Posted on 2009 under Hardware, Supercomputing, Technology |
13
Sep
Steve Balmer’s plans went really wrong with recent Linux patent auction. Instead of patents ending up with patent trolls, as Microsoft wished, AST acquired the patents, which was later sold to OIN, Open Invention Network.
Up your Bolder 
“Allied Security Trust is pleased that Open Invention Network had interest in acquiring the Open Source patent portfolio. OIN’s purchase ensures that these important patents will not be used by patent trolls or others seeking to disrupt Linux and the many companies and individuals advancing this important technology,” said Dan McCurdy, Chief Executive Officer of Allied Security Trust.
Following is the complete press release by OIN;
Durham, NC (September 8, 2009) – Open Invention Network (OIN), a collaborative enterprise that enables innovation in open source, today announced the acquisition of 22 Linux-focused patents that were marketed and sold by Microsoft. The patents were recently purchased by Allied Security Trust (AST) from Microsoft to ensure the patents did not fall into the hands of non-practicing entities (more information on non-practicing entities is available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_troll, among other sites) that could seek to assert the patents against Linux products. OIN subsequently acquired the Microsoft patents from AST.
“Today’s announcement evidences OIN’s continued commitment to acquire patents that may be relevant to Linux,” said Keith Bergelt, Chief Executive Officer of Open Invention Network. “We are pleased to have purchased these patents and view this as a model of successful collaboration among defensive patent organizations that share a common goal of creating freedom of action for practicing entities across Linux and the broader technology sector. The prospect of these patents being placed in the hands of non-practicing entities was a threat that has been averted with these purchases, irrespective of patent quality and whether or not the patents truly read on Linux.
“Allied Security Trust is pleased that Open Invention Network had interest in acquiring the Open Source patent portfolio. OIN’s purchase ensures that these important patents will not be used by patent trolls or others seeking to disrupt Linux and the many companies and individuals advancing this important technology,” said Dan McCurdy, Chief Executive Officer of Allied Security Trust.
About Allied Security Trust
AST is a Delaware statutory trust currently with 15 member companies headquartered in North America, Europe and Asia. The Trust provides opportunities to enhance companies freedom to sell products by sharing the cost of patent licenses. To date, the Trust has invested $40 million in patent purchases over its 30 months of operations. Through such purchases, the Trust provides an excellent opportunity for patent holders of all sizes to generate a return on their rights by selling patents to the Trust.
AST is not an investment vehicle. Its purpose is freedom of operation and cost reduction. It generates no profits and does not engage in patent assertions against other companies. AST maintains a catch-and-releas; commitment that returns to the market in a timely manner patents acquired on behalf of Trust members after licenses are secured. The Trust also addresses the increasing need for innovative companies to defend against costly patent law suits. For more information, visit www.alliedsecuritytrust.com.
About Open Invention Network
Open Invention Network is a collaborative enterprise that enables innovation in open source and an increasingly vibrant ecosystem around Linux by acquiring and licensing patents, influencing behaviors and policy, and protecting the integrity of the ecosystem through strategic programs such as Linux Defenders. It enables the growth and continuation of open source software by fostering a healthy Linux ecosystem of investors, vendors, developers and users.
Open Invention Network has considerable industry backing. It was launched in 2005, and has received investments from IBM, NEC, Novell, Philips, Red Hat and Sony. For more information, visit www.openinventionnetwork.com.
Media-Only Contact:
Ed Schauweker
Ketchum for Open Invention Network
ed.schauweker@ketchum.com
(703) 963-5238
Posted on 2009 under Communications |
12
Sep
Motorola’s biggest success to date was when it released the thinnest and sexiest device the world had seen. Since then, the handset-maker has struggled to produce anything like it.
Yesterday, everyone was prepared to see Motorola’s latest form factor that would bring it back from the brink. Instead, what we got was an announcement about an innovative new user interface, or skin, that runs on top of the Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Android operating system. In fact, the big unveiling had little to do with the hardware, and in many ways, the upcoming CLIQ phone looks like any smartphone with a slide-out Qwerty keyboard. The interesting stuff is the Blur technology running under the hood.
This marks a huge cultural shift for the company, which in the past has always been driven by hardware design. While we didn’t get the entire story, the picture we gleaned during yesterday’s announcement and during a hands-on demo showed that much of transformation had to do with new Motorola (NYSE: MOT) management—and leveraging assets the company already had.
When Sanjay Jha was appointed CEO of mobile devices, he fast tracked a project being worked on by former employees from Good Technology, an enterprise email service that Motorola acquired, and then sold off in February. So, while other divisions back in Illinois were slashing staff, the Sunnyvale office was quietly picking up employees from Apple and Google in what has become a long two and a half year process to get to market. Rick Osterloh, Motorola’s VP of Product Development for Android Products, couldn’t help but talk about the project, which had been kept under tight wraps for the past year so well. He said it originated with Jha, who was interested in what the former Good employees were working on. “He liked what he saw and he gave it resources.”
Jha explained the importance of BLUR to GigaOm’s Om Malik at Mobilize and how it compares to Apple’s iPhone and RIM’s BlackBerry. He said the platform melds Apple’s idea of having access to tons of applications with BlackBerry’s niche of integrating the apps—like email—deeply into the phone. Together, they have the apps and the integration: “The iPhone has one, BlackBerry has the other, but we have combined them in a meaningful way for social networking.”
Essentially, the BLUR technology enables users to get all of their messages, status updates and other social networking components pushed to them. Motorola’s director of product marketing Dan Rudolph told me during a demo at San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art that in order to accomplish this, there’s a lot of server-side technologies playing a role. All of the messages are compressed and then sent to the device. The process should help save on bandwidth and battery life, while the consumer will have all the information without having to go out and retrieve it.
Osterloh said the original idea stretches back as far as 2007 when Facebook and MySpace were just taking off. “We had all these people from Good…we thought we could really solve something.” He said the two keys were that messaging services on devices had gotten complicated. (Users had multiple email addresses and also SMS and MMS.) The other thing they looked at was making a consumer-friendly service that would be used by people who didn’t have support from an IT staff at work. “We redid everything. It was focused on business and this is 100 percent focused on the consumer.”
Some of the key services include an online portal, where users could log in and manage their device. If it’s lost, they can ping it and see where it’s located on a map. If it’s been stolen, they can wipe off all of their information and data. Likewise, if you get a new phone, all you would have to do is re-enter a BLUR user name and password and all of the consumer’s settings and preferences would be restored from the wallpaper to which widgets it has on the home screen—a significant time saver. Osterloh: “There was a big hole between what was happening with applications and what was happening with services on the BlackBerry. We see that there’s a need for both…The strategic part is the BLUR part.”
Motorola’s strong software platform may have increased its chances of making a comeback. But form factor is important, too. And, so far, it’s something that’s been neglected on the Google Android platform. To date, most of the devices are bulky, and while some have gotten sleeker, nothing still compares to the iPhone. Motorola’s new CLIQ also falls into this category. While solid and full of the latest hardware, it too is large and strays from Moto’s design background. INQ Mobile’s CEO Frank Meehan announced yesterday that his company was going to start building phones on Google Android’s OS, but pointed to one of the challenges with the platform: “Currently, Android phones on networks that are selling against the iPhone have not performed well. You need to get the experience better.”
So far, Motorola has announced that its first handsets will be sold via T-Mobile in the U.S. and also Orange, Telefonica (NYSE: TEF) and America Movil. How will it do? We’ll have to wait and see.
Posted on 2009 under Communications |
12
Sep
UK investment manager Invesco Perpetual AiM VCT, which owns a minority stake in troubled voice-to-text firm SpinVox, appears, in its 08/09 earnings, to have inadvertently confirmed rumours that paidContent:UK had received recently – that the company is actually up for sale.
Invesco’s market statement: “More disappointingly amongst the unquoted investments, since the year end, the company’s holding in SpinVox, the voicemail to text messaging business, was written down in value after the company chose not to invest in a further funding round, which was dilutive to non-participating investors. The business has been put up for sale, and it is possible that, should a good sales price be achieved, the new valuation may be exceeded.”
SpinVox’s PR is giving us a “no comment” but has asked Invesco to withdraw its statement, believing it was not for the investor (which is publicly limited) to announce the news. Invesco had invested £759,000 in SpinVox, but has devalued its perceived cost of this investment by 90 percent, down to just £76,000. Invesco owned 0.71 percent of SpinVox according to a July 8 Companies House filing, but SpinVox was recently forced to give further equity for emergency funding.
paidContent:UK understands some SpinVox staff had this summer hoped Cisco (NSDQ: CSCO), which SpinVox has been enabling with enterprise voice-to-text capabilities, would table a bid. But in the last two weeks attention turned to Massachusetts-based voice-to-text rival Nuance, which Independent.co.uk reported was interested in making an offer.
Neither approach has been confirmed, but it’s apparent that some kind of deal to rescue SpinVox from its financial predicament has been under discussion for some weeks. A sale may yet be for part, rather than all, of the company. It’s been in the market since 2003, but is no longer alone, with Nuance and SimulScribe making in-roads. SpinVox’s perception will also be impacted by recently heightened awareness of the fact that much of SpinVox’s voicemail transcription is carried out by human call centre operators, not technology. What price could SpinVox fetch at this point? Likely to be far less than investors have put in.
A sale could work out best for CEO Christina Domecq (who owns nearly 17 percent, according to the July filing), private investor Martin Hughes (17.9 percent), GLG (SEO: 066570) (15.72 percent) and CMO Daniel Doulton (8.8 percent). Share proportions may have changed following a recent emergency investment of over £15 million and the provision of a £30 million debenture loan.
Despite getting an estimated $200 million in funding until that point, we revealed how SpinVox recently resorted to paying some staff in equity instead of salary, scrapped many of its US execs and has faced legal claims from its suppliers for late payments, as cash worries gathered. Domecq told paidContent:UK on July 21 that fault lay with some of its vendors paying it late in the credit crunch and with a cash-intensive Latin America roll-out that would nevertheless make the business cashflow-positive within 90 days.
Read the full back-story in our SpinVox section…
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Posted on 2009 under Communications, News |
2
Sep
The current economic climate calls for a new approach to outsourcing relationships
Study commissioned by Logica and the London School of Economics (LSE)
- identifies the need for behavioral and contractual step changes in outsourcing relationships that move towards a shared risk and reward approach
- stresses the importance of collaborative leadership to enable innovation and business value add
- warns companies of failure to build their business for the future if the focus is solely on cost cutting/cost efficiency measures
- identifies ‘collaborative innovation’ as the new wave in outsourcing
02 September, 2009: Logica, a leading IT and business services provider, today announced the findings of an extensive study conducted in partnership with LSE’s Outsourcing Unit on outsourcing relationships entitled ‘Step change – Collaborating to Innovate’. The study calls for a sustainable change in the way businesses interact with the external services market to enable them to move their relationships from contract administration and outsourcing management to a new phase of collaborative leadership. The paper underlines the importance of new forms of contracting – contracts that share risk and reward in ways that incent innovation, collaboration and high performance to achieve common goals – as the key to success. When collaborative innovation plays a key role in outsourcing relationships, businesses truly leverage IT as a competitive advantage.
The paper draws its key findings from in-depth interactions with businesses across a spectrum of industries including companies such as Michelin, Spring Global Mail, Heathrow Terminal 5,(BAA), KPN and StatoilHydro among others. The paper classifies outsourcing relationships into four phases – contract administration, contract management, supplier management and collaborative innovation. Businesses in the fourth phase of collaborative innovation are positioned best to ride out the economic recession with the ability to build their businesses for the future.
Companies today expect more from their partners and suppliers. As Piet Koetsier, Manager, Business Process Outsourcing at KPN says “A pro-active partner is aligned in thinking with you and comes up with new ideas and innovation. They think for me.” The paper sets examples of how relationships are changing and the impact collaborative relationships have on performance.
Commenting on the importance of collaborative innovation, Kate Hanaghan, senior analyst, Bathwick group*, says, “Innovation has to be a joint effort as true innovation demands a proactive, timely and effective service to customers. There need to be processes in place that bring suppliers and customer teams together. Simply assuming or hoping that this will happen of its own accord is not enough. Collaborative leadership that leads to innovation has to be a conscious effort. This research paper will help guide companies and suppliers think of different ways to bring innovation to the forefront.”
The change in expectations from partner/supplier relationships is clearly outlined by Pascal Zammit, in 2008 Michelin’s head of business solutions, “We want our suppliers to jointly create a ‘polar star’ for us.” Michelin embarked on a CRM project in the fleet management area. Logica was part of the co-management of the project showcasing a relatively new way of working with collaborative leadership. Michelin showed leadership in its sourcing strategy by deciding on multiple vendors but experimented with the co-managed route with each of its partners for the implementation of the project. The case study clearly outlines how Michelin used collaborative leadership with its partners to ensure success of the project, highlighting a robust organisation and governance structure.
The paper concludes with four fundamental shapers and components for effective collaborative innovation – Leading, Contracting, Organising and Behaving. Of these, Leadership is primary and plays a vital role in shaping the environment to facilitate right contracting, organising and behaving.
Abhay Gupte, CEO, Logica India, says “While the debate rages around innovation, outsourcing and collaboration, this paper helps businesses decide the best way forward for them. It’s becoming increasingly crucial for organisations to work together, combining skill sets and sharing risks in order to stay competitive, thrive and build robust innovative businesses of the future. We do hope that this paper will motivate businesses to relook at the components that shape their outsourcing relationships.”
Professor Leslie Willcocks, Director of the Outsourcing Unit, LSE and lead author of the paper, said, “The findings of this paper are a culmination of our new research and further analysis of our database representing 17 years of combined research into over 1600 organisations. In the last four years we have seen an increasing number of mature outsourcing relationships capable of achieving technological, business process and even strategic innovations. Moreover the economic environment forces people to work together and we are seeing some organisations with the right type of leadership, contracting relationship, teaming and behaviours, achieving with their suppliers a positive and lasting impact on performance. Collaborative innovation is outsourcing’s new wave.”
To download the full white paper, visit: http://www.logica.com/outsourcingenterprise. To view a video of the authors explaining the findings of the paper, please visit < insert Logica TV>
* The Bathwick Group, founded in 1997, researches how businesses actually buy and apply IT to their business, how they innovate using technology, and how IT is supporting changes in market and organisational models.
Notes to Editors
The Outsourcing Enterprise series
This research paper is the fifth to be released as part of The Outsourcing Enterprise series of white papers targeted at CEOs that draw on a series of interrelated research studies conducted by Professor Leslie Willcocks and his co-authors – all leading authors on outsourcing. The findings are sourced from over 1600 organisations located throughout Europe, the USA and Asia along with ongoing, unpublished research. The Outsourcing Enterprise series, sponsored by Logica, provides leading edge thinking from the perspective of the Chief Executive and suggests the nature of the involvement the CEO should have, as well as those issues which should be considered in order to ensure the success of an IT or business process outsourcing decision. The four previous white papers in this series are:
1. “ Building core retained capabilities”, published November 2007
2. “The CEO role in delivering strategic advantage”, published July 2005
3. “The power of relationships”, published November 2005.
4. “The CEO guide to selecting effective suppliers”, published September 2006
These papers can be viewed on www.logica.com/outsourcingenterprise along with the special edition ‘Outsourcing in Difficult times’ released in April, 2009
About the authors
Professor Leslie Willcocks
Leslie Willcocks has an international reputation for his research and advisory work on outsourcing, information and communications technologies and organisational change. He is Professor of Technology Work and Globalisation and Head of the Information Systems and Innovation Group at the London School of Economics and Political Science UK. He is also Associate Fellow at Templeton College, Oxford, Visiting Professor at Erasmus and Melbourne Universities, and Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Information Technology.
Andrew S. Craig
Andrew S. Craig heads the IT leadership and governance stream of Carig Ltd and is also a director of Board Coaching Ltd. In addition to coaching he teaches at Ashridge and Warwick business schools on leadership and is a visiting Senior Research Fellow at the LSE. Current assignments include coaching the CEO of a FTSE-250 leisure company and working with the Board. He is also working with individuals and teams in the Defence Procurement Agency, Balfour Beatty, HSBC and finance and fund management companies.
About Logica
Logica is a leading IT and business services company, employing 40,000 people. It provides business consulting, systems integration, and IT and business process outsourcing services. Logica works closely with its customers to release their potential – enabling change that increases their efficiency, accelerates growth and manages risk. It applies its deep industry knowledge, technical excellence and global delivery expertise to help its customers build leadership positions in their markets. Logica is listed on both the London Stock Exchange and Euronext (Amsterdam) (LSE: LOG; Euronext: LOG). More information is available at www.logica.com.
Press Contacts:
Sabrina Mukund
Communication Manager- Logica
+91 96633 81233;
mukund.sabrina@logica.com
Tanuja Singh
Genesis Burson-Marsteller
+91 99863 62428
tanuja.singh@bm.com
Warm regards,
Susan John
Genesis Burson-Marsteller
THE HOLMES REPORT, 2008 CONSULTANCY OF THE YEAR
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Posted on 2009 under Communications |
2
Sep
BoxTone, a firm that develops BlackBerry system management software for enterprises, has raised $1.5 million in funding, per an SEC filing. Lazard Technology Partners is the investor; the company is calling it a first round add-on. CFO Jim Keller said BoxTone will use the new money for sales and marketing, though he declined to disclose the total amount it had raised to date.
BoxTone aims to make BlackBerry security and interface management less expensive for big companies; its roster of 230 clients include the City of Atlanta and Britain’s Cardiff University.
The Maryland-based startup’s software monitors BlackBerry usage in terms of productivity; companies can also choose to have their help desk or IT calls routed through its service. BoxTone just launched a self-service module that walks BlackBerry users through common troubleshooting tasks so that they can resolve their issues without contacting IT.
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