Occam's Razor

10M$ D round NFC fundraising

INSIDE Contactless (Aix en Provence, France) announced yesterday (15/12/05) the closing of a € 9 million ($10.6 million) D round (following the 1996 A round of Alta Berkeley, the 1998 B round of GIMV and 3i, and the 1999 C round of Siparex, Vertex and NIF) led by three new investors: Sofinnova, Vertex Venture Capital (Israel) and Visa International. Prior round investors GIMV, Vertex Singapore and Siparex have also participated.

While at the standard level Bluetooth is moving toward NFC and UWB compatibility, it will be interesting to watch the game between Bluetooth software vendors like Baracoda and pure player on the NFC like INSIDE Contactless.

INSIDE Contactless is a provider of semiconductor chips (memory and microprocessor) and hardware platforms (couplers and readers) related to 13.56 Mhz contactless technology. Delivering cost-effective, reliable and secure technology for both contactless cards and readers, INSIDE provides high performance, open standard solutions for Payment, ID and Access Control. Headquartered in France with a global presence in China, Singapore and the US, INSIDE's worldwide customer portfolio includes providing MicroPass chips for Visa's contactless payment initiative and serving as the exclusive provider of smart card reader technology for HID's iCLASS access control solution.

Urban WIFI infrastructure

What do we need to do to get the same services in all the large European cities (and start with Paris...). What is impressive it the actual low operation cost (Wifi also means free VoIP calls...). It would be great to get this within the Paris2012 Olympic games preparation)...

Seattle tests free Wi-Fi The Mayor of Seattle booted up a laptop yesterday, looked at the screen, grinned, and in a relieved voice, told a crowd Seattle's free Wi-Fi is on the air. Greg Nickels explained a test of the planned citywide free Internet access service will include two neighborhoods, and expand to four city parks in a month. Restaurant owners in the one of the test areas, Columbia City, told reporters they hope the free service will boost business. "People have staff meetings here at lunch," Cynthia Hobbs told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. "This will give them a chance to connect while they are eating and meeting." The cost of Seattle's five-year pilot Wi-Fi program is estimated at $115,000.

UK Gaming M&A's

InfoSpace has made its second buy of the year in the space, IOMO, a U.K.-based mobile games developer for $15 million in cash. IOMO develops five of the top 10 mobile games being offered by Orange and Vodafone in the United Kingdome. In the three months ended September 30, 2004, IOMO generated approximately $1 million in revenue.

In July of this year, InfoSpace snapped up the assets of Atlas Mobile, marking its first play for a piece of the wireless gaming market. Prior to the asset acquisition, Atlas announced in March that more than 1 million multiplayer games had been played on its platform in 10 weeks time.

A second transaction was also announced as Sorrent, a developer and publisher of mobile entertainment, has finalized an agreement to acquire Macrospace, an mobile games publisher based in London. (no price available on that deal).

Ecosystem development

Good article from the Register contrasting Microsoft and Docomo approaches to ecosystem development.

No cultures could be more opposed than those of Microsoft and DoCoMo. The Japanese operator created the model, now eagerly emulated by the likes of Vodafone, whereby the cellco takes the leading role in defining its requirements for its handset, software interface and infrastructure. DoCoMo engages in extensive R&D into advanced cellular technologies in a bid to drive next generation networks and influence the manufacturers, and often helps to fund the R&D of its partners to speed time to market and reduce its own costs…

…On this basis, it builds an ecosystem of developers, device makers and content providers and, in the case of its iMode content delivery platform, partner operators around the world. All a far cry from the Microsoft world where new releases of its technologies are presented with limited consultation to PC makers, developers and customers

Esmertec raises more money

After an interesting recent debt-based round (close to 20M$) , Esmertec a Swiss provider of Java applications for multimedia cellphones, personal digital assistants and other mass-market devices, raised more money this week, as it was anounced that it has landed CHF10 million ($8.5 million) from Japanese trading concern Mitsui & Co.

Question is to know what they will do with the money, and how it will be spend on external growth...

Wireless information sources

I have been an avid reader of the Rutberg & Co. Research and the Wireless Industry Newsletter (you can subscribe here if you do not already subscribe). The recent September edition has some interesting numbers on the financing and M&A activities:

During the one month period from September 1 through September 30, 38 private wireless companies announced $324 million in new financings. Investments were primarily in the carrier infrastructure, semiconductor, enterprise infrastructure, and enterprise application sectors. There were also 37 M&A transactions announced during the period, including Alcatel's $250 million acquisition of Spatial Wireless, Broadcom's $125 million acquisition of Alphamosaic, and Qualcomm's $170 million acquisition of Iridigm Display...

As illustrated by the M&A activity in September, we find that the level and average valuations of mergers and acquisitions in wireless has increased materially over the past year. As we look forward to the next one-to-two years, we believe that M&A activity is likely to increase, and that transactions of $100 million or greater are possible across several subsectors. Illustrative such subsectors include: mobile broadband equipment, broadband wireless access equipment, mobile content services, enterprise WLAN equipment, and enterprise RFID solutions...

Separately, we are impressed, and pleasantly surprised, by the traction within the metro mesh WiFi subsector. We believe that the recent surge of government interest and deployments in metro mesh WiFi indicates a material near-term equipment opportunity that is far in excess of our previous expectations. Finally, we continue to believe that mobile video represents a meaningful mobile data opportunity for carriers and content providers, even outside of Asia, and find positive theses for selected mobile video related subsectors...

Also quick recent post by Om Malik on the Rutberg September Report.

Bluetooth vs ZigBee

I've been working on trying to understand the relative position of ZigBee vs Bluetooth for quiet a while.
Interesting post from Jeff Nolan on the ZigBee front.

ZigBee could end up being the most important nearband wireless network technology in the years to come. Designed as a low power consumption and low cost technology, it's also capable of handling really large sensor networks, up to 65,000 nodes, as well as having high security built in from the onset to prevent tampering with or eavesdropping on the networks by intruders...

The power consumption feature in the specification is a really important part of the technology. A ZigBee device will sleep more than it's active, this is call a "low duty cycle", and with the active power at 10mW and the sleep power at 10uW, a AAA battery will power a ZigBee device for 37,000 hours on a duty cycle of .1 percent...

Yes, but...
... as my friends at Baracoda have demonstrated, you can ship a Bluetooth based Value Added Stack to manages the consumption issues in a similar sleep/wake-up way, and dramatically extends the battery life a Bluetooth device.

Philadelphia, San Francisco... ...and Paris

Fred Wilson originally noted sometime back in September that Philadelphia had launched an initiative to provide wireless internet access across their entire city. Now he has written about San Francisco undertaking a similar venture.

In Philadelphia, according to Technology Futurist and cNet, the cost is about $10 million initially and about $1.5 million per year to maintain it. That's because WiFi equipment is cheap and getting cheaper every day. If the amortized cost of the upfront expense is about $2-3 million per year, then the total annual cost is about $4 million per year.

San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom today said the city plans to launch citywide free WiFi access. Speaking at his annual state of the city address, Newsom said, "No San Franciscan should be without a computer and a broadband connection." San Francisco will eventually deploy free WiFi access throughout the city's public buildings and public spaces. San Francisco is the latest urban center to announce plans for a citywide wireless network. Both New York and Philadelphia have announced initiatives to launch WiFi hotzones... ....It's happening. Wifi is going to be public infrastructure like roads, tunnels, and bridges.

Others cities currently studying public WiFi offering include Redmond, Wash and Los Angeles:

The Redmond City Council just approved a proposal to support wireless Internet. The mayor of L.A. created a panel that will create a report looking at the role that Wi-Fi can play in attracting business in L.A. and the role the city should play in making sure the access is available to residents.

I think that this is something that Paris should absolutely launch. Having wireless internet everywhere you go, so that it becomes woven moreso into everyday life, no matter where you are, would be a very interesting experiment. Especially now that so many devices have WiFi.

European Wireless exit

Qualcomm Inc. announced today that it has acquired mobile interface company Trigenix Ltd. , a mobile user interface company, for about $36 million in cash.

Trigenix Ltd (formerly 3G LAB) was founded in March 2000 in Cambridge, UK. The VC group 3i invested £2m in Trigenix (formerly 3G LAB) first funding round in April 2000, and followed on with a £3m investment in May 2001. Trigenix and QUALCOMM have worked closely together over the past year on enabling a customizable wireless device user interface via the BREW solution. Qualcomm will use the acquisition to drive forward its BREW strategy, as the combination of Trigenix's Trigplayer and other tools into the BREW client software produces a much richer offering through a truly integrated solution.

Quick math from an investor perspective: 5M£ in (or 7.5M€) for 36M$ out (or 30M€), good example of how software can be a capital efficient investment.

In 2003, Trigenix has been deployed by mobile network operators across 6 European countries. Over a hundred customised Trigenix user interfaces have been released to allow users to personalise their mobile phones, choosing from a rich selection of themes based on films, lifestyle, television, sports, music, and travel. Trigenix has its headquarters in Cambridge, UK, home to a dynamic and thriving community of mobile industry technology companies...

Value migrates to the software side

Ericsson Revamps Bluetooth Division
WirelessWeek.com

Ericsson has decided to refocus its Bluetooth efforts by folding the division into the Ericsson Mobile Platforms group. The move calls for Ericsson to no longer design and develop new Bluetooth solutions, but rather support its existing customer base.

Yet another interesting example of value migrating from the hardware and chip design front to the software side, where small innovative companies like Baracoda are trying to add value to the Bluetooth standard by focusing on delivering a full software stack of value added features.