The Short Names

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.

 

 

 

 

 

            Logica’s messaging hub, FASTWIRE Open, benchmarks at record five million messages per day

Benchmark enables banks to reduce costs and manage business expansion

 

August 28, 2009: Logica ,a leading IT and business services company, today announced the results of a high-performance benchmark test carried out on FASTWIRE Open, Logica’s messaging hub, powered by IBM processors. The hub can now process over five million SWIFT Fin messages per day. The test was carried out in conjunction with a tier one banking client, which is one of world’s largest users of SWIFT – demonstrating the hub’s ability to support global banks.

 

FASTWIRE Open can scale to support the future growth of user banks, enabling them to not only reduce operational and network costs but also to take advantage of high throughput and adaptability to meet their demanding and growing requirements.

 

“Banks need to gain greater efficiencies if they are to preserve profit margins, given escalating payments volumes and sustained revenue pressure,” said Andy Schmidt, research director at TowerGroup. “Centralised messaging hubs that are scalable and integrated give banks the flexibility and control that their payments businesses require. This allows banks to achieve savings through reduced messaging costs – savings that can be passed on to clients.”

 

Tim Brew, director of global financial products at Logica, commented: “Payments volumes are increasing exponentially as global banks continue to grow, either organically or through M&A activity. Our high performing financial messaging hub enables banks to reduce costs by consolidating their multiple systems onto regional or global hubs. The client that participated in this test has proven that its future FASTWIRE Open-based messaging platform will support significant growth in its messaging traffic. The solution can clearly support our clients’ business expansion, but it also enables banks to reduce the overall cost per message and handle the ever increasing occurrence of unexpected volume peaks in messages.”

 

The benchmark test was undertaken by Logica at IBM’s performance testing facility in Montpellier, France, during June 2009. FASTWIRE Open, Logica’s messaging hub, achieved a throughput of up to 200 messages per second, while actively using only 16 processors, exceeding the target of 150 messages per second.

 

For the test, the system processed SWIFT format messages while concurrently managing day-to-day activities such as archiving and database replication. The platform used an Oracle 10g database, operating with Oracle RAC and Dataguard, and was based on IBM 64-Core Power6 5GHz Based Power 595.

- ends-

NOTES TO EDITORS

 

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.

 

 

About Logica’s payments expertise

Logica has more than 30 years of experience in delivering payments products to the largest financial institutions. Logica is the only company to provide an end-to-end payments hub enabling banks to move from duplicated, siloed payments systems to a modern hub environment. Logica’s All Payments Solution (LAPS) can process the full range of payment types (retail, domestic, international, urgent/timed, single and mass payments) within a single deployment. It is fully SEPA compliant and live, supporting SEPA in over 10 countries. LAPS is the only payments hub capable of supporting SEPA transactions beyond current domestic-level requirements. It can provide any global bank with a single consolidated Europe-wide SEPA deployment for when payments traffic merges in the near future from domestic to SEPA.  Furthermore, this massively scalable and high performing solution enables banks to optimise hardware utilisation and reduce infrastructure costs. For further information, visit http://www.logica.com/payments/400012772

 

About FASTWIRE Open

 

FASTWIRE Open is Logica’s high-end, network independent messaging platform. Based on Logica’s proven service-oriented open architecture, it delivers high performance and reliability on modern low cost infrastructures. It processes and routes all message types including payments and securities messages in SWIFT, ISO, XML and proprietary formats – enabling banks to choose the most cost effective route saving on unnecessary transaction fees.

 

 

Media contacts:

 

Sabrina Mukund                    

Logica India

+91 96633 81233

sabrina.mukund@logica.com

 

Tanuja Singh

Genesis Burson-Marsteller

+91 99863 62428

tanuja.singh@bm.com     

 

 

Warm regards,

Susan John

Genesis Burson-Marsteller

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»  Flush with iPhone cash, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) spent $390,000 to lobby the government on a variety of subjects, in particular the “funding education technology” part of the government stimulus package. [Forbes]

»  The FCC has given the green light to a merger between Sprint (NYSE: S) and Virgin Mobile (NYSE: VM). [Yahoo Tech]

»  Clearwire (NSDQ: CLWR) CEO Bill Morrow says the fact that his company isn’t battling companies like AT&T (NYSE: T) “on the classic wireless phone system” will help it beat them on 4G/WiMax. [Seattle Times]

»  Deutsche Bank doesn’t think that Nokia (NYSE: NOK), even with its netbook, will be immune from the cratering handset market over the next few years. [Barrons]

»  T-Mobile is trying out a 4G network in Europe using Huawei LTE base stations. [Cellular News]

»  An Apple blogger from Finland legally unlocked his iPhone and registered it on another network. He credits his carrier Sonera, which he claims is a “less-repugnant version of AT&T.”  [The Register UK]

Twitter’s trademark issues don’t really warrant three or four posts, but..it is what it is (see here, here, here, and here). 

Sam J. has a post (“Twitter’s ‘Tweet’ Trademark Torpedoed“) that I think adds to the mix:

According to documents from the Trademark Document Retrieval system, their lawyers (Fenwick & West LLP) were notified of the rejection by email to trademarks@fenwick.com that day. The USPTO had explained that “marksin prior-filed pending applications may present a bar to registrationof applicant’s mark. [...] If the marks in the referenced applicationsregister, applicant’s mark may be refused registration under TrademarkAct Section 2(d) because of a likelihood of confusion between the twomarks“, referencing and attaching not one, not two but three separate trademark applications:

• #77695071 for TWEETMARKS (pending receipt of Statement of Use)
• #77697186 for COTWEET (pending clarification)
• #77701645 for TWEETPHOTO (pending transfer to Supplemental Register)

Now I may not be a lawyer (I did play a role in overturning Dell’s “cloud computing” and Psion’s “Netbook”trademarks) but given all three of the marks identified look likeproceeding to registration (it only takes one to rain on their parade),it’s my non-expert opinion that Twitter has a snowflake’s chance in hell of securing a monopoly over the word “Tweet”.

I don’t have strong feeling on the issue (probably more accurate to say that I) haven’t taken a close look at the issue, it’s just been interesting to watch it twist and turn.  I don’t know that Twitter’s efforts are doomed, but they’ve been pretty inconsistent about messaging, and developers are bound to grumble.

[modified to include an excerpt of Sam's post]

In its campaign to be first among the cellular operators to roll out a fourth-generation network, Verizon Wireless (NYSE: VZ) said it has made its first phone calls in Boston and Seattle using VoIP over the emerging LTE technology. Release.

The calls mark the very first baby step in rolling out a nationwide 4G network, which will compete with Clearwire’s WiMax service and offer superior speeds and capacity to today’s 3G network. But are the tests based on technology that will be used when Verizon launches commercially next year? Kind of.

Verizon’s Network VP Tom Sawanobori told us that it is technically LTE and that the hardware is commercial today, but the software is not. “The software is pre-commercial…We plan to introduce commercial service on slightly newer version of Release 8, which meets our requirements.”

Partners involved in the test included Alcatel-Lucent Ericsson (NSDQ: ERIC) for base stations equipment; LG (SEO: 066570) and Samsung for devices and Starent Networks and Nokia (NYSE: NOK) Siemens Networks for network equipment. There’s 10 cell sites up and running in both cities.