Percept Knorigin signs deal with Alcatel Lucent to provide digital content

(IANS) Indian digital media company Percept Knorigin (PK) said Wednesday it had signed an agreement with French telecom firm Alcatel Lucent to expand the distribution of digital entertainment content to its subscribers across India.
"PK will use Alcatel-Lucent's digital media store (DMS) to enhance its web and mobile entertainment service, which is offered to consumers through partnerships with telecom service providers such as Bharat Sachar Nigam Limited, Mahanager Telephone Nigam Limited and Bharti Airtel," the company said in a statement.
Digital media store simplifies the distribution of applications and multimedia content across any network to any connected device including PCs, mobile phones and TVs.
The company's services like Adchakra, Cinecurry, HelloTV and 51010 dial-a-video has experienced rapid growth of nearly 300 percent last year. Therefore, to meet the increasing demands the company needs a robust digital media platform that could fulfill the requirements of mobile and web service providers.
With more than 1.2 billion people, India provides an enormous potential audience for the company's entertainment content.
"We were looking at a scalable service which can keep pace with the great growth we experienced last year, one that can provide us with the capability to create services across mobile phones, tablets and laptops," said Viraj Malik, managing director and chief executive officer, Percept Knorigin.
"Our deployment of Alcatel-Lucent's digital media store will provide an all-in-one solution to the challenges service providers face in terms of content, platforms and business operations," he added.
Digital media store will enable service providers offering PK services to establish personalised portals supported by merchandising tools.source

Tiny Cell Tower

Its 2.5-inch lightRadios could replace some 200-foot behemoths.

Almost everything electronic—modems, PCs, cellphones—becomes dramatically smaller and more powerful each year. Not cell towers. They're still big, ugly, and expensive. Most were designed with the simple goal of transmitting plain old phone calls, so towers are easily overwhelmed by smartphone users who now want to not only call grandma but also upload photos and stream TV shows. The current solution to network congestion is "building bigger and bigger cell towers in more places," says the president of Alcatel-Lucent's wireless division, Wim Sweldens. That's cost-prohibitive in vast rural expanses and pretty much impossible in dense urban areas. "It's no longer sustainable," he says.

On Feb. 7, Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) introduced a Rubik's cube-sized device called lightRadio that could help bring an end to the bigger-is-better approach. Most of today's cell towers are 200-foot monsters topped with an unsightly gangle of antennae. Each lightRadio unit measures 2.5 inches across and weighs just 10.5 oz. That compact package contains radios and antennae for each of the major cellular technologies—2G, 3G, and LTE. Carriers can plop them wherever they need more coverage, so long as an electrical source is available—on telephone poles, building rooftops, and bus stop shelters. "This will dramatically change the way mobile networks are built," says Sweldens.

Smartphone users won't be able to download Top Chef via these modules just yet. While carriers say they are very interested in the technology, none have committed to testing it yet, let alone buying it. And while the first versions of the lightRadio devices could help quickly plug holes in coverage, they'll still need to be wired to a cellular base station, the cabinet-sized rack of gear usually housed in a basement or shed at the bottom of a cell tower. (Base stations convert mobile, analog signals into digital ones and send them across a carrier's underground broadband cables.) By 2014, Alcatel-Lucent hopes to integrate all of the bulky base-station technology into lightRadio units as well.

Carriers are scrambling to cope with a steep rise in mobile traffic, which is increasing by 26 percent a year, according to Cisco Systems (CSCO), the world's largest networking gear supplier. The economics of the Internet make keeping up difficult. Though consumers are downloading more movies and apps on their phones, wireless carriers don't generally make extra revenue from these "data hogs," as some call them. "The economics are getting worse," says Sweldens. LightRadio devices, he claims, could lower the cost of new cellular investments by as much as 50 percent. One big expense that lightRadio minimizes: the price of winning approval from the not-in-my-backyard types who fight proposed cell towers. "Site acquisition is the Achilles' heel of every wireless carrier," says Jeffrey M. Thompson, chief executive officer of Towerstream, which offers high-speed cellular service in 11 U.S. cities, including New York. He says it often takes a year to win approval to build a new tower.

Carriers have lately been trying to alleviate network strain by keeping people from using the cell network at all. For several years they've offered consumers the option to buy "femtocells," small gadgets for the home that intercept a mobile user's phone calls and data requests and send them over cable and DSL lines instead of airwaves. It's a tough sell: Carriers are essentially asking customers to pay for a device whose only function is to make their cell service tolerable. (In some cases they give femtocells to subscribers for free.) About a million people have taken them up on the offer, according to Dell'Oro Group, a market research firm.

LightRadio is the first major attempt to rethink the cell tower itself, says Michael Howard, co-founder of research firm Infonetics Research. Asked if any other networking company is working on something like lightRadio, Howard says "If they weren't, they are now."source

Alcatel-Lucent 'radio' reduces half of the mobile network energy

There is very little that we can do as a society to stop of the flood of mobile devices vying for wireless connections around the world. But what technology innovators CAN do is look for ways to minimize the environmental impact of the network infrastructure being deployed to support all those mobile phones, personal digital assistant and (now) tablets vying seeking to connect.

Enter Alcatel-Lucent, which has teamed up with Freescale and Hewlett-Packard to create a new, less power-hungry base station infrastructure technology called lightRadio. The architecture — which will be available in trials starting in the second half of 2011 (notably in China) — combines the multiple antennaes that currently support 2G, 3G and LTE systems, compressing them into a single multi-frequency, multi-standard Wideband Array Antennae.

There are a number of very green-techy reasons that lightRadio is pretty interesting:

1. It uses about half the energy that current radio access network equipment uses. In the press release about the new technology, Alcatel-Lucent cites data estimating that base stations currently emit about 18 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually.
2. The technology can be installed pretty much anywhere — poles, buildings, anyplace there is power and a broadband connection
3. Building on point No. 2, there are future innovations planned in terms of microwave backhaul and compression techniques that would make this infrastructure relevant in emerging markets where renewable energies (solar, wind, etc.) could be used as the source of power

This development dovetails with other Alcatel-Lucent and telecommunications initiatives seeking to make mobile networks much more energy-efficient. Here are some related articles:

• Tech pioneers test energy storage with solar-powered telco base station
• Verizon Wireless shores up green credentials
• Sprint CEO: Prioritizing greener wireless services, mobile gadgets

Realistically, it will be a long time before anyone picks their wireless network because it is greener than someone else’s. But as the demands on these networks increase exponentially, so will the electricity consumption — unless technologies like this one are embraced. If for no other reason, the wireless carriers will be scrambling to contain their exposure to electricity costs.

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Alcatel-Lucent Partners with DeviceAnywhere to Help Mobile Operators Launch New Services

Alcatel-Lucent, a major telecom infrastructure equipment provider, and DeviceAnywhere, a provider of mobile application testing, have partnered to help developers and mobile operators launch new services more quickly.

Both companies are trying to accelerate application testing and certification, reducing development costs and removing fragmentation barriers. By offering laptop access to service provider’s mobile devices in the cloud, the companies make it easier for service providers to fill their apps stores with new voice, data, multimedia and video services.

With the integration of Alcatel-Lucent’s Developer Platform andDeviceAnywhere’s (News - Alert) TestCenter, developers can instantly and remotely test and certify their apps across thousands of mobile devices on live global networks.

 “Application submission and certification is arguably the biggest challenge for operators to overcome before they can successfully launch their own application storefronts,” said Faraz Syed (News - Alert), CEO and co-founder, DeviceAnywhere, in a statement. “By introducing proof-based certification on live, networked devices, operators can empower their developer partners to manage their own certification process, yet still retain full control of the testing results.”

Besides improving the end-user reach, this cloud-based testing improves subscriber discovery of cool new Web, mobile and video apps, which accelerates return on investment for operators and developers alike.

“The integration of DeviceAnywhere’s technology further strengthens Alcatel-Lucent’s Developer Platform, which is the industry’s most comprehensive solution for helping service providers open up their networks and manage their own application storefronts,” said Scott Monson, director of Alcatel-Lucent’s (News  -Alert) application services, in a statement.

Developers can use their personal computer to quickly and economically verify their apps to ensure that they are running smoothly on networks, devices and operating systems. This kind of cloud-based testing helps speed up the introduction into apps stores, company officials said.

A recent report from Multimedia Research Group (MRG) said Alcatel-Lucent is leading the IPTV (News  - Alert) Access market worldwide. The company has been leading the IPTV Access market since 2007. Read the full report here.