An international and cross-industry group of more than 20 leading companies have announced the formation of a consortium, Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem, that will define and build a new digital media framework using industry standards, and will enable consumers to acquire and play content across a wide range of services and devices. 

Anchored by Alcatel-Lucent, Best Buy, Cisco, Comcast, Fox Entertainment Group, HP, Intel, Lionsgate, Microsoft, NBC Universal, Paramount Pictures, Philips, Sony, Toshiba, VeriSign and Warner Bros. Entertainment, DECE LLC will address growing consumer confusion around buying, downloading and playing digital content offered by multiple services by working toward a simple, uniform digital media experience.

"This is great news for consumers hungry for access to a wider array of digital content they can enjoy on any device they own.  We formed this consortium to give consumers that kind of power and choice," said Mitch Singer, president of DECE LLC, on behalf of its members.  "To open up the market for digital distribution, we are developing a specification that connects a wide variety of services and devices.   DECE LLC is taking the lessons learned from the successful "buy once, play anywhere" experience that we enjoy with CDs, DVDs and Blu-ray today, and using a similar approach in developing the next generation digital media experience." 
 
Over time, DECE LLC will issue a licensable specification, along with a recognizable brand and logo for compliant products and services that will assure consumers that content they download will play on their devices.  The specification, based on industry standards, will outline the hardware and software requirements for companies to follow as they define new consumer experiences. 

The specification will also define how consumers can enjoy their purchased content on an assortment of devices, or even remotely, thereby creating the convenience of a virtual library, accessible in the home or on the road.  By offering consumers the same level of confidence and comfort with digital content that they feel today with physical media, DECE LLC believes it can bring real value to digital content.

As DECE LLC moves ahead, it will continue to seek broader industry support across the content, software, hardware, retailer and service provider sectors, and will issue more information around its development and release plans.

RAD Data Communications, a specialist in pseudowire technology, has announced the launch of a new TDM pseudowire access gateway that is designed to enable transport operators to maximize return on investment from their fiber rollouts.

"The IPmux-216 TDM pseudowire access gateway justifies the cost of fiber build-outs because it allows transport operators to offer multiple E1s or T1s with the highest degree of timing accuracy on the market," explains Eyal Gabay, Senior Product Line Manager at RAD Data Communications. "RAD engineered into its ASIC two crucial assets that the competition can't offer – guaranteed accurate timing and support for multiple clock domains over Ethernet," Gabay continues. "This allows transport providers to utilize their fiber by backhauling mobile traffic simultaneously from different cellular operators, with each one being able to rely on its own clock to guarantee synchronization – in the past, a sore point for pseudowire circuits, but with careful forethought and engineering RAD has met the challenge."

The heart of the IPmux-216 is said to be a 'unique' multi-standard pseudowire ASIC processor, developed in-house by RAD, that supports a full range of pseudowire flavors, including TDMoIP (RFC5087), CESoPSN (RFC5086), SAToP (RFC4553), and HDLCoPSN (RFC4618). Pseudowire technology is typically used to extend E1/T1 and DS3 services transparently over IP, Ethernet and MPLS networks.

 The IPmux-216 enables transport operators to support multiple customers and multiple timing domains with a single pseudowire device while maintaining stringent timing distribution and clock recovery mechanisms on a per-E1/T1 basis. With this critical capability, transport operators can ensure that they profitably utilize the IPmux-216's full throughput and provisioning capacity, regardless of whether it is servicing a single customer or multiple customers.

Mobile operators and retail carriers require that transport providers, such as cable MSOs deliver E1/T1 circuits over their packet switched networks. These wholesale services must be comparable to traditional E1/T1s, including support for in-band facility loopbacks, fault propagation and other Operations, Administration and Maintenance (OAM) tools. The IPmux-216 provides these capabilities and is, therefore, ideal for wholesale E1/T1 services for mobile backhaul and Multi-Tenant Units (MTUs).

RAD's IPmux-216 converts up to 16 E1/T1 TDM data streams into packets for transport over Ethernet, IP and MPLS networks. It also offers SFP-based fiber or copper Ethernet interfaces that support Fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet. The IPmux-216 pseudowire gateway supports a wide range of management, networking and security-related protocols, including RADIUS, SSH/SSL and SNMPv3.

Trutap, the free and open mobile social networking service, has announced today that it will be promoted to Sony Ericsson users around the world, via the Sony Ericsson Fun & Download portal.

Launched to the general public in November 2007, Trutap is an open mobile service that allows users across the globe to enjoy a simple way to stay connected to their social lives. Trutap enables its users to chat, group message, upload text and images to blogs and send pictures in one, easy-to-use application. Trutap injects life into ordinary mobiles, opening up a world of social networking capabilities and giving users a truly online social presence empowering them to take everyone they know, everywhere they go.

Trutap has experienced huge growth in emerging markets where it focuses its strategy for expansion. With the service now available on Sony Ericsson handsets via the Fun & Download portal, Trutap is positioned front-row centre in a major, global shop window, making it easier and quicker for everyone to download the service and start Trutapping.

Sony Ericsson is placing a major focus on its support and promotion of J2ME applications and has sourced the best around for its Fun & Download store.

Doug Richard, CEO of Trutap said: "Today young people everywhere want to live life in real time, sharing gossip, pictures, news and experiences as they happen, living and sharing the moment. We are delighted that our partnership with Sony Ericsson, one of the world's leading manufacturers, will gain Trutap unparalleled exposure to new users around the world, especially in emerging markets. This is the beginning of the mobile revolution and as more manufacturers start to realise the potential of independent applications the more innovation we will see."

CommProve, a vendor of advanced solutions for the real-time monitoring of wireless networks, has closed $14 Million in new financing to support its international expansion and broaden its product portfolio. The financing round was led by TVM Capital and Endeavour with the participation of the existing investor, TLcom Capital.

CommProve has established itself as a leading vendor of software applications and systems to 2G and 3G wireless carriers to support real-time monitoring and data analysis of wireless networks.  Having deployed solutions with more than 10 operators in Europe, Africa and America, including Telecom Italia Mobile, WIND and Telecom Personal, supporting more than 120 Million mobile users, CommProve is looking to establish a presence in Asia to capture the large opportunities emerging in this region.

"With deployment of new wireless networks in emerging markets and the adoption of mobile broadband services to support devices such as the iPhone on existing networks, the timing of this expansion round could not be better" commented Dave Wilkinson, CEO of CommProve. "The financing will allow us to expand our market presence and further develop our solution portfolio to offer operators a new level of business intelligence for the management and deployment of services".

"CommProve's real-time capture of all mobile phone events in a network, and presentation of just the critical information needed to drive high value applications is unique and brings disruptive change to a market", commented Christopher Cobbold, Partner at TVM and member of CommProve's Board of Directors. "CommProve's technology is faster and more cost effective than today's drive-testing and customer surveys to collect feedback on performance. A growing customer base is taking advantage of their breakthrough technology. We look forward to helping CommProve further capitalize on this tremendous opportunity".

"CommProve's technology has the potential to improve both actual network performance and the customer's perception of service quality. The open platform ensures that the power of real-time information is available to drive many business functions, from network design to customer care" said Dominique Pitteloud, from Endeavour Vision and member of CommProve's Board of Directors. "The solution ensures that operators can, for example, maximize the revenues from today's high value roaming subscribers, be better positioned to offer superior mobile broadband services and adopt emerging technologies such as femtocells, WiMAX and LTE".

Nokia has announced the expansion of the Nokia Media Network, a mobile advertising network that reaches more than 100 million consumers around the world. Some of the biggest players in media from across Europe have joined the Nokia Media Network: Agence France-Presse, France; RTL Mobile, Germany; Cuatro, Spain; Grupo Prisa, publisher of El País, Spain; Unidad Editorial, publisher of El Mundo, Spain; CNET, UK; Telegraph Media Group, UK; Trinity Mirror, UK; and International Herald Tribune, pan-European
 
 
The Nokia Media Network allows advertisers to target consumers on the pages of premium mobile internet publishers, operator partners and Nokia services, with click-through rates on the network averaging 10 percent. The new European publishers join other flagship Nokia Media Network publishers such as Reuters, Cosmopolitan and AccuWeather, operators like Sprint and Airtel, and Nokia services including Nokia.mobi, MOSH and Widsets.

"We are pleased to announce the addition of these top European publishers to the Nokia Media Network," said Head of Nokia Interactive Advertising Tom Henriksson. "The biggest brands in the world trust Nokia with their mobile advertising because of the quality of the publishers on our network.  We will continue to fortify the Nokia Media Network with leading publishers like these so that we will continue to deliver the strongest response rates in the industry."
 
"Agence France-Presse has joined the Nokia Media Network, because Nokia has demonstrated leadership in building a global mobile advertising service," said Otman Meriche, Agence France-Presse business development manager. "Our advertisers are looking for brand-safe, high performance media, and Nokia's understanding of the mobile channel is unrivaled."

The Sicap Device Management Center was launched last month as Telefónica O2 Czech Republic service "O2 Settings".

The platform automatically detects devices in the O2 network and sends them settings for services the customer is provisioned for, such as MMS and WAP browsing. The platform runs in real time and the setting is usually received within one minute of detection.

The Sicap platform has responded to the mobile customer frustration with complex settings on sophisticated new-generation devices. Now that the majority of Telefónica O2 Czech Republic customers have devices capable of advanced multimedia messaging and IT services, the operator has chosen the Sicap Device Management expertise to ensure new customer devices are "off the shelf-ready to use" and that they are maintained throughout their lifecycle. The process is fully automated, keeps history of used devices and sends setting only to subscriber devices which were not previously set. In parallel, a back office interface enables Customer Care to handle settings on-demand.

The "O2 Settings" seamless settings delivery service enhances the brand image of the operator and customer confidence in network services. There is no other operator on the Czech market which offers setting service upon automated detection.
Financial gains for the operator are twofold. A reduction in individual customer enquiries significantly cuts the cost of customer care, while an increase in service take-up boosts ARPU.

According to Petr Kavan, Service manager of Telefónica O2 Czech Republic, "The Sicap platform is a reliable and scalable tool for us to progressively roll-out seamless device management services. Our usage of Sicap technology will not only set our customers devices, but notably enhance the targeting of our marketing offers."

According to Ruth Stockinger, Global Account Manager at Sicap, "Telefónica O2 Czech Republic has implemented our open standards platform which reads OMA-DM continuous provisioning protocol for advanced device management services. We are proud to accompany Telefónica O2 in the development of their services."

Kabira Technologies has announced the release of Kabira Charging 2.0, its convergent charging, mediation and policy management platform software.  By integrating fine-grained control and charging for services onto a unified, extreme transaction platform, Kabira Charging 2.0 is claimed to enable service providers to achieve substantial business efficiencies while supporting the rapid creation of new product offerings and creative charging models – including multi-play bundles.

Kabira Charging 2.0 is optimized to work with the Cisco Content Services Gateway 2 server (CSG2), a high-speed processing module that provides a host of service control and billing functions.  Kabira Charging 2.0 offers advanced capabilities for on/off-line, batch, event and session-based charging, as well as fine-grain policy management for both prepaid/post-paid IP service subscribers.

"With the combination of Kabira Charging and the Cisco CSG2, service providers are able to enhance their competitiveness and business agility in the telecom marketplace," said Chris Clabaugh, vice president of business development at Kabira.  "Kabira Charging leverages several similarly deployed solutions based on our Kabira Transaction Platform's software-based high-availability clustering technology.  This is in combination with our in-memory, object-oriented, event-driven architecture."  Clabaugh added, "Operators now have the benefit of an advanced and proven solution, which delivers powerful network and service control, an enhanced end-user experience, and provides the ability to offer a variety of service plans beyond the typical 'time-or-volume-based' data rates."

Used by mobile service providers around the world, a single Cisco CSG2 blade can simultaneously manage several hundred thousand active mobile users, and process more than a million concurrent sessions per second, while providing two major new functions that providers need to manage and monetize mobile content services:

.  Dynamic mobile content examination and access control – enabling mobile service providers to meet the needs for parental control, satisfy corporate usage policies and comply with social and regulatory requirements; and

.  Flexible, application-aware billing – enabling providers to offer differentiated charges for services by volume, duration, event and other parameters.

When the Cisco CSG2 blade is integrated with Kabira Charging 2.0, a service provider can maximize control over its subscriber offerings and infrastructure.  Kabira Charging 2.0 offers highly-personalized, granular policy management and charging models based on fine-grained service and subscriber profile data.  Moreover, it also enables service providers to maintain subscriber service traffic and sessions, as well as charging transactions, despite back-end billing system overload or connection failures, thus providing a high-quality subscriber experience while protecting service provider revenues.

Kabira Charging 2.0 includes an expanded re-usable module library with features such as Balance Management and Billing Offload.  It enables a fully configurable solution for online charging, authorization and policy management that can be extended to support non-conventional needs.  Kabira Charging 2.0 uses these modules in numerous business services configurations, such as: on-line event-based authorization and charging for prepaid services, authorization and charging at subscriber and service levels according to price plans defined in subscriber profiles, charging transaction journaling, and more.  Also included with Kabira Charging 2.0 is an intuitive web-based administrative and monitoring interface to efficiently manage any number of Kabira Charging nodes.

Kabira Charging 2.0 relies on the high-availability and scalability features of the proven Kabira Transaction Platform, and supports single-server (node) and clustered server deployment configurations.  Kabira Charging runs on SPARC architecture servers running the Solaris 10 operating system as well as on x64-based servers running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

Ad-funded social networks will provide the bulk of revenues in the mobile user-generated content (UGC) space by 2013, according to a new report from Juniper Research.

The report says that the total value of the UGC market – comprising social networking, dating and personal content delivery (PCD) services – will rise from nearly $1.1 billion in 2007 to more than $7.3 billion in 2013, with social networking overhauling dating to become the largest revenue generating segment by 2009. The report also notes the increasing importance played by advertising, which will account for nearly one-third of total revenues in the UGC space by the end of the forecast period, and more than half of mobile social networking revenues.

According to report author Dr Windsor Holden, "It's clear that we have seen an industry wide shift regarding the implementation of business models in this area. Whereas initially there was a perception that users would pay a small mobility premium to access social networks on their handsets, it rapidly became clear that to achieve truly mass adoption, it would be necessary to offer free membership and then to augment that with advertising and the sale of premium content."

The Juniper report also observed that, while the iPhone had substantially increased public awareness of mobile content services, there was significant scope for improvement with regards to the marketing of such services within the industry as a whole. It also stressed the need for operators to reduce data costs outside of bundles to encourage casual use of social networking and dating services. 

Other findings from the report include:

• The number of active users of mobile social networking sites is expected to rise from 54 million in 2008 to nearly 730 million in 2013
• The Far East & China region will be most popular in terms of mobile user number for mobile social networking and PCD throughout the forecast period, but the Indian Sub Continent will become the largest region for mobile dating services by 2010
• There will be more than 9 billion downloads from PCD sites by 2013, of which 32% will be ad-supported

Juniper Research assesses the current and future status of mobile user-generated content based on interviews, case studies and analysis from representatives of some of the leading organisations in the growing mobile user-generated content industry.

MobiTV, a provider of mobile and broadband IP Video distribution technology, and Media Excel, a specialist in real-time video encoding and transcoding solutions, have today announced a strategic partnership agreement to jointly offer advanced video delivery capabilities to service providers.

MobiTV's Optimized Delivery Server (ODS) for scalable high capacity video delivery, combined with Media Excel's video encoding and transcoding appliances will enable service providers to offer premium video services to their subscribers over 3G, 4G, and broadband networks.

MobiTV recently announced that the number of mobile subscribers' worldwide that access television using its MobiTV service has surpassed the four million mark. The service is currently deployed over more than fifteen carrier networks, including Sprint, AT&T Wireless, Alltel, Telus, Rogers and Bell Mobility.

"Many of our customers are looking to us to provide broadcast quality, high availability IP video systems for new mobile and broadband video networks and we want to shorten the time to market for these services by integrating industry leading transcoding technologies, that will enable the rapid delivery of a complete IP Video solution," said Bruce Gilpin, COO, MobiTV. "Our work with Media Excel enables us to offer a turn-key system for world-class video delivery over IP networks."

Media Excel provides next-generation hardware transcoding appliances that are used by large-scale video service providers such as MobiTV, as well as broadcasters and service operators.

"The explosion of mobile video over cellular and broadband networks is a tremendous opportunity for operators. Through our integrated platform with MobiTV's ODS we can provide a highly scalable and tested solution for operators that can significantly reduce time to market and integration costs," said Thanasis Iatrou, CEO of Media Excel.

According to Strategy Analytics, the global mobile media market will double between 2008 and 2011, from $32 billion to more than $64 billion, largely due to the increase in global service provider video offerings.

"We are seeing consumer spending on mobile data services ramping to more than $200 billion by 2011, and video is a major part of this growth," said David Kerr, vice president, global wireless practice, Strategy Analytics. "The growing functionality and usability of handsets and networks is also feeding into major growth in the use of Web browsing from mobile phones, and the outlook for Web 2.0 services is positive."

Ericsson has announced that it has signed an agreement with Portuguese triple play operator Sonaecom to provide and integrate its open, standards-based, end-to-end IPTV solution. It includes Ericsson's new IMS-based IPTV middleware and enables the operator to deliver personalized and interactive TV experiences to its subscribers.

Under the Prime Integrator agreement, Ericsson will upgrade Sonaecom's IPTV system by delivering and integrating a next-generation, end-to-end IPTV solution. This will bring together Ericsson solutions including its new IMS-based IPTV middleware and network infrastructure, as well as Tandberg Television's high-definition and standard-definition video processing platform. Deployment and trial has started.

Ericsson's IPTV Middleware is the world's first solution to be pre-integrated with IMS. Its flexibility and scalability will enable Sonaecom to quickly create, test and deploy differentiated TV services in order to provide an individual entertainment and communication package for consumers that includes interactive and mobile functionality. The Ericsson IPTV ecosystem is based on open standards, designed to comply with the Open IPTV Forum specifications.

José Pinto Correia, CTO, at Sonaecom, says: "Ericsson's complete solution will help us achieve our IPTV vision of bringing our customers personalized and interactive multimedia services, and provides us with the integration skills we need to deliver to consumers an individualized TV experience across multiple networks."

Jan Wäreby, Senior Vice President and Head of Business Unit Multimedia, Ericsson, says: "Creating the individual TV experience requires a combination of skills taken from the world of telecoms and television. This experience must reach wider than just television, further than just mobile, and beyond the limits of fixed-line networks. Helping operators to address this is central to Ericsson's TV solutions offering. This new IPTV ecosystem is transforming the worlds of communications and entertainment to deliver an open, carrier-class TV solution that drives the future of truly converged and blended services."

Hans-Erhard Reiter, President of Ericsson Portugal, says: "The strong combination of Ericsson's IPTV offering, systems integration capabilities and local personnel will provide Sonaecom with a scalable, robust, end-to-end IMS-based solution to build its television business and offer advanced, revenue-generating services to its customers."