The Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials (APCO) and Motorola, long the top provider of public safety radios, disagreed on the state of industry competition, in filings on an Aug. 19 FCC Public Safety Bureau public notice. Motorola also took issue with the notice’s characterization of the market as one where “first responders rely on communications systems supplied by a small number of equipment providers to support mission-critical communications.” Questions about competition in the public safety equipment market were raised by leaders of the House Commerce Committee in a June 30 letter to FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski.
Deals between pay-TV distributors and programmers are becoming increasingly complicated as content owners seek higher prices and distributors try to win broader sets of rights, executives told investors at a Goldman Sachs conference in New York this week. Sometimes TV programmers don’t always have all the rights the pay-TV operators want to license, said CEO Glenn Britt of Time Warner Cable. “The world tends to focus on the money part of these deals, but the reality is the negotiations have gotten very complicated and it’s because we want to move toward the ‘four anys'” of letting viewers watch programming on their device of choice at their place and time of choice, he said.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) special agents on September 17, 2010 arrested Arturo Marrero, 47, of Davie, Florida on charges of smuggling cigarettes out of Miami to the European Union.
China's Ministry of Commerce reports that China will flex its muscles to boost its exports of low-carbon and green high -end goods, instead of remaining at the low end of the global value chain, according to Gao Hucheng, Vice Minister of Commerce, who spoke at an energy forum in Taiyuan, capital of Shanxi Province.
Latin America will be the fastest growing pay-TV market through 2014, Parks Associates said. It predicted annual growth rates of 10 percent through 2014, compared to less than 2 percent in Western Europe and North America. “While Asia and Eastern Europe are exciting emerging markets, Latin America will be the next land of opportunity for TV services,” said analyst Brett Sappington. Population and economic growth in Latin America, changes in regulations and new technologies such as 3D and IPTV will help fuel the growth in pay-TV services, he said.
The FCC’s proposal to allocate more spectrum to wireless broadband has broad support and could face an easier time politically than most key communications issues before Congress and the FCC, Qualcomm Vice President Dean Brenner said Tuesday at an Information Technology & Innovation Foundation conference. The commission’s National Broadband Plan recommended that 500 MHz of additional spectrum be allocated for wireless broadband within 10 years.
Zoran will sell “more complete solutions” as a result of its $166 million acquisition of Microtune and will eventually combine the company’s silicon TV tuners with DTV processors/demodulators, CEO Levy Gerzberg told analysts in a conference call. The deal is expected to close in Q4. “The plans for how we bring the products together will have to evolve over time,” Gerzberg said. Microtune and Zoran have been working for “a number of years” on reference designs using their respective ICs for set-top boxes and combining technologies “will start coming in the near future,” Gerzberg said. The companies will likely merge their demodulator technologies, he said. While Zoran demodulators are used to “address several geographies,” Microtune’s chips have been confined to China. In a set-top box, Zoran’s and Microtune’s respective chips could carry a $12-$13 average selling price, based on the $10 Zoran gets for its demodulators, company officials said. CE manufacturers are slowly shifting away from can tuners toward silicon versions that are expected to be in nearly 50 percent of TVs by 2012-2013, Microtune CEO Jim Fontaine said. Microtune also will give Zoran a strong position in the cable modems and cable set-top boxes that produce 80 percent of Microtune’s annual revenue. Microtune cable STB customers in the U.S. include Arris, Cisco and Motorola. It claims an 85-95 percent share of the market for tuners in DOCSIS 3.0 modems. Among Microtune’s TV customers are Samsung and Panasonic. Microtune’s business will be combined under Zoran’s Home Entertainment Division, company officials said. Zoran also will gain a tuner business as it seeks to expand use of the frame rate conversion (FRC) technology it acquired in buying Let it Wave. Zoran FRCs have been deployed in Europe and the company recently landed a new “tier one” customer, said Gerzberg, who declined to identify the company. Microtune has 270 employees, including those in design centers in Dallas, Germany and Shanghai.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection has posted an "adverse effects finding" regarding the construction of a new port facility at the Forest City land port of entry in Maine. As part of the consultation process and in order to resolve adverse effects, CBP seeks the public views and comment on the proposed mitigation strategy.
Hackers create about 57,000 websites weekly and exploit about 375 top brands around the world, a three-month PandaLabs study found. When unsuspecting users click on fake sites attributed to the brands, “their computers will either be infected or they will be directed to a landing page that appears legitimate.” About 23 percent of the sites were falsely related to eBay, 21 percent to Western Union and more than 2 percent to Amazon, PandaLabs said. At 65 percent, banks “comprise the majority of fake websites,” and online stores and auction sites make up 27 percent.
Cybersecurity still isn’t a priority for the U.S. government, and it may take a major attack to wake people up, cyberspace experts and industry executives said Thursday at the University of Nebraska College of Law’s Space and Cyber Conference. Some said a cyber attack could potentially cause as much havoc as an atomic bomb, at least in terms of damage to the economy.