promote sustainable economic development to maintain our high quality of life.
Envivio + Bouygues Telecom + Cognacq-Jay Image
Envivio announced that its 4Caster C4 video encoder is being used by Bouygues Telecom, one of France's largest mobile network operators with ten million subscribers, to encode video for its TV 3G+ mobile video service. The Bouygues Telecom video headend is hosted by Cognacq-Jay Image, the content management and delivery subsidiary of TDF. TV 3G+ provides subscribers with access to more than 60 channels in a variety of standard and premium packages.
When launching the new service in November 2008, Bouygues Telecom and Cognacq-Jay Image elected to replace their legacy software encoders with the 4Caster C4 hardware encoder configured for Mobile TV. The multi-profile 4Caster C4 enables the TV 3G+ service to be optimized for the 176 different handsets currently in use by Bouygues Telecom subscribers. This includes a QVGA resolution, 3.5G HSDPA profile to deliver premium video quality for subscribers with high-end devices.
"4Caster C4 from Envivio has helped us by delivering the reliability and performance needed to provide a good quality of experience for the end user, as well as flexibility that is enabling our company to follow the fast-moving mobile market." said Thibaut Keraval in charge of Mobile Services Solutions in Bouygues Telecom.
"Upgrading the existing infrastructure to an up-to-date Envivio platform was an important decision in the development of TV 3G+," said David Karoutchi, Business Development Manager - Mobile & Broadband, Cognacq-Jay Image. "The 4Caster C4 provides a high reliability, high performance foundation that offers the superior service levels we were looking for in order to ensure the best experience for subscribers."
The award-winning Envivio 4Caster C4 simultaneously delivers four channels of video with up to 32 different Mobile TV profiles per system, providing an advanced compression platform for operators launching new services or upgrading early generation services based on software encoding platforms. The Bouygues Telecom deployment also includes the Envivio 4Manager headend management system, providing M:N automatic redundancy configuration for true carrier-grade service availability. This transforms mobile TV into a full-fledged service offering, based on a state-of-the-art professional headend infrastructure. • 17-11-09
Cognacq-Jay Image, a company of TDF Group, provides TV channels with industry-leading expertise in design, development and operation of broadcast control rooms related services including soundstages operation, post-production, digital archiving. Cognacq-Jay Image delivers multimedia services for VOD and live TV applications. Cognacq-Jay Image is a technical provider to editors and operators, offering personalized audiovisual programs able to facilitate the development of new services to broadband networks: Mobile, IPTV, Internet.
Envivio Inc is the leading technology provider of IP video convergence encoding solutions for telcos and broadcasters. Envivio is the only company to offer convergence solutions supporting the "Three Screens" of consumer video - TVs, PCs and mobile phones - making IP video a reality over any type of network and to any multimedia device from mobile to HD. Envivio solutions deliver industry leading AVC (H.264), AVS, and Windows Media Video (VC-1) compressed video quality at the lowest bit rate for mobile TV, Internet TV, IPTV, and broadcast applications. Service providers worldwide use Envivio solutions to reduce their operational costs while offering subscribers the most compelling and highest quality video services anytime and anywhere.
MoreMagic Solutions, a leading mobile payments platform provider, and Cambodia Advance Communications, Cadcomms, offering services under the brand name QB (cube), announced today that international friends and family of QB customers are now able to recharge QB mobile phones, and transfer airtime to QB mobile phones, using the MoreMagic Solutions International Recharge Hub. MoreMagic Solutions provides the leading platform for international TopUp transactions and settlements, and connects with an extensive list of mobile operators throughout Southeast Asia, including India, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam, in addition to Cambodia.
From thousands of international retail locations, or the web - www.etopuponline.com, a customer can purchase a gift of prepaid airtime, or transfer airtime, to a QB mobile phone. QB recharges are available at 46,000 Western Union Agent locations throughout the United States, resulting in universal availability of the service. When a member of the Cambodian community in the United States, or another country, sends a TopUp, the airtime is immediately available, and the recipient is notified with a personalized SMS message.
“At QB, we welcome the opportunity to offer airtime to customers in the United States, and around the world, working with MoreMagic Solutions,” said Dr. Farouq Abu Saleh, COO, QB. “The customer recognizes the QB brand, and knows that a gift of an airtime recharge will result in more calls from home. The QB customer is pleased with the convenience afforded by the multitude of Western Union Agent locations in the United States, as well as easy access from the internet.”
“Cambodian communities in the United States, and around the world, maintain strong ties with friends and family back home, and customers understand that gifts of airtime are an inexpensive way to receive calls from relatives with QB mobile phones,” said Pankaj Gulati, chairman and CEO, MoreMagic Solutions. “MoreMagic Solutions is pleased to make QB recharges widely available through etopuponline.com, Western Union Agent locations in the United States, and other retail locations worldwide.” • 16-2-10
Cadcomms (Cambodia Advance Communications) is one of the leading telecommunications services providers in Cambodia, offering services since 2008. Cadcomms operates a 3.5G mobile telephony service using the QB brand. • With deployments in more than 60 countries worldwide, MoreMagic Solutions offers payment solutions for mobile operators, financial institutions, content providers, and distributors, enabling consumers to purchase goods and services on demand using a mobile phone, POS, or web.
Indonesian mobile network operator, Telkomsel has launched an upgraded SMS service, branded SMS Pro, based on a platform supplied by Acision. Mobile users can now block unsolicited SMS or SMS spam, set up automatic replies, introduce message forwarding, automatically copy messages to another mobile number and set up SMS white-list, where subscribers can define up to 10 numbers that they want to receive SMS form - all from their handset.
Having relied upon Acision's messaging infrastructure to cope with considerable capacity increases over the last nine years, Telkomsel turned to its strategic partner to identify key technologies that will secure greater revenues from SMS, differentiate their messaging offerings and create services that help increase customer loyalty.
Nirwan Lesmana, General Manager, Marketing Communications at Telkomsel said: "As the first Message Plus deployment in the Indonesian market, we are committed to providing our customers with a personalised text messaging experience while offering our customers full control in managing that experience."
Rory Buckley, Chief Executive of Acision, added: "With 75 million subscribers, Telkomsel processes staggering amounts of messaging traffic daily and there is still room for SMS volume growth. By launching Acision Message Plus, Telkomsel has embraced an innovative and compelling strategy to draw subscribers towards premium content and higher value interactions. This creates new revenue streams, more value added SMS traffic and an enhanced customer user experience."
Telkomsel is the largest operator in the country, and statistics from the Mobile World reports that the company ended Q1 '09 with just over 72 million customers, and a market share of 50%. The country has a population penetration level of 57%. • June 2009Enhanced Scheduling and Resource Allocation Framework
Enea® announced that its Enea OSE is the first real-time operating system (RTOS) to be integrated with the Framework for Real-time Embedded Systems based on Contracts (FRESCOR). The combined Enea OSE and FRESCOR solution will allow developers to build optimized and reliable systems for a wide variety of application markets from media to mobile phones.
The Enea OSE and Contract Framework solution allows applications, including those from third-parties, to request the system resources required for their maximum quality of operation. Using the same contract methodology the system can then guarantee that the application will receive those resources regardless of any intervening factors or it can propose an alternative contract.
"The advanced scheduling technology that we have been developing with the FRESCOR consortium delivers reliable applications and systems that run at the highest levels of quality - guaranteed", said Per Åkerberg, president and CEO at Enea. "In addition, the framework offers an innovative method of system integration well suited to markets where many software components are delivered as a single device such at mobile phones and communications infrastructure."
FRESCOR is a consortium research project funded in part by the European Union's Sixth Framework Program. Its main objective is to integrate advanced flexible scheduling techniques directly into the embedded systems design methodology. This is achieved by creating a contract model that specifies which are the application requirements with respect to the flexible use of the processing resources in the system, and also what are the resources that must be guaranteed if the component is to be installed into the system, and how the system can distribute any spare capacity that it has, to achieve the highest usage rates for the available resources.
Enea OSE, Enea's flagship RTOS, is a modular, high-performance, full-featured real-time operating system optimized for complex distributed systems requiring the utmost in availability and reliability. Enea OSE's pre-emptive real-time response, memory protection, supervision, error handling, and run-time program loading make it ideal for building fault-tolerant distributed systems that offer true deterministic real-time behavior with five nines or higher availability. • 29-5-09
Telco Updates
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