Nimbuzz, the multi-community mobile instant message application, has announced the launch of its new app for BlackBerry smartphones that runs as a native application enabling users to connect with each other via their favourite social networks.

Claimed to be just one of a number of industry ‘firsts' contained in the new release, native functionality allows Nimbuzz to run constantly in the background, have alert notifications ‘pushed' to the home screen and integrate notifications with sound profiles, ensuring users never miss another message. 

Free to download and free to use, the Nimbuzz app also supports instant messaging through Skype, allowing BlackBerry smartphone users to bring their Skype contacts with them wherever they go. In addition, online chat is available for other communities including MSN, GoogleTalk, Yahoo!, Facebook and MySpace, making Nimbuzz the most comprehensive mobile social messaging application available for the Blackberry.

Nimbuzz, which recently won the ‘Connect On Blackberry' award at the Blackberry Alliance Program's EMEA Innovation Awards in Rome, is optimised for BlackBerry smartphones  running OS v4.6 or higher, including the BlackBerry Storm, BlackBerry Bold, BlackBerry Tour, BlackBerry Pearl Flip and BlackBerry Curve 8900 smartphones.

The application is available free to download now from Nimbuzz.com and BlackBerry App World.

Evert-Jaap Lugt, founder and CEO of Nimbuzz says:  "We are delighted to offer Nimbuzz as the first credible, all-in-one social messaging solution for BlackBerry smartphones. It demonstrates why we have become market leaders in mobile internet communication integrating the award-winning functionality of Nimbuzz to get the best out of each operating system and handset.  This 1st generation client for BlackBerry will continue to be developed and will evolve to provide the full Nimbuzz experience over time."

Smaato, a mobile ad optimiser and mobile advertising company, today announced the closing of its second institutional round of funding (Series B). Aeris CAPITAL led the $4.5 million round, with an undisclosed partner and existing shareholders also participating. The capital will be used to grow the company's claimed position as the largest mobile advertising optimizer, and to grow its global presence.

"Our mission is to give mobile publishers a dependable mobile advertising solution for their worldwide inventory to maximize mobile revenues," said Ragnar Kruse, CEO and Co-Founder of Smaato. "We provide an innovative mobile advertising optimization and mediation platform that can deliver ads in 215+ countries for mobile web and apps. This new round of funding will help us further expand our network of now 33 ad networks globally and continue to provide the best possible choice and service to our customers. We have recently opened our Singapore presence and as a result of the funding we will continue to strengthen our position in other regions."

More than 1.000 publishers have signed up with Smaato as a partner to monetize their content so far and Smaato is managing close to 3 billion ad requests per month. Mobile publishers, mobile developers, ad networks and operators partner with Smaato to maximize mobile advertising with aggregation of multiple leading ad networks worldwide. Working with mobile ad networks on a global scale, Smaato has a unique offering to the market: relevant local ads combined globally in a single sign-up process.

"The mobile advertising market is growing rapidly and it has proved to be a profitable business even in recessionary periods. In fact, we have seen mobile advertising increase dramatically over the past 12 months. We see enormous potential to grow the business and our geographical offering," continued Mr. Kruse.

Uwe Feuersenger, CEO of aeris CAPITAL said: "As demand increases worldwide for mobile advertising solutions, we see Smaato as the pioneer in the space, capable of leading a true change in the market. As investors, we're excited to work with the experienced Smaato team who are at the forefront of what we believe will be a huge and beneficial shift for both consumers and mobile companies alike."

Cambridge Consultants has launched DUEL (Dual-domain Uplink Equaliser for LTE), claimed to be a 'breakthrough' technology that significantly improves LTE uplink performance when compared to MMSE, the 'text-book' receiver design.  DUEL, designed as an algorithmic and DSP extension to LTE base station receiver designs, requires no changes to handsets, says Cambridge.

The LTE uplink (SC-FDMA, arguably where LTE is most novel, says Cambridge) supports the transfer of information from users' terminals to the network.  With the rapid growth on the internet of user-generated content fuelled by social networks and the prevalence of digital still and video cameras, the uplink will continue to take on a more significant role in influencing users' perceptions of service quality.  Good uplink performance is also critical to good overall internet experience.

LTE promises to deliver high data transfer rates, but these can only be achieved under perfect channel conditions, such as low user mobility (walking speed or lower) and high diversity (low correlation) between receive paths at the base station.  There are many occasions when these conditions do not arise, but the users' expectations will not diminish when this happens.  Users will simply become disappointed if the performance they receive drops off.  Areas of lower performance appear to users as black-spots or holes and filling these holes in the network increases the cost for the operators.

Cambridge Consultants' patent pending DUEL receiver is claimed to improve the performance of the uplink in all channel conditions, filling many of the holes that would otherwise remain.  Its 'unique and highly complex' algorithms take advantage of properties of the LTE uplink signal to reconstruct what was transmitted with higher fidelity than a conventional text-book receiver.  As a result, it works well even when the signals received by each BS antenna are highly correlated, says the company.

Monty Barlow, Group Leader for Digital Signal Processing at Cambridge Consultants, explained: "There were two key challenges that we faced in designing a better receiver.  Firstly, we needed to understand the information within the uplink signal that could be used to reconstruct what we received more accurately, which in itself was a mammoth mathematical challenge.  Secondly, we needed to find a way to reduce the processing complexity so that it could be implemented within sensible resources.  The outcome is that DUEL can be deployed on any base-station baseband platform, including DSP, FPGA and even ASIC.  Its footprint varies with silicon technology and supported RF bandwidth, but is well within the capabilities of modern signal processing devices.  It can also be extended to provide gains on MIMO uplink to support the future revisions of LTE."

Tim Fowler, Commercial Director in Cambridge Consultants' Wireless Division, added: "Downlink speeds have traditionally received more focus as consumers look to download multimedia content onto mobile devices.  However, with the increase in popularity of mobile micro-blogging, social networking and video-sharing, uplink performance will become more and more important.  We believe that this development fills a critical gap in the technology and will benefit both operators and end users."

Cambridge Consultants has not only designed and modelled DUEL, but has also developed a test platform that includes a conventional MMSE based receiver alongside the DUEL receiver to allow their performance to be compared on the same received signal.  The test platform uses a combination of devices from picoChip and Cambridge Consultants' proprietary VIPER development platform, and includes a real-time uplink transmitter and channel model which can be dynamically varied to explore the performance benefits.  The complete test and visualisation environment that this platform provides helps to understand the complexities and characteristics of the channel and the performance benefits that are delivered.

Cambridge Consultants has produced a white paper that describes DUEL and quantifies its benefits which is available upon request, via info@CambridgeConsultants.com

Derdack, provider of mobile messaging platforms and notification workflow software, today announced that HIS-IZZ Hospitals, a network of four hospitals based in Brussels, has implemented a centralised notification workflow hub using message master Enterprise Alert from Derdack.  This, says Derdack, has automated the management of critical alerts and warnings, resulting in improved business continuity and a lower risk of unexpected business interruption.

Mr. Brocken, Prevention Advisor, HIS-IZZ Hospitals said, "We had a basic paging system in place and could see that message master Enterprise Alert offered a proven solution that provided all of the notification functionality and the centralisation capabilities we were looking for.  It has given us greater control over notifications and reduced the risk of interruption to our business continuity.  We have eliminated the need for staff to carry both pagers and mobile phones.  Together with the low maintenance associated with message master Enterprise Alert, we have also reduced our ongoing monitoring costs."

HIS-IZZ Hospitals' four hospitals use a number of internal monitoring systems.  Previously if an alarm was detected alerts were sent from the monitoring software to pager devices carried by a team of technical staff.  However a 16 character message limit meant that a complex series of codes was used to indicate the nature and source of the alert.

Derdack's integration partner M2MCOM has implemented a pair of message master Enterprise Alert servers each of which acts as a centralised notification hub for two HIS-IZZ Hospitals.  Each server also provides reciprocal backup, and in the event of a problem affecting normal operation all alerts can be seamlessly switched to the other server thus ensuring continual monitoring.

If a critical event is detected, for example a fire alarm is triggered, an email is immediately sent to the message master Enterprise Alert server.  Derdack's software intelligently analyses the content of the email to determine the precise location of the alarm and nature of the problem.  It then creates and sends an SMS message to the technical team that supports the particular building affected by the alert.

message master Enterprise Alert also manages the notification workflow for non-urgent warnings such as where a fire door has been left open or a smoke detector is no longer responding.  Alerts are sent from message master Enterprise Alert via SMS to the relevant technical team responsible for that hospital.

Mr.Brocken, HIS-IZZ Hospitals concluded, "Intelligent translation of the codes contained within the email alerts by message master Enterprise Alert ensures that we are now sending detailed and meaningful information using plain language to the technical team.  The project has been a complete success and we are now investigating connecting other technical systems to the notification hub."

Matthes Derdack, Managing Director of Derdack added, "The strength of message master Enterprise Alert's integration capabilities ensures that additional systems can be connected to the hub with minimal effort thus allowing the hospital to gain maximum benefit from its investment in notification workflow software. Centralisation and consolidation leads to significantly reduced total cost of ownership and ultimately, message master Enterprise Alert is an important element not only for business continuity but for the health and security of the hospital's patients."

Vyke Communications has announced that Vyke Business, previously Vyke Enterprise, has gone live with an initial roll-out of its VoIP calling service.

The initial phase of Vyke Business is focused on a selected number of corporates and resellers in the UK and Norway and is scheduled for a full launch during December 2009.  The initial phase includes 20 corporates and 10 resellers in the UK and Norway.

Vyke Business builds upon the Company's leading paid mobile VoIP services offering with additional unique products and services, specifically designed for the business community.

Vyke Business provides businesses the opportunity to reduce significantly the cost of calling internationally:

* Free Vyke-to-Vyke calls and texts within a WiFi zone
* Up to 98% savings on international calls from within a WiFi zone
* Up to 95% savings on international calls when outside a WiFi zone
* Up to 95% savings on international SMS, in and out of a WiFi zone

Vyke Business has been designed to support multiple sales channels and sizes of businesses, and will be targeted to both SME's and large businesses through our existing network of distributors and resellers with an initial focus on Western Europe.
Kim Berknov, CEO, commented:

"We are pleased that Vyke Business is now being rolled out for full commercial deployment as it represents a significant opportunity that we intend to pursue aggressively. Vyke Business was specifically designed to enable SME's and other corporates to reduce and manage the costs of international mobile calling. The initial feedback from businesses in the UK and Scandinavia has been very positive and I believe that this has the potential to make a very positive contribution to the Company."

OMTP today announced that its BONDI Reference Implementation is the first to be fully compliant with the 165 mandatory tests available for the W3C Widgets 1.0: Packaging and Configuration specification.
 
Widgets are small, self-contained applications, which are created using web standards. The OMTP BONDI Reference Implementation currently running on Windows Mobile is designed to drive the BONDI specification work, whilst existing as a demo platform and test-bed for widget developers to use. Future reference implementations are planned.
 
Nick Allott, CTO of OMTP said "the OMTP membership have put a significant amount of effort into ensuring that the BONDI reference implementation is compliant with W3C standards. As members of W3C we have helped to drive the specifications and it is fantastic news that we can be the first to declare compliance to this important web standard"
 
The Packaging and Configuration specification lays out the standard for how widgets are packaged, configured and how the packages are processed by a web runtime. The specification is part of a suite of standards being developed by the W3C to standardise the widget space.

Thales, a specialist in information systems and communications security, has announced SafeSign Mobile Authentication which is said to enable strong authentication using a mobile device.

Said to be suitable for many online applications including financial services and government, SafeSign Mobile Authentication provides security against man-in-the-middle attacks, while also giving users the freedom of secure banking anywhere, anytime with the convenience of using their own mobile device.

The solution, developed in partnership with Salt Group, global specialist in the development of high assurance mobile authentication solutions, offers a choice of mobile authentication solutions for secure log on, transaction signing and payment authorisation. Organisations can choose from SMS or Java-based solutions to ensure that the most appropriate level of security is applied to transactions.

SafeSign Mobile Authentication provides users with a more convenient token-based solution for both secure log-on and the signing, verification and authorisation of transaction details. Standard Chartered Bank in Hong Kong has already adopted the solution for transaction authorisation in its corporate internet banking system, while the State Government of Victoria in Australia has selected SafeSign Mobile Authentication for secure log-on to government services.

According to Thales, mobile authentication is attractive to customers as it represents a more cost-effective security solution since there are no distribution costs. Furthermore, as the solution relies on a ubiquitous device – the mobile telephone – as the secure channel to generate or exchange security information, it is cheaper and simpler than setting up a public key infrastructure or providing and managing specialised tokens.

Ross Oakley, Managing Director of Salt Group, comments, "Seventy per cent of today's global population already carries a mobile phone, so extending its use to authentication and transaction authorisation seems a natural development and one that users should readily accept. With a choice of mobile authentication mechanisms, customers can choose the most appropriate level of security for their business. However, regardless of the token chosen, mobile authentication offers significant operational, cost and deployment benefits while also maintaining the high assurance characteristics associated with more traditional devices."

Franck Greverie, Vice President, Managing Director for the information systems security activities of Thales, adds, "With the addition of mobile authentication, our SafeSign solution supports an unequalled range of contemporary authentication mechanisms from the world's leading providers including specialised tokens, EMV CAP, PKI and smart cards. Financial institutions and governments can deploy a single enterprise authentication hub, supporting various authentication mechanisms geared to the needs and preferences of their customers and to the security requirements of their services.  This single authentication infrastructure results in lower capital and operating costs, improved governance and shorter time to market."

Confirming a holiday rush to the mobile internet by shoppers, Novarra, an Internet Mobility specialist, has reported mobile phone web traffic to retailer and shopping info web sites on Black Friday increased twelve fold and more than doubled on Cyber Monday compared to before the holiday shopping season kick off.

The results are based on a sampling of web traffic through Novarra deployments for a variety of  ‘brick and mortar' retailers in the US and UK, including Abercrombie, Argos, Asos, Best Buy, Currys, Debenhams, John Lewis, Macy's, Nordstrom, Sears, Target, Tesco, Topshop and Walmart, as well as e-tailers Amazon and eBay.
 
Specific findings are said to include:

–  For retailers, Black Friday beats Cyber Monday in the US:  average page view increases via mobile for US retailers were up on average 388 percent for retailers tracked on Black Friday but only 160 percent on Cyber Monday.  In the UK, where Black Friday is not a retail event, page views were up a more modest 40 percent on Friday the 27th and 23 percent on Monday the 30th.

–  The Black Friday US winners were: bestbuy.com (792 percent), walmart.com (740 percent), sears.com (492 percent) and macys.com (447 percent).  UK retailer argos.co.uk was a standout in that market with a 395 percent increase.

–  As expected, traffic to Black Friday ad sites and Cyber Monday shopping sites, including bfads.net and cybermonday.net, skyrocketed nearly 100,000 percent for the week of November 24-30 as consumers checked for the best "door buster" and online deals, with a steep peak leading up to Black Friday.
 
"This is further confirmation that consumers increasingly rely on the internet via mobile phones for their daily habits and routines," said Scott Cotter, senior director of marketing, Novarra.  "For many shoppers, browsing special deals, comparing products, pricing and other information while they are on the run – even at a retailer's location, has become second nature."
 
Recent Novarra Mobile Internet Experience Update results are said to show a 190 percent increase in mobile social networking site page views.  In addition, Novarra recently reported a 1,068 percent increase in micro-blogging click-throughs during the first three quarters of 2009 and dramatic game day mobile web traffic increases during the Major League Baseball World Series.
 
The retailer data was collected from mobile web use provided through Novarra's Vision mobile browser and mobile internet and multimedia platform. Novarra is said to deliver mobile internet access to two thirds of US mobile phone users and over one billion globally.

Agilent Technologies and Keithley Instruments today announced that the sale of substantially all of Keithley's RF product line to Agilent is now complete. As Keithley previously announced, the parties had signed a definitive agreement for the sale on Nov. 19, 2009.  
    
"This acquisition is a great fit for Agilent," said Ron Nersesian, president of Agilent's Electronic Measurement Group. "The talented RF team and the former Keithley product line will be strong additions to Agilent, building on our leadership position in RF measurements. We look forward to expanding our RF portfolio for customers."  
    
"We are pleased that this effective RF team will be able to continue to contribute at Agilent," said Joseph P. Keithley, the company's chairman, president and chief executive officer. "We believe their expertise and experience will definitely add value to Agilent's work in RF."