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Marvell beaten by Chinese chipmakers in sub 1,000 yuan handset procurement tender of China Mobile

November 15, 2010 8:52 pm / 4 Comments on Marvell beaten by Chinese chipmakers in sub 1,000 yuan handset procurement tender of China Mobile

Follow-up: First real chances for Marvell on the tablet and smartphone fronts [Aug 21 – Sept 25, 2011]

No international vendors win China Mobile procurement bid for 6 million TD-SCDMA CMMB handsets, says report [Nov 15, 2010]:

China Mobile will procure 12 models of inexpensive TD-SCDMA CMMB handsets, with an equal procurement volume of 500,000 units for each model, the report indicated. The seven local suppliers are ZTE with three models, Huawei Device, Lenovo and Coolpad each with two models as well as K-Touch, Hisense and New Postcom each with one model.

Vendors, including Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and Samsung Electronics, all failed in the competition because China Mobile asked for a unit procurement price of below 1,000 yuan (US$150) and they do not offer such inexpensive TD-SCDMA handset models, the report pointed out. Consequently, the seven China-based vendors eat the whole pie, with prices ranging from 350 yuan [US$52.7] to 650 [US$97.8] yuan.

Seven of the 12 models will use TD-SCDMA chips developed by China-based Leadcore Technology, a member of Datang Telecom Technology & Industry Group, and five models will be equipped with chips developed by China-based Spreadcom [Spreadtrum] Communications and T3G (originally China-based but has merged into ST-Ericsson).

Details on the model number, TD-SCDMA chipset vendor, and CMMB chip vendor for each handset are as follows (source Marbridge Daily):

China Mobile sub 1000 Yuan procurement results -- Nov-2010

Earlier reports about the tender announcement were:
– China Mobile to procure 6 million TD-SCMA handsets, says Chinese media [Oct 8, 2010]: “Of the total, 3.6 million will be of entry-level models and 2.4 million mid-range products. … the latest procurement effort is largely due to the fourth phase of the China Mobile’s TD-SCMA network construction. When completed, demand for TD-SCMA end-use products is expected to increase substantially.”
– China market: Inexpensive TD-SCDMA handsets to be available in 4Q10 [Oct 13, 2010]: “Pushed by China Mobile, TD-SCDMA handsets and smartphones at retail prices of about 500 yuan (US$75) and 1,000 yuan respectively will be available in the China market in the fourth quarter of 2010. … China Mobile is setting up its fourth-phase TD-SCDMA network of more than 100,000 base stations and expects the number of TD-SCDMA subscribers to increase from 13.42 million currently to 100 million in 2012.”

Please note the globally rock-bottom nature of 350 yuan [US$52.7] for entry-level models and of 650 [US$97.8] yuan mid-range products. No wonder that such a low-cost and high-performance system-on-a-chip (SoC) leader as Marvell Technology Group Ltd. had no chance to succeed through any of its handset manufacturing partners. Despite of its long stated aim to capitalize on huge volumes made possible by the sub 1,000 yuan TD-SCDMA handsets:

– Marvell Empowers Mass Market TD-SCDMA OPhones with PXA920 Chipset [Sept 8, 2009]:

The Marvell PXA920 [which later has obtained the additional name Pantheon 920] comes with a dedicated high performance ARM instruction set compliant Sheeva™ processor and an integrated release 7 (TD-SCDMA, TD-HSDPA, TD-HSUPA) TD-SCDMA baseband [processor] as well as a China Mobile proven EDGE modem.

“China Mobile Research Institute believes that the OPhone platform operating on the Marvell PXA920 will catalyze the hyper-growth of TD-SCDMA smartphones as it provides a powerful combination of value-added services on a feature rich, high performance and highly affordable platform. We believe that the PXA920 solution will help us realize China Mobile’s vision of sub-1000 RMB [sub $146] TD OPhones in the near future,” said Bill Huang general manager of China Mobile Research Institute. “Marvell has worked with us from the start of the PXA920 program [2 years ago] and we are excited by the rapid progress we have made towards realizing this milestone. China Mobile will work closely with Marvell and handset eco-system partners to deploy the PXA920 and we look forward to the rapid launch of next generation TD-SCDMA OPhones based on the Marvell PXA920.”

“It is an especially proud moment for me to work with China Mobile on the mass market launch of TD-SCDMA OPhones in China,” said Shanghai-born, Weili Dai, Marvell co-founder and vice president and general manager of the company’s Consumer and Computing Business Group. “Marvell’s mission is to make technology more useful and more affordable to more of the world’s consumers. The PXA920 realizes a shared vision of China Mobile and Marvell to make powerful and affordable smartphones accessible to everyone. With the first single chip solution for TD-SCDMA, Marvell is raising the technology bar for the entire industry.

– Marvell’s Vision and Long Term Commitment to China Positions Company for Next Phase of Growth [Sept 7, 2009]:

Marvell, with approximately $3 billion in revenues in fiscal year 2009, has nearly 700 employees in its Shanghai campus and is aggressively planning to expand its operations in China. The company has focused on building its presence in the China market for most of its 14 year history, initially developing strong relationships with enterprise customers like Huawei and ZTE.

…

Last week, Marvell celebrated the culmination of several years of investment in the China smartphone market with the introduction of the Marvell® PXA920, the first commercially available single-chip solution, enabling mass market availability of TD-SCDMA smartphones. Developed by Marvell’s research and development center in Shanghai, the PXA920 is a high performance, super integrated chipset that makes the new smartphones far more affordable than feature phones currently offered by China Mobile while providing enhanced performance versus current smartphones.

Update: That opportunity was realized only 2 years later. See:First real chances for Marvell on the tablet and smartphone fronts [Aug 21, 2011]

– Marvell Technology Group CEO Sehat Sutardja on Bloomberg [Sept, 2009]:

Our strategy is to focus:

  1. Focus on high-end smartphones
  2. Move smartphones to mainstream cell/feature-phone price range
  3. Work with China Mobile [world’s largest mobile company] for TD-SCDMA

– Marvell Drives $99 Smartphones to Market With New Pantheon Platform [Feb 12, 2010]
– Marvell Affirms Significant Progress in TD-SCDMA Mobile Phone Chipset at Mobile World Congress 2010 – Company Showcases Array of New Smartphones Developed for the China Market Powered by Marvell’s Low Cost, High Performance Processors [Feb 15, 2010]:

More than 90 percent of all OPhones (EDGE and TD-SCDMA) shipped since launch last September are built on Marvell’s power efficient, high performance silicon technology.

In addition to OPhones, Marvell recently announced new breakthrough developments in cellular silicon technology with the new Pantheon(TM) communication processors which enable development of sleeker, high performance smartphones with HD-quality, live instant video, voice, data and 3D graphics for gaming and other popular mobile applications for consumers.

“Marvell is proud to have been an early technology partner to China Mobile on the development of the OPhone smartphone and we are delighted to see the rapid and broad adoption of China’s TD-SCDMA standard,” said Ms. Weili Dai, Marvell’s Co-founder and Vice President and General Manager of Marvell Semiconductor’s Consumer and Computing Business Unit. “… The collaboration with China Mobile affirms our commitment to drive the smartphone for mass market adoption and to deliver the ‘always-on lifestyle’ to consumers around the world.”

“China Mobile’s vision of the sub-1000 RMB (sub $150) TD-SCDMA OPhones will become a reality because of our collaboration with leading companies like Marvell,” said Bill Huang general manager of China Mobile Research Institute. “Marvell and China Mobile are excited by the rapid progress we have made in the TD-SCDMA technical cooperation.”

As the world’s first solution with a built-in TD-SCDMA platform solution with a 55nm design, the Pantheon 920 is a high performance, highly integrated solution that helps make smartphones far more affordable than feature phones while providing enhanced performance compared to current smartphones.

The Pantheon 920 processor [exactly the same as the PXA 920 announced in Sept 2009]supports all leading open operating system (OS) software platforms and come with a dedicated high performance ARM instruction set compliant Marvell CPU processor, high performance HD video, 3D graphics accelerators, and industry’s leading TD-SCDMA modem with 2.8Mbps HSDPA and 2.2Mbps HSUPA.

Certainly it could be the case that the next round of China Mobile tender for sub 2,000 yuan (sub $300) handset procurements will be won by Marvell.  The sub 1,000 yuan (sub $150) segment, however, has been lost for them.

Background on Chinese chipmakers now succeeding against Marvell and all other international operations

When looking into the background of local chipmakers, especially that of the biggest winner Leadcore technology, one thing becomes absolutely clear. The telecommunication chip supply is as much under state control as the whole telecommunication market. Moreover every strategy related decision, which of this procurement process is just one example, is under direct control of the Central Commitee of the Chinese Communist Party. As as consequence there is no wonder that no international chip maker has any chance to penetrate the mass handset market technologically viable for local chipmakers. It is quite probable that the Central Commitee wants to build an internationally competitive local chip industry via the huge volumes available on their home handset market. Some evidence:

–   Leadcore Unveiled oPhone Solutions to Strengthen the High-end TD-SCDMA Handset [April 23, 2009]

On April 23, 2009, in the Leadcore Technology Annual Client Conference 2009, Mr. Sun Yu, the president of Leadcore Tech revealed the progress of TD-SCDMA terminals development. Mr. Sun Yu said that more than 60 handsets are based on the Leadcore solutions in the current 100 TD-SCDMA handsets. More than 70% TD-SCDMA terminals products in the market were derived from the Leadcore’s DTivy. The Pecker test terminal launched by the Leadcore technology occupied the vast majority share of TD-SCDMA test terminal market. He also revealed that China Mobile was taking its great effort to R&D the solutions of OMS-based TD-SCDMA handset, oPhone, which will be released by Leadcore on April 23, 2009.

– TD Forum Attended Leadcore Technology Client Conference to Witness the New Heights of Chip Manufacturers [April 22, 2010]

– Continuous innovation to lead the future – the core technology wonderful debut thirteenth China Beijing International High-Tech Expo [May 27, 2010],  as translated from Chinese by Google:

展会期间联芯科技展位受到了中央领导以及参展观众的高度关注，取得良好反响。 Core Technology Alliance booth during the exhibition by the central leadership and the participating audience attention and achieved good response. 中共中央政治局委员、市委书记刘淇，中共中央政治局委员、国务委员刘延东，国务委员、公安部部长孟建柱，均来到联芯科技TD联盟展位驻足参观，了解公司最新技术与市场化成果。 CPC Central Committee, Liu Qi, Party Secretary of the CPC Central Committee, State Councilor Liu Yandong, State Councilor and Minister of Public Security Meng Jianzhu, are the core technology to the joint booth TD Union stopped to visit, understand the latest technology and market results.

– General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPC, Chinese President and Chairman of Central Military Commission, Jintao Hu paid an inspection visit to Spreadtrum Communications (Shanghai) Co., Ltd [Jan 18, 2010]
– Hu calls for independent innovation [Jan 18, 2010]:

Hu Jintao (R front), general secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, Chinese president and chairman of the Central Military Commission, shakes hands with young members of the research and development team as he inspects Spreadtrum Communications, Inc., in Shanghai, east China, on Jan. 16, 2010. Hu Jintao made an inspection tour in Shanghai on Jan. 14-17. [Xinhua]

… At the Spreadtrum Communication, Inc., a high-tech company founded by returned overseas students, Hu said independent innovation is the lifeline of a company. He told the company staff “I hope you could make further breakthroughs in core technologies, so as to boost China’s communication industry.”

– Spreadtrum Communications, Inc. Announces $44 Million of New Financing [May 5, 2009]:

“We very much appreciate and are excited to receive this nearly interest-free financing.  This indicates the Chinese government’s strong support and high confidence in Spreadtrum to develop semiconductor products in 2nd and 3rd generation wireless communications in the Chinese market.  We plan to use our borrowings under the loan to increase R&D investment in our GSM and TD-SCDMA projects and to expand our IC operations in China.  With our strengthened financial position, we are more confident in our ability to overcome the difficulties caused by the current worldwide economic and financial crisis and do not expect to need to raise additional funds in the near future,” said Dr. Leo Li, president and chief executive officer of Spreadtrum Communications, Inc.

And these are just the visible indications that local chipmakers are getting huge government subsidies. And T3G, now a wholly owned subsidiary of ST Ericsson, has also been a very much preferred player because of its parent’s huge patent portfolio and international Ericsson influence in the strategic (for China’s local and foreign market efforts) LTE wins (see: IMT-Advanced (4G) for the next-generations of interactive mobile services, China is triumphant [Oct 24, 2010]). With that they can beat even the best international chip house, the Marvell Technology Group.

1. Leadcore Technology (part of the state-owned Datang Telecom Technology & Industry Group)

The current outcome is not the first time for the biggest winner Leadcore Tedchnology (with seven of the 12 models using its TD-SCDAM chip, i.e. 58% or 3.5M chips) as evidenced by one and a half years old news of Leadcore Technology Gets Big Order from China Mobile [May 21, 2009]:

Leadcore Technology Co., Ltd., together with its three partners, wins nearly a half of the CNY 600 million subsidy from China Mobile in the telecom carrier’s latest round of bidding for TD-SCDMA terminal procurement

…

Leadcore’s mobile phone chips are applied in five models of TD-SDMA mobile phones that are ordered by China Mobile this time.

The TD-SCDMA network operator has ordered 11 models of mobile phones, including the Leadcore chip-powered low-end TD-SCDMA devices launched by ZTE Corporation (SZSE: 000063 and SEHK: 0763) and LG, as well as the Leadcore chip-based flagship broadband TD-SCDMA products rolled out by LG, ZTE, and Yulong Computer Telecommunication Scientific (Shenzhen) Co., Ltd.

The other companies share the TD-SCDMA terminal order from China Mobile include T3G Technology Co., Ltd., Spreadtrum Communications, Inc. (Nasdaq: SPRD), Dopod Communication Corporation, Motorola, Samsung, Huawei Technologies, Hisense, and Guangzhou New Postcom Equipment.

Leadcore Technology’s lead on the technology market for TD-SCDMA terminals goes back to the very beginning as was reported by Datang Licensed TD Tech from Leadcore [Sept. 30, 2009]:

Sun Yuwang, president at Leadcore Technology, once said that more than 60 of the over 100 TD handsets that have gotten network access licenses in the country have been equipped with Leadcore chips, with an additional 14 new models afoot. Among the top four PC makers in the world, Lenovo, HP and Acer have all adopted Leadcore’s products.

Leadcore’s TD chip shipment outpaced 1 million pieces this past April, topping 2 million by the end of this August. Now the company is holding more than 60% of the domestic TD chip market.

Leadcore’s dominance has been further evidenced by TD Forum Attended Leadcore Technology Client Conference to Witness the New Heights of Chip Manufacturers [April 22, 2010]:

Dr. Jing Wang, Secretary-general of TD Forum attended the conference and witnessed great achievements gained by TD-SCDMA chip manufacturers since TD-SCDMA commercialization one year ago. With the further mature of TD-SCDMA market and gradually strengthened cooperation among related parts of TD-SCDMA industry, the problems occurred in the development of TD-SCDMA industry will be resolved effectively.

Leadcore is part of the state-owned Datang Telecom Technology & Industry Group which has the following structure:

with officially provided links as below:

Affiliations

Datang Telecom Technology & Industry Holdings Co.,Ltd.

Datang Telecom Technology Co.,Ltd.

GoHigh Data Networks Technology Co.,Ltd.

Unit in charge

State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council

Among the affiliate links given above there is no link for Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) although on the stucture image it is listed as part of the Datang Telecom Technology & Industry Holdings Co.,Ltd.

Datang Telecom Technology & Industry Holdings has agreed to acquire US$102 million worth of Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) shares to bring its stake in the foundry chipmaker to 20%, according to a Chinese-language sina.com report.

The report said SMIC will use the new funds mainly to expand advanced process capacity at its 12-inch fabs.

Datang, directly owned by China’s central government, is currently the majority shareholder of SMIC with a 16.6% stake.

Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC) will pump at least US$2 billion into research and development annually in the future, aiming to develop “world-class” technologies and manufacturing within the next five years, according to Jiang Shang Zhou, chairman of the China-based foundry chipmaker.

…

SMIC is now undertaking a project to ramp up 45nm process capacity, which will cost it a total of about US$4 billion, Jiang noted. In addition, the company’s next move to a 32nm technology will initially require US$600 million, Jiang added.

Soon the Datang Telecom Technology & Industry Group will be even larger as per the news that China Potevio to merge with Datang [July 15, 2010]:

The government has decided to merge two State-owned telecom equipment makers – China Datang Corp and Potevio – by the end of this year, sources from Datang said on Wednesday.

The merged entity is expected to become the third-biggest telecom equipment maker in China after Huawei Technologies and ZTE Corp, the source said.

…

Datang is a large power generation company and one of the key promoters of the TD-SCDMA standard in the nation.

China Potevio is a leading IT equipment manufacturer and service provider. Its main businesses span the manufacture of telecommunications products, the application of telecom products, and the informatization of broadcasting and TV.

The group is also playing an active role in high-tech investments as per Datang Telecom planning PE fund [May 20, 2010]:

Telecom equipment maker Datang Telecom on Wednesday said it plans to set up a 5 billion yuan ($732.18 million) private equity (PE) fund for investments in the booming Internet of Things (IOT) industry.

Datang will partner with the Wuxi New District Venture Investment Group, the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and Wuxi Guolian Development (Group) Co to set up the PE fund with a corpus of 1 billion yuan in the first stage.

The company will invest 200 million yuan during the first stage of fundraising and hold a 40 percent equity stake in the fund management company being set up to manage the private equity fund.

IOT refers to networks of real-world objects linked to the Internet that interact through web services. The technology is based on the concept that all real-world objects can be identified and managed by computers if they are equipped with radio tags and linked to the Internet. Technologies such as radio frequency identification and sensors form the cornerstones of the network.

What is the current status of the group  and Leadcore itself in relationship to China’s own TD-SCDMA and TD-LTE technologies? The Datang Telecom Group was awarded “2nd China Annual 3G Prize” [June 30, 2010] press release is giving all the details (emphasis is mine):

Since Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of PR China issued 3G licenses in January 2009, in TD-SCDMA industry DTG has occupied 30% of market share in system equipment, and 50% in chips and Solutions.

Currently, DTG possesses the most comprehensive TD-SCDMA solutions for all circumstances in the industry, and is competent to provide complete, end to end TD-SCDMA and TD-LTE business solutions. DTG has already provided network equipment supply and construction services to Guangdong, Shandong, Jiangsu and Zhejiang, and other key provinces. DTG actively cooperated with China Mobile to accomplish coverage of complex scenes, such as, intensive urban areas, large scaled stadiums, maglev trains and Cross-ocean Bridge, and provided premium green network with TD-SCDMA technology. All products provided by DTG are ready for smooth evolution towards TD-LTE.  This award collectively represents high recognition and acceptance towards Datang Telecom Group for its contribution in promoting the development of Chinese telecommunication industry.

LeadCore Technology, winner of “TD-SCDMA terminal chip and the best solution provider”, is the core enterprise specialized in TD-SCDMA terminal industry in DTG. As a chip enterprise in the upstream position of industrial chain, Leadcore Technology always focuses on layout of industrial chain and value chain; Leadcore adheres to technology innovation and market-orientation; promotes industrialization of innovation achievements,  persists in pursuing win-win situation from cooperation and also coordinates with the partners from industrial chain, so as to promote rapid and healthy development of TD-SCDMA industry.

2. Spreadtrum Communications, Inc (founded by Chinese expatriates in 2001, a public company since 2007 with principal executive offices and most operations in China but incorporated in Cayman Islands)

– Spreadtrum and Hisense Jointly Launched the World’s First Affordable TD-SCDMA Phone Supporting CMMB Digital TV [Jan 10, 2010]

Hisense N51 was jointly developed by Spreadtrum and Hisense in a highly collaborative technical partnership. Executive Vice President of Hisense Communication, Ms. Wenlin Yang, said: “Hisense and Spreadtrum share a long history of co-operation. Partnering with Spreadtrum, we successfully won the bid of ‘thousand-yuan 3G mobile phones’ project of China Mobile’s ‘TD-SCDMA Terminal Special Incentive Fund Project.’ Through our six-month joint efforts and Spreadtrum’s very competitive TD-SCDMA and CMMB solutions, the Hisense N51 was introduced. … “

President and CEO of Spreadtrum Communications, Inc., Dr. Leo Li, said: “… Spreadtrum provides highly integrated TD-SCDMA/HSDPA/GSM/GPRS/EDGE baseband chip SC8800H and RF chip QS3200, which effectively reduce the cost of development and manufacturing of Hisense Communication products. Therefore, Hisense Communication is able to introduce cost-effective handsets such as N51 by targeting the Chinese 3G market quickly to meet the needs of consumers. Spreadtrum CMMB mobile TV chip SC6600V provides Hisense N51 with vast application space. Particularly, Hisense N51 is currently the world’s only 1000 RMB level TD-SCDMA phone that supports CMMB.”

– Spreadtrum’s TD-SCDMA Chip Adopted in the World’s First 3G OPhone Lenovo O1 [Dec 14, 2009]:

Lenovo Mobile Communication Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “Lenovo Mobile”) launched the world’s first TD-SCDMA standard-based OPhone smart phones – Lenovo O1, with immediate sales in all local markets in mainland China. The phone is based on Spreadtrum Communications, Inc. (hereinafter referred to as “Spreadtrum”, Nasdaq: SPRD) TD-SCDMA solution, and supports China Mobile OPhone OS smart phone operating system.

Spreadtrum and Lenovo Mobile, in a highly collaborative technical partnership, jointly developed Lenovo O1.  This new handset runs on the China Mobile led developed Intelligent Terminal software platform – the OPhone platform.  Lenovo 01 uses Spreadtrum’s TD-SCDMA/HSDPA / GSM / GPRS / EDGE baseband chip SC8800S and radio frequency (“RF”) chip QS3200.

– Spreadtrum and China Telecommunications Technology Labs Announce Strategic Partnership to Promote New Technologies and Services [May 15, 2009]

A unique industry chain capability has developed in China’s mobile phone industry, which now comprises of design, R&D, support, production, marketing, etc. This development will enhance the competitiveness of phones made in China for the local and overseas markets. With the strategic partnership of CTTL and Spreadtrum, our cooperation will create new technologies and services in wireless communications and multimedia terminals. For example, we expect to innovative services by utilizing our combined resources and new techniques in 2G and 3G networks to develop high-tech information security technologies for the mobile and multimedia markets. Our cooperation will simultaneously broaden and strengthen interactions in the industry chain.

… China Telecommunications Technology Labs (“CTTL”), founded in 1981, was named under the authorization of the Ministry of Information Industry (MII) and the State General Administration for Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine (AQSIQ). Currently, CTTL is administrated by the China Academy of Telecommunications Research (CATR) and was formed through re-organization and merges of four divisions of CATR, i.e. the Research Institute of Telecommunications Transmission (RITT), the Telecommunications Metrology Center (TMC), the Research Institute for Industry Standard of Posts and Telecommunications (PTISR), the CTTL Anti-seismic Research Institute of Telecommunications Equipment, BaoDing (ARITE). It is a leading high-tech laboratory with the following missions: telecommunications technology development, telecommunications product standards and test methods research, telecommunications metrology standards and methods research, products inspection, verification and technical assessment and testing instruments metrology and evaluation of communications software.

– Spreadtrum Communications, Inc. Announces $44 Million of New Financing [May 5, 2009]:

“We very much appreciate and are excited to receive this nearly interest-free financing.  This indicates the Chinese government’s strong support and high confidence in Spreadtrum to develop semiconductor products in 2nd and 3rd generation wireless communications in the Chinese market.  We plan to use our borrowings under the loan to increase R&D investment in our GSM and TD-SCDMA projects and to expand our IC operations in China.  With our strengthened financial position, we are more confident in our ability to overcome the difficulties caused by the current worldwide economic and financial crisis and do not expect to need to raise additional funds in the near future,” said Dr. Leo Li, president and chief executive officer of Spreadtrum Communications, Inc.

– Spreadtrum: TD-based Chip Shipment Totaled 100,000 [March 6, 2009]:

Spreadtrum Communications, Inc. clarified on March 3, 2009 that the shipment of its TD-SCDMA-based chips totaled nearly 100,000.

Earlier, the shipment of Spreadtrum’s TD-SCDMA-based chips was reported to reach 10,000 or so. The number is inaccurate, explained the Nasdaq-listed company, adding that mobile phones adopting its chips accounted for nearly one third of China’s procurement of 300,000 TD-SCDMA cellphones and terminals.

The Shanghai-based company incurred a net loss of USD 31.3 million for the third quarter of 2008, in contrast to a net profits of USD 6.1 million Q3 2007 and USD 2.6 million in Q2 2008

– Spreadtrum Announces World’s First TD-SCDMA/HSDPA/EDGE/GPRS/GSM Single-chip RF Transceiver – The QS3200 RF transceiver features high integration and low power consumption and provides 2G/2.5G/3G/3.5G multimode support [Feb 16, 2009]:

Followed by the GSM/GPRS single-chip RF transceiver, the QS500, and the GSM/GPRS/EDGE single-chip RF transceiver, the QS1000, today Spreadtrum announced the QS3200, the world’s first single-chip RF transceiver to support multimode such as 2G/3G/3.5G. The QS3200 offers great improvement over the other TD-SCDMA RF chip on signal transmission, reception, and power amplification in addition to the integrated features and low power consumption in Spreadtrum’s other chip solutions.  The launch of the QS3200 makes Spreadtrum one of the total solution providers in the wireless communications market and takes a positive step forward in commercializing TD-SCDMA technology.

– Spreadtrum Announces SC6600V: First Single-Chip Demodulator/Decoder for CMMB-Based Mobile TV [May 7, 2008]

Spreadtrum’s new SC6600V solution is an integrated CMMB demodulator and source decoder chip and is the first single chip solution that supports both AVS and H.264 video decoding standards.  As the first CMMB single chip solution for mobile TV, the SC6600V is designed for feature phones.  The SC6600V adopts an integrated platform design for communications and mobile multimedia to reduce the design period of Spreadtrum’s customers.  … Spreadtrum’s SC6600V single-chip solution is designed to enable handset makers and carriers to offer mobile TV feature in feature phones at reasonable prices, instead of being relegated to expensive SmartPhones as most mobile TV solutions are currently.

… CMMB is a homegrown mobile TV standard that applies to mobile devices such as mobile phones, PDAs and Portable Media Players (PMPs).  It features free mobility, rich video and data services.  In addition, it provides consumers with cost-effective mobile TV service that satisfies most consumers’ needs and is expected to be used in the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games.

Mr. Ma Jv, President, Academy of Broadcasting Science of the State Administration of Radio Film and Television, indicated that, “We are very glad that Spreadtrum has developed the SC6600V, the first CMMB-based Mobile TV single chip solution for mobile phones, which integrated demultiplex, channel decoder and source decoder.  We believe that it will help CMMB start to grow its market quickly, and we hope Spreadtrum will continue to unleash its technology strengths, allowing it to contribute to the CMMB industry’s ongoing development and road to becoming prosperous.”

– Spreadtrum Communications Completes Acquisition of Quorum Systems [Jan 16, 2008]:

With the acquisition of Quorum, Spreadtrum gains a highly skilled RF engineering team of 30 engineers with an average of 10 years of industry experience. The combination of Spreadtrum’s leading single-chip baseband solutions with Quorum’s complementary, low-power high-performance RF designs is expected to strengthen Spreadtrum’s competitive position in the wireless market, including in 2G, 3G, RF, baseband, physical layer software, protocol and applications. Since its founding in 2003, Quorum has created multi-band transceiver designs ranging from GSM/GPRS/EDGE to WCDMA and 3G HSDPA application, plus a recently announced TD-SCDMA platform.

3. T3G (an ST Ericssson subsidiary since December 2008)

– Key Milestones:

T3G has achieved an impressive record of world firsts in bringing innovation to China:

  • The world’s first ASIC based TD-SCDMA system level call achieved in 2004
  • The world’s first international TD-SCDMA call in 2004
  • The world’s first 384Kbps commercial TD-SCDMA/EDGE dual-mode Samsung phone, powered by T3G’s chipset in 2005
  • The world’s first ASIC based 2.8Mbps TD-HSDPA system call achieved in 2007
  • The world’s first 2.8 million TD-HSDPA/EDGE dual-mode dual-band commercial data card powered by T3G’s chipset in 2008
  • Completed the world’s first TD-LTE end-to-end application demonstration on multimode soft modem platform in 2009
  • Launched the world’s first TD-HSPA chip in 65nm in 2009

– Strong presence and identity in China:

ST-Ericsson, through its subsidiary T3G, has been actively developing platforms for the TD mobile standard since 2003. The company’s extensive investment in technology and product development has given it a leadership position in the market. The company provides solutions to Chinese and global handset manufactures and design houses. It offers mobile chipsets, software protocols, system reference designs and customized technical support. In May 2009, ST-Ericsson was selected by China Mobile as a major technology partner for the development of its highend and low-cost handsets. The company will also support four of its customers to commercialize their mobile phones during 2009-2010.

…

  • ST-Ericsson’s 550 employees are based in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Hong Kong
  • ST-Ericsson (ST-NXP Wireless) acquired T3G in December 2008. T3G was established in January 2003 as a joint venture. Its founding partners were Philips Semiconductors (later NXP Semiconductors, and finally ST-NXP Wireless), Datang Mobile, Samsung Electronics, and since 2005 also Motorola. T3G is based in Beijing.

– Datang set to sell off T3G stake [June 19, 2008]:

Datang Mobile, the second largest stakeholder of T3G, is putting its 32.11 percent stake on sale for 122.2 million yuan, according to a notice posted on the website of Beijing Equity Exchange.

The move comes on the heels of the collapse of Commit Inc, another major TD-SCDMA chipmaker, which has dimmed the prospects of TD-SCDMA.

There are rumors that Geneva-based semiconductor maker STMicroelectronics might take over Datang Mobile’s stake in T3G.

…

Commit has had its own share of woes, forcing it to shut shop at the end of April after failing to secure fresh funding and pay its employees for months. Commit’s shareholders include Hyper Market, Texas Instruments, Nokia, LG and State-owned Potevio and Datang Telecom, parent of Datang Mobile.

Industry observers blame Commit and T3G’s woes on the slow roll-out of TD-SCDMA in China.

– ST-Ericsson and China Mobile to Bring TD-SCDMA to the Mass Market [May 26, 2009]:

China Mobile has selected ST-Ericsson’s company in China, T3G, as a major technology partner for the development of its high-end and low-cost handsets, based on the 3G standard TD-SCDMA. ST-Ericsson will also support four of its customers to commercialize their mobile phones during 2009-2010.

Under the agreement, ST-Ericsson, the 50/50 joint venture between Ericsson and STMicroelectronics, will develop a new low-cost platform to support its customers to offer affordable TD-SCDMA devices to the China consumers. ST-Ericsson will also support customers to develop high-end mobile phones, based on existing and new platforms such as the T7210, which will allow consumers to enjoy high-speed broadband and multimedia services.

“Although ST-Ericsson is a recent joint venture, our subsidiary T3G has been actively developing platforms for the mobile standard for more than six years, achieving an impressive record of world firsts in bringing innovation to China,” said Alain Dutheil, President and CEO of ST-Ericsson. “Our dedicated local R&D team, as well as our strong commitment to continuous innovation and close cooperation with customers, will enable China Mobile to offer a broad range of handsets for the mass market as well as for the high-end segment.”

ST-Ericsson’s T7210 mobile platform supports TD-SCDMA dual-band in 2010-2025MHz/1880-1920MHz frequencies, and has successfully completed handovers of voice and high-speed data services in order to operate optimally in Chinese dual-band network environments.

– ST-Ericsson Continues to Drive Innovation in TD Market [Sept 14, 2009]:

ST-Ericsson, a world leader in wireless platforms and semiconductors, and its Chinese subsidiary T3G today announced the industry’s first TD-HSPA modem chip samples in 65nm. This new chip is smaller than existing products, making it easier to implement in mobile devices, and is also designed to reach significantly lower power consumption.

– ST-Ericsson reaches key milestones in China [Nov 27, 2009]:

Confirms clear market leadership in the TD-technology

  • Five million TD chipsets shipped
  • ST-Ericsson’s solutions power more than 100 models of TD devices, including handsets, data cards and embedded devices

ST-Ericsson, a world leader in wireless platforms and semiconductors, has reached two important milestones, confirming its market leadership in the Chinese homegrown 3G standard, TD-SCDMA. ST-Ericsson, through its Chinese subsidiary T3G, has been leading the innovation in the TD market since 2003, bringing numerous industry firsts.

… Read more at:  http://www.stericsson.com/press/Strong_presence_china_English.pdf

– ST-Ericsson to cooperate with China Mobile on TD-LTE [Feb 16, 2010]:

ST-Ericsson, a world leader in wireless platforms and semiconductors, announced today it will cooperate with China Mobile on TD-LTE development and will support a demonstration of TD-LTE at Shanghai World EXPO in 2010.

ST-Ericsson will also actively participate on other TD-LTE projects organized by China Mobile, including trial and interoperability testing (IOT) with infrastructure vendors.

Bill Huang, General Manager of China Mobile Research Institute, said: “China Mobile and ST-Ericsson are co-operating very successfully on TD-SCDMA technology and we are happy to extend our partnership into the TD-LTE area and then multi-mode technologies in future. We share a common goal of creating a global LTE market encompassing both TDD and FDD technologies.”

…

ST-Ericsson’s key milestones in LTE:

  • In December 2009, ST-Ericsson and Ericsson were first to achieve LTE and HSPA mobility with a multimode device. Read more at www.stericsson.com/press_releases/LTE_HSPA.jsp
  • 2009: Fully working LTE chipset available and interoperability testing of the platform with operators
  • 2008: Platform interoperability tests activities initiated with network vendors
  • 2007: First handheld LTE prototype available and first handheld public demonstration at Mobile World Congress in 2008
  • 2004-2005: ST-Ericsson started research and standardization activities related to LTE

– ST-Ericsson launches feature rich mobile internet platform in China – T6718 enables development of cost-effective and power-efficient multimedia TD-HSPA handsets [May 27, 2010]:

The T6718 is the first commercial 65 nanometer-based TD-HSPA platform, enabling manufacturers to quickly produce compact, cost efficient and feature-rich mobile broadband handsets for the Chinese market. ST-Ericsson expects the T6718, which can support downlink speeds of 2.8Mbps and uplink speeds of 2.2Mbps, to be in commercial products from Q3 2010.

… Handsets based on the T6718 platform will be able to deliver up to seven hours of talk-time or 25 days of standby on one battery charge. Incorporating software support for Assisted-GPS (AGPS), the T6718 will also enable location-based services, such as navigation and local search.

– T6718 TD-HSPA/EDGE:

The dual mode TD-HSPA/EDGE modem is integrated with an ARM processor to deliver small size, fast response time and low power. This is also the first TD-HSPA solution to take advantage of the additional size and power benefits of the 65 nm process node.

The T6718 delivers a rich Internet experience including fast browsing, streaming video, broadcast television and other multimedia services on a touch-screen display. The 5 Mpixel camera support and video recording capability coupled with the graphics hardware accelerator provide a great visual consumer experience. Furthermore, the T6718 has the lowest power consumption in its class which means more hours enjoying music, video, internet access and talking.

…

High performance and low power consumption

  • The first commercial 65 nanometer based TD-SCDMA
    platform     on the market
  • Talk time up to 7 hours and stand by up to 25 days on one battery charge (standard 1000mAh battery)
  • ARM926 processor up to 416 MHz

Cloud Computing Strategy for Digital China: Taiwan is leading the way except IOT

November 8, 2010 12:04 pm / 4 Comments on Cloud Computing Strategy for Digital China: Taiwan is leading the way except IOT

In my post Be aware of mainland China and Taiwan stronger manufacturing links in ICT [Sept 2] it has already been proven that mainland China and Taiwan are fast becoming essentially one in the important ICT sector. Moreover, it was a recent acceptance of IMT-Advanced (4G) for the next-generations of interactive mobile services, China is triumphant [Oct 24] as major effect of that acceptance. It is more visible for mainland China as for them the #1 issue is Could China close the gap in mobile Internet? It should! [July 21]. For Taiwan the issue in this regard was the one related to Intel dismisses WiMAX Program Office [July 1] only. With IMT-Advanced (4G) accepted by ITU the Taiwanese concern about their strong and already very much advanced WiMAX commitment has also been resolved since the WirelessMAN-Advanced within IMT-Advanced is in fact a kind of WiMAX 2.

With such triumphant continuation assured for both the Taiwanese mobile Internet as well as that of mainland China (see 3.9G TD-LTE rollout in 2012 with integrated 2G, 3G and 4G? [July 19]) for an ardent China technology watcher like myself the next issue is what about their cloud computing strategies?

For mainland China the most visible manifestations of any cloud foundation related strategies of their own have been the OPhone OS (OMS) 2.0 based on Android 2.1 [July 5] and the Mobile search SaaS battle [June 28]. On behalf of the large international ICT players, on the other hand, the most visible mainland China related cloud effort has been so far the SAP’s Business ByDesign SaaS to be relaunched on July 31 with mobility as one of key attractions [July 28] only. So a kind of core coverage has already been provided on my “Experiencing the Cloud” blog.

-With a TD-LTE (time division long term evolution) testing lab jointly established by Taiwanese end-user instruments makers in China becoming operational, China Mobile, one of China`s big three telecom service providers, will move to expand its cooperation with them on 4G business in the country soon.

Yvonne Li, president of Taiwan`s Far Eastone Telecommunications Co., Ltd., one of founders of the TD-LTE testing lab, has confirmed that several Taiwanese handset makers, including High Tech Computer (HTC) Corp. and Asustek Computer Inc., have sent their smartphones to the lab for testing, which will be adopted by China Mobile for launch in China in 2011 at the earliest.

Also, Taiwan-based MediaTek Inc., a globally leading handset IC designer, is expected to count on the lab to accelerate development of its chipsets for TD-LTE phones, industry insiders noted.

Through the testing lab, Li stressed that Taiwanese firms relative to 4G communications can tap China Mobile`s supply chain of 4G phones more easily in the future than before. In short, the lab will also help step up cooperation between the Chinese telecom service provider and Taiwanese manufacturers.

Li also indicated that his firm has moved to expand collaboration with China Mobile on value-added mobile services, with the former`s application software and e-book readers already available on the latter`s online shopping store. Prospectively, said, the cooperation will open the door wider to China`s e-book reader market for other Taiwanese firms in the future.

So far, China Mobile has decided to set up over 3000 TD-LTE base stations in six metropolises, such as Beijing and Shanghai, in China, and, to counter underdevelopment of related 4G phones, has planned to rely on Taiwanese suppliers` cutting-edge product R&D capability to boost promotion of the 4G services.

Taiwan-based mobile telecom carrier Far EasTone Telecommunications (FET) has launched 25 Chinese-language Android applications om Mobile Market, the online store operated by China Mobile, with market response better than originally expected, according to FET.

The 25 applications, with 23 ones free and two chargeable, are selected from S Mart, FET’s online store of which 40% are for chargeable download, FET indicated. The launch on Mobile Market has hit a record of 43,000 downloads a day and reached more than 140,000 downloads cumulatively, FET noted. With 40 more applications under review by China Mobile, FET expects to have 100 applications available on Mobile Market at the end of 2010.

Most of the applications on Mobile Market should be for free use in order to cultivate habits, a necessary measure to pave the way for launching more chargeable applications in the future, FET pointed out. FET plans to invest NT$300 million (US$9.6 million) in three years offering free applications to tap the China market.

Taiwan has about 15.42 million computer users and 14.46 million being habitual Internet browsers, 63.9% of which have shipped [shopped?] online, up 10 percentage points from the corresponding 53.9% of last year, according to a recent survey by the Research, Development & Evaluation Commission (RDEC) under the Taiwan Cabinet.

Online shoppers have spent on average this year NT$13,864 (US$447.23) per person, surging 41.24% from last year`s NT$9,816 (US$306.75). In addition, 26.4% of the browsers have used online financial services, up five percentage points from that recorded a year earlier. Such uptrend reflects the increasing dependence on the Internet by Taiwanese in home economy, or the art and economics of home management.

The survey shows that 86 of every 100 households in Taiwan own computers, with 81 being online browsers. This year the proportion of mobile online users has increased to 53% from last year`s 41.9%; while 75.6% of the island`s 12-and-older people have used computers and 70.9% have used the Internet.

Some 64.9% of Taiwan`s online users have participated in Internet communities, 48.8% have joined MSN, and 41.4% have participated in Facebook, with 34.9% having set up personal blogs.

The joint venture … will be the first manufacturer of cloud computing equipment co-founded by industries on the two sides of the Taiwan Straits.

Tian [Sounin, Skycloud Chairman] noted that mainland China has included cloud-computing development in its 12th Five-Year Plan, setting to push for one mega cloud computing plan each in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Wuxi and Nanjing in five years.

Of the five mega programs, the one for Beijing will cost at least RMB50 billion (US$7.5 billion at US$1:RMB6.6) in investment and create an industry revenue four times the investment costs. The one for Shanghai is also expected to create revenue the same size of the Beijing plan.

According to executives of Chunghwa Telecom Co., Ltd., the mainland`s top three telecom carriers—China Telecom, China Mobile and China Unicom—will also start their own cloud-computing programs.

…

Taiwan`s Ministry of Economic Affairs estimated global revenue in cloud-computing industry will reach US$409.6 billion in 2012 and Taiwan has designed cloud computing as next NT$1 trillion (US$33 billion at US$1:NT$30) industry.

The cooperation is for Skycloud help CHT market CHT-developed cloud computing infrastructure and application services and ICT-based intelligent services/solutions for home, business and government use in China, with Skycloud to provide hardware and system integration services, CHT pointed out. In addition, CHT will set up an exhibition center of its cloud computing products in a cloud computing park developed by Skycloud in Beijing, with completion scheduled for the end of January 2011, CHT indicated. CHT will then introduce its cloud computing products, the HiCloud CaaS (compute as a service), to the China market in March-April 2011, the company noted.

…

Skycloud, in order to promote cloud computing business, has set up 13 offices around China and the nationwide promotion network will be expanded to 35-40 offices in 2011, Tian [Edward, Skycloud chairman] pointed out. Skycloud has been in cooperation with Taiwan-based IC design house VIA Technologies, and both sides will set up a China-based joint venture in 2011 to develop terminal devices specifically for cloud computing application, Tian indicated.

Two top companies of Taiwan and China have signed a memorandum of understanding to start the cooperation on jointly tapping the commercial opportunities in cloud computing services for companies in the Greater China area.

Lu Shyue-ching, chairman of Chunghwa Telecom Co. and concurrently head of the Taiwan Cloud Computing Consortium (TCCC), inked the document with chairman Edward Tian of the Beijing-based Skycloud Technology (China), Inc.

The pact marks the closer cooperation between the two companies, but executives at Chunghwa Telecom, the leading telecommunications service company in Taiwan, said the project also represents the beginning of mutual assistance between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait concerning cloud computing services.

They said Chunghwa Telecom will team up with Taiwan-based enterprises to formally start providing services in the Chinese market in 2011, including shipping the turn-key projects there.

The partners of Chunghwa Telecom in Taiwan include Quanta Computers, Inventec, and Trend Micro Incorporated.

…

Skycloud Technology, a leading cloud computing system integration company, has become a bellwether of the cloud computing sector in China after integrating resources at several other companies, including Centrine Data Systems, CE Open Source Software, and a software firm set up by the Beijing University of Technologyto form the China Cloud Computing Technology and Industry Alliance (CCCTIA).

Chunghwa Telecom is playing a similar role in Taiwan.

Shareholders of Skycloud Technology (China) also include Yahoo founder Jerry Young, and executives from Taiwan like chairman Barry Lam of Quanta Computer, president Chen Wen-Chi of VIA Technologies, and chairman Steve Chang of Trend Micro, a computer and Internet security company.

Skycloud Technology, which aims to bring enterprises in China into the “cloud era,” was understood to have won several contracts to develop cloud computing projects in China, including the one at Beijing Zhongguancun.

Chunghwa Telecom Co., Ltd. and Inventec Corp. yesterday announced cooperation on four cloud-computing projects, including establishing a cloud-computing equipment laboratory, developing cloud-computing equipment for end-user market, and setting up an online store offering content applications.

Also, the two companies decided to work with Skycloud Technology (China) Inc. on integrated solutions for mainland China`s cloud-computing market, which is estimated at around NT$1 trillion (US$33 billion at US$1:NT$30) over next five years.

Inventec will place all the application software it co-develops with content-service developers on Chunghwa Telecom`s cloud-computing Internet data centers set up around the island. Industry watchers said Inventec and Chunghwa Telecom do not rule out the possibility of founding a joint venture to develop cloud-computing application software. Chunghwa Telecom executives said the jury is still out on the joint venture plan.

…

The idea of the two companies’ online content store is inspired by Apple Store. The online store will help Taiwan`s developers of cloud-computing software open online shops to sell their products.

… Meanwhile, Platform Computing, a leading company in cluster, grid and cloud management software with 80 percent of the global market share, said on Monday that it planned to build an operating center in Taiwan within six months. The Canada-based company expects the new center to handle its cloud computing business in the greater China area …

  • Update [Nov 16]: Gene Perez from GMS (Santa Maria, California, US) noted in the comment below, that “labor is pretty damn cheap there as well”. Indeed, the graph below is showing the case for Taiwan (from U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Table 1 of International Comparisons of Manufacturing Productivity and Unit Labor Cost Trends or http://www.bls.gov/fls/prodsuppt.xls):
  • Something similar for Greater China (PRC) from the same source [Nov 17] which shows that manufacturing employees in Greater China get upto 10 times less than even their counterparts in Taiwan — a huge competitive edge for many years and decades ahead which is when combined with cloud computing foundation will be an even more killing combination than upto now:

Table 1.  Hourly compensation costs of manufacturing employees in China, 2002-2008

Year National currency basis
(Yuan)		 U.S. dollar basis
(US$)		 Index1
(US = 100)
2002 4.74 0.57 2.1
2003 5.17 0.62 2.2
2004 5.50 0.66 2.3
2005 5.95 0.73 2.4
2006 6.44 0.81 2.7
20072 8.06 1.06 3.4
2008 9.48 1.36 4.2

The current issue for me is therefore Taiwan related. What is the cloud computing strategy in Taiwan? How that strategy has taken into consideration the huge potential of mainland China? Not only as a market to sell into but as well as a huge and growing ICT industry to collaborate with.  What is the role of the government there? Etc.

Below are my findings for which it was more than enough to collect information from the relevant Taiwan Economic News of China Economic News Service (CENS). I would highly recommend to subscribe to that service.

  • Items #1-3 are showing that Taiwan’s lead in cloud computing has been well established by their government led efforts in the last two years. Item #4-5 are indicating that from large international ICT players Microsoft has been the first to engage in this very early period. Item #6 is about the first government assisted megaprojects.
  • Item #7 is referring to the latest Gartner view on mainland China.
  • Item #8 is about the IOT (Internet of Things) situation (notable here is the active liason work of  Newland Group of Greater China), while item #9 is about the cloud computing effort as a whole in Taiwan.
  • Item #10 is about Intel’s involvement coming quite late to the party.
  • Items #11-12 are about Chungwa Telecom (Taiwan’s #1 telecom service provider) efforts being with the government from the very beginning.
  • Item #13 is a report about the one year results of another government lead effort to build a mighty e-Book Industry, application-wise closely related to the whole cloud computing strategy.
  • Items #14-20 are about some “grass-root” efforts indicating the building strengths of ICT industry players in the joint cloud computing effort:
    – #14: HTC which is also the most promising ICT brand in Taiwan [Oct 18]
    – #15: a joint brain-drain effort by their major ICT players
    – #16: BenQ-AUO Group
    – #17: Taiwan Mobile and Far EasTone, not to lag behind Chunghwa Telecom
    – #18: Inventec
    – #19: Chungwa-Fujitsu collaboration
    – #20: Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., known internationally as Foxconn

1. Taiwan`s MIC Prescribes Manufacturing-to-Service Upgrade to Sharpen Edge (2008/12/24)

Despite the global economic downturn, the Ministry of Economic Affairs in Taiwan and its Industry & Technology Intelligence Services (ITIS) have been sponsoring a series of seminars themed “Discovering Taiwan 2008: Building Future Industries.” As part of this program, the Market Intelligence Center (MIC) of the Institute for Information Industry (III) has been exploring, based on tapping opportunities within the information and communication technology (ICT) sector, various issues, including “the developmental trends of Taiwan`s IT sector; building new superiorities in Taiwan`s IT sector by tapping green concepts and values; and the outlook on the ten key IT software issues in 2009.”

The MIC believes that it is critical for Taiwan to upgrade its industrial competitiveness by shifting from manufacturing to offering service-oriented products.

…

Top-10 IT Software Issues

After intensive investigation and interviews with companies and experts, MIC summarizes in the following the 10-top issues concerning the IT software industry in Taiwan.

1. Microsoft … Windows 7 operating system in 2010 …

2. IT software developers … vital to focus on energy-saving, carbon-reduction in 2009, as global information-software developers try to build new products … to help enterprises cut energy consumption and upgrade IT equipment operation efficiency in 2009.

3. The increasingly mature business model Cloud Computing, or the Internet-based “Cloud” development and use of computing. It is computer tech that enables offering IT-related capabilities as service, allowing users to access technology-enabled services online. With such increasingly mature computing meeting the trend of businesses to streamline computing equipment, Cloud would gain more attention and stir more buzz in 2009.

4. The Software as a Service (SaaS) will become a major option for enterprises. Eliminating the need to install, run an application on customers` own PC, SaaS is a model of software deployment that offers as service customers to access, run programs online. Like the Cloud Computing, SaaS allows enterprises to better control costs for software installation, maintenance, making such option a top-choice for SMEs.

5. With SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) solutions for systems development and integration increasingly maturing, and after IT software developers` aggressive promotion, such solution will no longer be a buzzword but more widely adopted in 2009.

6. Open-code software to be used for mobile applications: After Google`s promotion of Linux cellphone open software architecture and Nokia`s release of the Symbian code, open-code software will be rapidly applied in mobile applications in 2009.

7. … information security of smartphone applications …

8. Personal Data Protection Law …

9. Taiwan`s contract software-developers …

10. Knowledge Process Outsourcing or KPO will continue to gain momentum, with the American legal profession already adopting such model. KPO is simply having staff in a different company or subsidiary of the same firm in the same country or offshore do knowledge- and information-related work to save cost, or a form of outsourcing. The highly localized, customized KPO is the next stage in the IT-outsourcing evolution.

2. Four Taiwanese Companies, Institutes Set Up Taiwan Cloud Computing Center (2010/01/29)

The four members include telecom carrier Chunghwa Telecom Co., Ltd. (CHT), anti-virus software company Trend Micro Inc., government-sponsored technology R&D institute Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), and information technology (IT) industry knowledge center Institute for Information Industry (III).

The center will be responsible for helping push six emerging industries on the island into the cloud computing field, and develop Taiwan into a global supply base of cloud-computing equipment and an application headquarters.

Taiwan`s Premier Wu Den-yih said earlier that the TCCC is expected to further upgrade the development of local information and communication technology (ICT) industry and that the Executive Yuan (the Cabinet) has enlisted cloud-computing a key sector for priority development.

…

Targeted cloud-computing applications in Taiwan include medical-care and educational industries in the initial stage; as well as six emerging lines for the second stage, such as green energy, tourism, health-care, biotechnology, dedicated agriculture, and culture/creativity industries.

3. ITRI Kicks Off Operation of Cloud Computing Research Center (2009/12/29)

Since setting up the Cloud Computing Research Center in September of 2009, the ITRI has actively recruited top engineers with related technical background, including Dr. Chiueh Tzi-cker, the head of the center, and sought cooperation with enterprises, in an effort to activate the center as soon as possible and assist industries on the island to carve out new niches through earlier involvement in the technology.

Chiueh noted that the center will be dedicated to development of software, hardware and application services based on cloud computing technology. Plus, he added that ITRI will establish a containerized data center, which will be installed with a total of up to 2,000 servers and related necessary equipment.

4. MOEA Signs MOU With Microsoft to Tap Cloud Computing Technology (2009/11/09)

Besides, Taiwan`s Economic Minister Y.S. Shih and Microsoft`s CEO Steve Ballmer also announced at the MOU signing a joint investment to establish the “Software and Services Excellence Center” on the island, which will employ engineers from Taiwan`s nationally funded Industrial Technology Research Institute and Institute for Information Industry to develop and apply the could computing technology.

Also, Shih said that through collaboration with Microsoft, Taiwanese R&D institute and enterprises can gain invaluable experience in development of application services based on the technology. Besides, he added, technically supported by Microsoft, the government can also effectively assist local enterprises to apply such technology to step up development of the island`s emerging industries as creative culture and e-book reader sectors.

… Microsoft has also signed a cooperation agreement with Taiwan`s largest telecom company, Chunghwa Telecom Co., to develop application services and platforms based on the technology.

5. Microsoft to Pour 90% R&D Resources Into Cloud Computing (2010/10/28)

There are many opportunities for Taiwanese OEMs/ODMs (original equipment /design manufacturers) in the “cloud computing” era, due mainly to strong demand for data-center construction and hardware such as servers, according to Zhang Yaqin, corporate vice president of Microsoft and chairman of Microsoft`s Asia-Pacific R&D Group.

In addition, Zhang said, Taiwanese information technology (IT) hardware makers have enjoyed strong advantages in making terminal products.

In the future, Zhang said at a recent IT industry trend forum held in Taiwan that major battlefields of the IT industry would lie in platforms, cloud computing, and portable devices. Any company that wins in the three fields would be the next-generation leader, Zhang said.

6. Multibillion Cloud Computing Projects Kick Off in Taiwan (2010/07/09)

At a cloud-computing forum recently held in Taipei, attending Taiwan government officials and top executive of Taiwan`s No.1 telecom carrier announced the commencements of their five-year, multibillion-dollar cloud computing projects.

Government representatives said the government will funnel NT$24 billion (US$750 million at US$1:NT$32) in five years into cultivating Taiwan`s cloud-computing industry, with the ultimate goal set to transform the island`s information-communications technology (ICT) industry into the cloud-computing industry.

Chunghwa Telecom Co., Ltd. will invest NT$40 billion (US$1.2 billion) in five years to set up the island`s biggest cloud-operation and data centers, the company`s chairman, S.J. Lu, vowed,

To smoothen the development of the Taiwan industry as expected, a cloud-computing alliance representing around 80 of the island`s manufacturers will set up a system-test platform, according to Lu, who is chairman of the alliance.

7. Gartner Says IT Spending in China Will Reach $216.7 billion in 2010 (2010/05/07)

… the IT economy in China is driven by large verticals, rather than by consumer IT spending; however, it is slowly evolving toward the consumer market.

… Demand from Chinese companies for emerging technologies like software-as-a-service (SaaS), virtualization, cloud computing, unified communications and green IT is low but rising. IT vendors should help their channel partners continue to build skill sets around these emerging technologies, as spending on these technologies may help drive IT spending to 2013 and beyond.

8. MIT-invented IOT Seen as Moneymaker for Taiwan and China (2010/06/29)

Even in this age of lightning speed Internet communication and technologies, the concept of IOT (Internet of Things), attributed to the 1999-founded Auto-ID Center of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is reportedly just catching on with firms in Taiwan and China. IOT, arguably the Net-era sibling of the original universal bar code that is still ubiquitous and tracks goods in quantifiable terms, is manifested as a self-configuring wireless network of sensors whose purpose is to interconnect RFID-tagged routine things via the Internet.

Companies in Taiwan and China eager to tap business opportunities of Internet of Things will form an alliance in late June to develop industry standards for their operations in Greater China.

The alliance will consist of telecoms from China such as China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom, as well as those from Taiwan as Chunghwa Telecom, Far EasTone Telecom and Taiwan Mobile. Such move reflects the telecoms` optimism about the potential of IOT, touted as the next major moneymaker in telecommunications valued at US$1 trillion worldwide by 2020, as well as seen by leading economies as a pivotal industry to drive growth and offset economic downturns.
[More information: Heavyweight Manufacturers Co-open Cross-Strait IOT Alliance (2010/07/21); ??? “Sensor China” Internet of Things Alliance established in our city, Wuxi Daily (2010-6-28) ??? <<< the exact relationship is not yet clear ]

President Barrack Obama of the U.S. reportedly equates IOT with green energy in degree of importance, believing these two key sectors can generate short and long term benefits.

Futuristic Inventory Management

As with the UPC or barcode, industry executives say that if daily objects like canned goods, books, shoes or auto parts are integrated with micro-identifications that are linked via the Internet, depleting stock or product waste will be minimized as suppliers can track effectively and instantly inventory levels, whether in Mumbai or the Mojave Desert. Industry watchers say that IOT can theoretically encode 50 to 100 trillion objects and track their movements via the Net.

…

China Mobile president J.Z. Wang summarizes IOT as “extensive sensing, reliable transmission, and intelligent treatment.” Market analysts at the Topology Research Institute, a Taiwan-based market consultant, cites a real-world product incorporating extensive sensing: the world`s first IOT-enabled fridge that was recently introduced by the Haier Group, China`s No.1 household appliance maker. Linked via the Net to the supermarket, the fridge has a display panel that tells the user freshness of foods in the supermarket as well as characteristics, origins of food stored in the freezer.

Upbeat Outlook

Despite its budding stage in China, revenue from the IOT sector as from infrared sensors and RFID manufacturing is expected to top US$14.7 billion by the end of this year and US$36.7 billion by 2015.

During a tour in August 2009 of the Wuxi Internet of Things Research Institute, Chinese premier J.B. Wen proposed to set up the “Experience China” center to enable the world to experience everything in China through IOT applications. Now upgraded to a national organization, the center in Wuxi, Jiangsu Province is China`s first IOT city.

Also China has invited Taiwan`s IOT developers to visit the officially-invested IOT facilities in Wuxi, with the invitees including Chunghwa Telecom, D-Link, Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI), GemTek, First International Telecom, Tatung, and Alpha Networks.

Wen`s IOT vision and instructions have spawned a slew of developments: Since early this year, China has accelerated interconnecting telecom networks, telecasting and broadcasting networks and the Internet, offering subscribers on a single platform wide ranging services including voice, data and telecasting and broadcasting, with the triple-play network considered the foundation of China`s IOT future.

Vice Chairman of Chinese National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) X.Q. Zhang says that the commission will aggressively promote six measures to develop IOT and other emerging industries in China, including interconnecting the three networks, inspiring investments in IOT projects, and creating demand for IOT applications.

IOT Fever

Apparently China is serious about building the IOT sector in the nation. Chengdu, capital city of the southwestern province of Sichuan, announced in May a municipal IOT project with estimated revenue of US$4.4 billion; Guangzhou, the capital city of the southernmost province of Guangdong, announced plans to generate IOT revenue of US$14.7 billion in five years; Shannxi Province has launched an IOT alliance; Jiangxu Province has started a plan to build an IOT industry valued at US$58.8 billion; and Beijing announced the establishment of a national committee to set IOT standards.

…

Y.J. Lee, a senior market researcher at Topology, advises Taiwan`s IOT developers to watch closely China`s standardization of its RFID and electronic-labels, as well as try to work with China`s agency on IOT protocols based on its homegrown TD-SCDMA 3G technology and take part in China`s IOT infrastructural projects. Lee also believes that entering China`s market and working with its standard-setters will help Taiwan`s IOT developers penetrate other emerging IOT markets, as well as become a dominant global player.

Lee notes that Taiwan`s IOT developers lag their Chinese counterparts as China Mobile, China Unicom, Invengo Information Technology and Tongfang in terms of network and service technologies, as China offers opportunities for field testing of integrated systems. In contrast, Taiwan is ahead of China in integrated-circuit design, components and equipment manufacturing, making the two sides more friend than foe.

Taiwan Makers Contracted

As such, the Newland Group in China, recognized as the No.1 IOT equipment supplier in Greater China, recently announced it would contract Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd., United Microelectronics Corp. (UMC), Largan Precision Co., Ltd. and Faraday Technology Corp. as suppliers. [See also: Newland Europe & Taiwan.]

[From that recent announcement: “Wang said she had approached Chairman Terry Gou of the Hon Hai Group and Honorary Vice Chairman John Hsuan of UMC over cooperation deals on Internet of Things. She added that the Internet of Things industry in mainland China and that in Taiwan can complement each other with their own advantages. For instance, Taiwan is good at raid frequency identification (RFID), high-end chips, barcode test, and consumer-premise equipment while the mainland is adept at matrix code and sensor transmission. Newland’s executives pointed out that Newland is moving to integrate upstream, middle-stream and downstream sectors of Internet of Things to constitute a complete supply chain for the mainland’s Internet of Things market.”]

Newland is one of the three Chinese manufacturers contracted by China Telecom, China`s No.1 telecom carrier, to supply IOT equipment.

…

Regarding Taiwan`s lack of field testing of integrated systems, Topology`s Lee suggests Taiwan`s IOT developers focus on applications for urban life, transportation, residence, finance, retail, energy, production, and agriculture.

Wireless Sensor Network

Y.S. Hsieh, another Topology analyst, suggests Taiwan`s equipment supplier emphasize wireless sensor network, with service providers to use the network to develop IOT applications like intelligent data transmission system, homecare for seniors, as well as home and community security. She notes that although manufacturing of WSN equipment as chips, modules and end equipment is mature in Taiwan, very few developers are capable of integrating such equipment and no open interoperability platforms have been set up on the island. These deficiencies hamstring development of Taiwan`s IOT industry, she stresses.

China`s significance in global RFID manufacturing, including manufacturing of tag, reader, and infrastructure equipment, also strengthens its IOT development, according to watchers in Taiwan. China`s RFID strength is driven by robust demand, which totaled around US$1.4 billion in 2008, with the global market valued at US$5.2 billion, up from 2007`s US$4.9 billion.

…

9. Taiwan Sees Sunny Future in Cloud Computing (2010/07/22)

The government of Taiwan is vigorously working with the island`s information and communications technology (ICT) sector on strategies to facilitate the development of cloud-computing industry. The emerging industry has been singled out as an area that could fast-forward the island`s ICT sector into a leading provider of system-integration services incorporating software and hardware.

Cloud computing is a cost-effective alternative for delivering computing power to organizations over the Internet. Computer hardware, software and information are provided online based on demand, like electricity, and service is charged by usage. Some analysts figure that cloud computing can save a company of 200 employees about 30% on software expenses.

Late last year, the United States Federal Government launched the Apps.gov, a cloud-computing application site, which is a major feature of the Obama Administration`s initiative to cut down operating costs while boosting government efficiency. The federal government is estimated to be able to save US$75 billion by offering administrative services via the cloud site.

Government Support

Taiwan`s government-backed Industrial Economics and Knowledge Center (IEK) estimates that the global market for cloud applications and services will top US$160 billion in 2015. The Executive Yuan, Taiwan`s Cabinet, projects the island`s cloud-computing industry will generate revenue totaling NT$1 trillion (US$31.2 billion at US$1:NT$32) and create 50,000 jobs in 2014.

…

The government`s first step to materialize its cloud policy is “Government Cloud” or “G Cloud” plan, which will provide contracts to local manufacturers to help them foster cloud computing capability. “G Cloud” will offer applications associated with small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), medical services and healthcare, homeland security, online education, digital content, tax, electronic invoice, trade, and finance services. Applications will be stored in “container data centers,” which eliminate the need to download memory-consuming applications to end-user devices like desktops, laptops, and handheld gadgets.

…

Senior government officials pointed out that South Korean and United States governments have combined information centers in all government organizations across the two countries into two to three centers and are equipping these centers with cloud-computing capability to cut software leasing costs.

Cloud Computing Alliance

An alliance of 65 Taiwanese manufacturers is planning to co-organize a private company to vie for contracts under the ambitious project. The alliance was launched on April 7 with coordination by ITRI. Alliance members include Wistron, Quanta Computer, Inventec, Accton Technology, Chunghwa Telecom, Far EasTone Telecom, and Taiwan Mobile.

… Chunghwa, Taiwan`s No.1 telecom carrier, will help the government foster Taiwan`s cloud-computing industry with its Internet Data Centers (IDCs) across Taiwan. The company is building a center in Banqiao, Taipei County. … Inventec Corp. Chairman Shiqin Li, expects Taiwan to ship its first integrated cloud-computing system by the end of this year. Insiders of the Taiwan industry estimate that the United States or mainland China would be Taiwan`s first export destination.

…

Quanta Computer, the world`s No.2 contract supplier of laptops, has entered into alliance with Chunghwa Telecom to set up a cloud-computing platform for enterprises and will open a cloud-computing company at yearend to sell the applications.

The enterprise cloud-computing platform, Quanta`s vice president, T.J. Fang stresses, will not only provide applications to Taiwan`s 80,000 manufacturers but also to the millions of manufacturers in mainland China. He adds that the platform`s applications may be bundled with Quanta`s servers and storage equipment or even as total solutions.

Currently, Quanta`s enterprise cloud-computing applications will at least include enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply-chain management, work-process management, provision of software crucial to product designs, and emergency response centers (ERCs).

According to Fan, Quanta has been involved in cloud-computing development for some time and sees the new IT sector as a chance to evolve into a software-service provider from a hardware manufacturer. “Quanta has established an R&D center to develop application software and expects cloud computing to bring it another NT$1 trillion [US$31 billion] of revenue after notebook-computer production,” he says. He stresses cloud-computing application software can help small and midsize businesses slash software licensing fees.

…

Microsoft on Board

Taiwan`s strength in developing the cloud-computing industry convinced Microsoft to open a Software and Service Excellence Center (SSEC) in Taiwan, its first on the island and fourth in the world, in early June. Microsoft will work with the first batch of Taiwanese tenants in the center, including Quanta, Inventec and Delta Electronics, to develop new generation of cloud servers.

… Microsoft expects more than 100 Taiwanese ICT companies to join the center in developing cloud computing solutions over the next three years.

Security Concerns

W.N. Jan, a senior consultant and director general of Market Intelligence and Consulting Institute (MIC), categorizes the cloud industry chain into service provision coupled with transmission and service equipment. “MIC`s viewpoint is that service provision involves bigger business opportunities and its business model emphasizes offering services on the Internet. Accordingly, information security will become a top concern in cloud applications,” he notes.

MIC`s surveys, Jan says, show that Taiwan`s enterprises still are hesitant to embrace cloud services all because of security concerns. “CIOs and CTOs are reluctant, or even opposed, to using cloud services,” he stresses. To fix the issue, the Legislative Yuan, he says, is revising an act associated with protection of computer-processed personal data to regulate all enterprises holding personal data.

10. Intel Joins Hands With Taiwan in Developing Cloud-Computing Technology (2010/10/29)

Paul Otellini, president and chief executive officer of Intel, signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) on cooperation with the Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA) yesterday (Oct. 28), aiming to join hands with the Taiwanese government, universities, and enterprises in the development of the cloud-computing industry.

…

Otellini pointed out that the Internet population will top 4 billion in the coming years, leading to the emergence of various Internet-access devices, such as TV and set-top box, which will bring good business opportunities for both Taiwan and Intel.

…

He pointed to the tremendous change in the pipeline for Internet-access devices, whose functions will cover intelligent control, two-way interaction, hi-tech sensing, and distant care, saying changes in this sector in one year will equal changes in the past 50 years. In the future, mobile devices will have constant connection with the Internet and digital signals, enabling people to access information and entertainment services anytime, according to him.

Lu Shyue-ching, chairman of Chunghwa Telecom, reported that his company has signed an MOU with Intel for the joint development of cloud-computing technology, as well as close- and open-end platforms for smart TV. The company has also joined Open Data Center Appliance, in order to accelerate the development of cloud-computing technology. In addition, it signed an MOU with NTT.com the other day for the same purpose.

11. Chunghwa Telecom Projects Sales at NT$220B in 2015 (2010/10/19)

The telecom carrier has designated overseas operation, cloud computing, iEN, movie-on-demand and value-added mobile services as major growth drivers for sales over the next five years. Mainland China is set to be the company`s major overseas market as soon as its mainland branch starts operation early next year.

For cloud computing service, the company will spend NT$40 billion (US$1.29 billion) over next five years beginning this year on installation of cloud computing facilities. The service is estimated to drive up the company`s sales over the next 10 years.

12. Chunghwa Telecom Unveils Five-Year Roadmap (2010/07/27)

Over the next five years, the company`s investments will focus on cloud computing, digital convergence, intelligent energy network, information-communication technology, movie-on-demand (MOD) service, value-added mobile service, and reinvested businesses at home and overseas.

Many of the investment projects are associated with the bright future of related markets in mainland China, where the central government has worked out development projects for intelligent energy network and digital convergence industries.

13. Year One for Taiwan`s e-Book Industry (2010/02/09)

Joining the global rush into the rapidly evolving e-book market, Taiwanese e-reader makers are joining hands with content suppliers in launching e-book services whose reach could extend to the huge market across the Taiwan Strait.

Such ventures were at center stage during the 2010 Taipei International Book Exhibition, held at the Taipei World Trade Center on Jan. 27-Feb. 1.

BenQ, for instance, teamed up with eBook Japan to launch eBook Taiwan during the book fair. eBook Taiwan enables readers to tap a bonanza of digital content via its e-reader, dubbed the BenQ nReader.
Jerry Wang, vice chairman of BenQ, claims that the combination of eBook Taiwan and BenQ nReader offers consumers a reading experience approaching that of print publications and enables them to buy books with just a touch on the e-reader.

eBook Taiwan is an open-end platform with a webpage featuring a safe, stable, smooth, and simple design. It serves as a neutral outlet for Taiwan`s digital-content providers, with a reasonable sharing of profits and a DRM (digital rights management) mechanism capable of offering publishers full protection of their rights. Thanks to the support of cutting-edge technologies such as a high-clarity, high-compression post-production tool, chapter-based sales management, and the ability to support multiple formats including ePub, EFI, PDF, and TXT, e-books can be easily put on the shelf of the platform. This capability enhances timeliness and enriches the content of the platform, which in turn will boost consumer willingness to use it.

In addition to the provision of popular books and magazines in traditional Chinese characters, simplified Chinese characters, and Japanese, eBook Taiwan also offers publication and delivery of magazines simultaneously with the print versions. More than 10,000 books and magazines covering a variety of fields are now available on the platform, and readers can even access parts of books and summaries of feature reports in magazines before placing purchase orders.

…

In view of the e-book surge, market insiders are calling 2010 “year one for Taiwan`s e-book industry.” This underscores the rosy outlook of the industry, which has been incorporated into the government`s flagship development plan for the digital content industry. The government predicts that the production value of the local e-book content industry will hit NT$30 billion (US$937 million at NT$32:US$1) in two years and NT$100 billion (US$3 billion) in four years.

…

Attracted by the huge market potential, growing numbers of domestic electronics firms have been jumping onto the bandwagon for e-readers and related products. The Economics Ministry reports that total investment by local firms in e-readers and components/parts has topped NT$15 billion (US$469 million), with major participants including Prime View, BenQ, Delta, Hon Hai, Gold Circuit Electronics, and ASUS.

…

The Topology Research Institute predicts that Taiwan`s e-reader market will reach 100,000 units this year, compared with 1 million in the Chinese market and only a fraction of 9.1 million globally (including 6.8 million in the U.S.). Topology believes that the global e-reader market will remain in the fledgling stage for two more years before embarking on a period of vigorous development.

14. HTC Debuts Two New Models in London (2010/09/16)

Along with the new models, HTC also debuted a free Internet service, dubbed HTCSense-com, which will enable subscribers to tap cloud-computing service offered by HTC. The service is similar to Microsoft’s MyPhone service and Apple’s MobileMe service. The service, for instance, enables owners to give directions to their lost phones via the Internet, such as making it ring, sending messages to the phone for the obtainer, locking up the phone, or even eliminating data stored in the phone.

15. Taiwan`s Hi-Tech Manufacturers Go to U.S. to Solicit Talents (2010/09/13)

Delegation members planned to offer a total of 1,200 jobs covering R&D specialists, market researchers, market managers, and accountants.

The delegation was accompanied by a cloud-computing alliance, which would visit Intel, Microsoft and IBM.

16. BenQ-AUO Group Eyes US$22 B.-beyond Revenue This Year: Chairman Lee (2010/09/01)

According to Lee, BenQ-AUO will focus its future development on medical care, cloud computing, green energy, and environment protection etc.

BenQ-AUO group has opened a hospital in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province of China with more than 3,000 beds. The group is scheduled to inaugurate another big hospital by the end of 2011 in Suzhou, Jiangsu Province of China.

17. Taiwan`s Top 3 Telecom Companies Zero in on Market for Application Services based on Cloud Computing (2010/02/09)

Not to lag behind Chunghwa Telecom, Taiwan Mobile and Far EasTone have been stepping up their business deployment in the emerging segment for cloud computing technology-based services.

For instance, Taiwan Mobile has cooperated with Fubon Financial Group on constructing an extensive cloud computing network for their respective subsidiaries.

… Far EasTone has also been in talk with HP, IBM, Quanta Computer, Data Systems Consulting Co., Ltd. and related software developers on formation of a cooperative alliance, in which the telecom company will take charge of building a cloud computing platform and other members will supply needed software and hardware for operation of the platform.

18. Inventec Announces Venturing Into Cloud Computing, Online Gaming (2009/12/16)

Inventec Corp. of Taiwan recently announced plans to step into the high-potential cloud-computing business, and will provide software download online by the year-end, as well as moving into online gaming in 2010.

… Chiu Chuan-chen, president of Inventec`s software business division, pointed out that his company has been cultivating the software business for more than 10 years and now is the right time to commercialize products. Inventec`s software business would first focus on two major fields, including the intelligent learning and healthcare, while keeping an eye on online gaming.

19. Chunghwa, Fujitsu Collaborate on E-Commerce and Others (2009/11/17)

The pact is part of Chunghwa Telecom`s efforts to enhance cooperative ties with Japanese hi-tech manufacturers. … In the near future, Chunghwa plans to work with Japanese internet-TV, digital-content and TV shopping service providers.

20. Hon Hai Joins Forces With III to Develop Cloud Computing Software (2009/06/03)

Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd., the largest EMS (electronic manufacturing service) provider, has joined forces with the government-funded Institute for Information Industry (III) of Taiwan to develop Cloud Computing application software as the first Taiwanese company to get engaged in the field.

Hon Hai and III will seek financial aid from the government for establishing the first lab of Cloud Computing as a joint venture between industries and the government on the island. So far, the Ministry of Economic Affairs has already lifted restrictions on official subsidization of development of related application software, paving the way for local companies to dedicate their energies to the field.

Hon Hai has decided to invest a total of NT$1.9 billion (US$58.46 million at US$1: NT$32.5) in constructing an R&D building in Kaohsiung Software Technology Park, southern Taiwan, to specialize in research and development of digital contents and information service offerings.

…

On the other hand, by investing in R&D of Cloud Computing, Hon Hai is to diversify its business operation into information services from manufacturing. Furthermore, the firm plans to apply Cloud Computing platform to the long-distance health care, showing its determination to venture into the medical care industry.

Marvell ARMADA with sun readable and unbreakable Pixel Qi screen, and target [mass] manufacturing cost of $75

November 4, 2010 4:18 pm / 10 Comments on Marvell ARMADA with sun readable and unbreakable Pixel Qi screen, and target [mass] manufacturing cost of $75

Update: OLPC plans solar charging, satellite Internet for XO-3 [July 20, 2011]

The XO-3 will become available early next year or perhaps sooner, and price is still being determined, but it will still be under $100, Negroponte said.

The tablet will also include a camera on top of the screen, placed inside the bezel surrounding the display. A microphone will be placed in the bezel under the screen, and USB 2.0 ports and a headphone jack will be on the sides.

Decisions are still being made about the display, which is holding up development of the device, Negroponte said. OLPC wants a transflective screen, much like the current XO, but with improved richness in e-ink and transmissive modes. OLPC plans to use spin-off Pixel Qi’s hybrid screen …

The original post:

Pixel Qi’s problems with mass manufacturing are well described in the latest June 3. update of Pixel Qi’s first big name device manufacturing partner is the extremely ambitious ZTE [Feb 15, 2011].

This all comes together in a prototype form to be shown sometime in the middle of February 2011 as per OLPC XO-3 Tablet Delayed [Nov 3]. Product delivery would be ready by the end of 2011 in a form suitable for developed countries, then a year later in another form for developing nations of the world. While an advanced cloud client capability based on then latest version of Google’s Android operating system will be perfect for the 1st world countries, the 3d world will get a next generation version of the current XO-1 and XO-1.5 computer from OLPC .

Follow-up: High expectations on Marvell’s opportunities with China Mobile [May 28, 2011]

Update: that plan is going well with the progress as best reported by XO-1.75: cutting through the nonsense [Jan 11, 2011] referring to the corrections by the VP of Hardware Engineering at OLPC to errors in a CES 2011 report, and also comments throughout the blogosphere regarding the absolutely coincidental announcement by Microsoft of their ARM support:

There were several errors in that [CES 2011] news article [with title: OLPC cuts price of XO 1.75 laptop to $165, power by half [Jan 7, 2011]] which I would like to clear up:

  • the XO-1.75 will not have an 8.9” screen, but will continue with the sunlight readable 7.5” screen designed by Mary Lou Jepsen (now at Pixel Qi) used in the XO-1 and 1.5.
  • the $165 price is fiction (BOM price hasn’t been finalized), but probably not very far from the truth for the non-touchscreen equipped version. Please don’t forget that since we don’t add any profit margin, the laptop price directly depends on the volume ordered.
  • the switch to ARM was completely independent of any future support for ARM in Windows. That support was announced this week, while I’ve been pursuing this ARM design for three years, with active development over the last eight months. Furthermore, we are using the Marvell Armada 610, which won’t be supported by Windows (if you believe M$).
  • Linux has shipped, and will continue to ship, on EVERY XO produced. You can believe random commenters, or you can believe the person who signs off on every SKU produced.

I’ll also add that a lot of work has gone into software development, including porting Fedora 14 to ARM and adding multi-touch support to the Sugar UI. This has been a long time in the making, and the announcement of Microsoft’s ARM port is a coincidence. Sorry, no riveting conspiracies here.

Some media reports have been implying that mass production will start by mid-year. This is incorrect. It may possibly be that the design is finalised by then, but planning and tooling for mass production and deliveries is quite an endeavour beyond that.

If you want the real information on the XO-1.75, look at the OLPC Wiki page. Right now, they’re up to Alpha test model 2. If you want to view or take part in the development discussion, head over to the devel mailing list (strictly speaking, this list is for software development, but the community are discussing the hardware there too).

Notes [Jan 11, 2011]: On the OLPC Wiki page for the XO-1.75 there is a link to the Announce: OLPC software strategy [July 7, 2010] in which you can find the following crucial statements:

XO-1.75 and beyond

XO-1.75 software development is underway. Today we’re announcing that we’re planning on using Fedora as the base distribution for the XO-1.75. This wasn’t an obvious decision — ARM is not a release architecture in Fedora, and so we’re committing to help out with that port. Our reasons for choosing Fedora even though ARM work is needed were that we don’t want to force our deployments to learn a new distribution and re-write any customizations they’ve written, we want to reuse the packaging work that’s already been done in Fedora for OLPC and Sugar packages, and we want to continue our collaboration with the Fedora community who we’re getting to know and work with well.

[Fedora was chosen more than two years ago and delivered in the very convenient Fedora 10 on SD card [Nov 28, 2008] format. This is why it has such a widespread use in the OLPC community, especially among adults who do not want to use the child focused graphical interface called Sugar but rather a desktop environment on their XOs.]

BACK TO THE ORIGINAL [Nov 4, 2010] POST:

Whatever will be delivered by Windows 7 tablets/slates with Oak Trail Atom SoC in December [Nov 1] or anything else the next XO-3 tablet effort outlined below will be an enormous threat to the current ICT establishment, everybody included (mighty Apple as well).

Two undisputed technology leaders are behind the whole engineering effort: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. for the leading System-on-a-Chip (SoC) capability and Pixel Qi Corporation for the incredible screen.

Follow up: Marvell to capitalize on BRIC market with the Moby tablet [Feb 3, 2011]
Follow-up: Kinoma is now the marvellous software owned by Marvell [Feb 15, 2011]

Update [Jan 6, 2011]: Marvell 100 series tablet [Jan 6, 2011] is giving quite a credibility to the follow-up project described in the rest of our post

[CES 2011] Marvell’s foray into the tablet market sees this rather cute and well designed model, the 100 series. Unlike other tablets that are in the market, this one comes with Android 2.2 (instead of 2.1), while sporting a rather young, all-white design with all the lines in the right places. A microSD memory card slot is there for expansion purposes, and you won’t get multi-touch support on the 10” display which is a bummer, so forget about zooming in or out in Angry Birds. There is 1GB of internal memory inside, while Wi-Fi connectivity is supported although 3G will not be present when it hits the market sometime this year for $199 a pop [with $99 manufacturing cost — see in the below video]. Of course, as with Marvell’s OLPC project, the 100 series will target the educational environment more. It is pretty heavy, but it won’t weigh a ton like most textbooks. Looks hardy enough to stand up to the rigors of restless kids, too! Interestingly enough, being an Android-powered device, it has more than the usual 4 buttons of Home, Menu, Back and Search, but will include the “Up” and “Down” buttons, too.

Update [Jan 10, 2011]: Mobylize Tablet on ABC News: Good to Know [Jan 10, 2011]


Note while watching the video that the LCD screen used in the tablet has wide viewing angle.

Update [Nov 2]: Sehat Sutardja: An Engineering Marvell by IEEE Spectrum [Nov 2, in print Oct 27 but with the title of Marvell Inside] is describing the extremely deep electronic engineering mentality lead by the CEO of Marvell Technology Group Ltd. as the secret recipe for success from the very beginning:

Sehat already had plans for the first product: a better read channel for disk drives. It sounds incredibly specialized and it is, but it’s also one of the drive’s key components. The read channel takes the analog signal coming from the magnetic head as it scans the disk, converts the noisy signal to digital, and puts that information out onto the bus that will take it to the computer. Existing read channels used a bipolar transistor on a complementary-metal-oxide semiconductor substrate (BiCMOS), but Sehat planned to use only CMOS. That way the channels could be manufactured by a chip foundry like the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., so Marvell wouldn’t have to build its own fab. Using CMOS also meant that the device would consume less power. This would, however, present an engineering challenge: Existing CMOS read-channel designs were much slower than BiCMOS.

… they convinced Seagate Technology to take a chance. Ken Burns, an executive at Seagate, told them that the company’s next-generation drive would need a read channel at 240 Mb/s—could Marvell deliver? … They told Burns yes. In less than three months the Marvell team hit the 240-Mb/s mark, and Seagate became Marvell’s first customer. … Today, in terms of units sold, Marvell has about 60 percent of the market for hard drive systems-on-a-chip.

“This little start-up, with one product line, put Texas Instruments out of the read-channel business,” Ohr [an analyst with Gartner] says.

Added later: Winner: Pixel Qi’s Everywhere Display by IEEE Spectrum [Jan 20, 2010] is well describing the innovative screen technology in a way that the leading mind behind, Ms. Mary Lou Jepsen is also well represented. Here is a key excerpt from that:

The Pixel Qi display consumes far less power than traditional LCDs, drawing a peak of about 2.5 watts, of which the backlight accounts for about 2 W, says Jepsen. Turn off that light and slow the refresh rate, and you can maintain a static image—such as the page you’re reading now—with just half a watt. That’s still more power than is needed by electrophoretic displays, the generic term for the kind made by E Ink [and used in most e-readers such as Amazon’s Kindle devices]. Electrophoretic screens are bistable, which means that the pixels can maintain a static image powerlessly. But e-paper also requires a higher operating voltage than the Pixel Qi screen, which means that if future e-paper displays offer faster refresh rates, their power advantage will likely wane.

… Pixel Qi has also beat E Ink to color. In the Spectrum conference room, Jepsen cranks the backlight all the way up to show off the color and video playback. The video is perfectly watchable, although it probably wouldn’t be your first choice if movies were the primary application [like with the TV sets]. The colors don’t look as saturated as they would on a glossy cinema display, but at least the blacks in dark scenes are very black. In other words, the Pixel Qi screen offers an excellent compromise for a class of gadgets defined by their low-cost versatility.

READ ALL the details below in order to understand the reality of the – seemingly, believe me just seemingly – bombastic claim in the introduction (… this will be an enormous threat to the current ICT establishment …)!

Here is the video interview accompanying the article referred in the introduction, to start with:

This engineering effort goes back to May with announcement that One Laptop per Child and Marvell Join Forces to Redefine Tablet Computing for Students Around the World [May 27]. The most important details  are (emphasis is mine):

The new family of XO tablets will incorporate elements and new capabilities based on feedback from the nearly 2 million children and families around the world who use the current XO laptop.  The XO tablet, for example, will require approximately one watt of power to operate (compared to about 5 watts necessary for the current XO laptop).  The XO tablet will also feature a multi-lingual soft keyboard with touch feedback, enabling it to serve millions more children who speak virtually any language anywhere in the world.

The device is also decidedly “constructionist” in nature.  By design, it combines hardware and software to deliver a platform that will enable educators, students and families around the world to create their own content, and learn to read, write, and create their own education programs and share all of these experiences via a mesh network model.  The device will also feature an application to directly access more than 2 million free books available across the Internet.

“While devices like eReaders and current tablets are terrific literary, media and entertainment platforms, they don’t meet the needs of an educational model based on making things, versus just consuming them.  Today’s learning environments require robust platforms for computation, content creation and experimentation – and all that at a very low cost,” said Dr. Nicholas Negroponte, Founder and Chairman of One Laptop per Child.

… “Marvell has made a long-term commitment to improving education and inspiring a revolution in the application of technology in the classroom.  The Moby tablet platform – and our partnership with OLPC – represents our joint passion and commitment to give students the power to learn, create, connect and collaborate in entirely new ways,” said Weili Dai, Marvell’s Co-founder and Vice President and General Manager of the Consumer and Computing Business Unit.  “Marvell’s cutting edge technology – including live content, high quality video (1080p full-HD encode and decode), high performance 3D graphics, Flash 10 Internet and two-way teleconferencing – will fundamentally improve the way students learn by giving them more efficient, relevant – even fun tools to use.  …”

Marvell indeed has all the necessary SoC prerequisites and credentials for such a fantastic goal (both technically and market-wise) as described in my post Marvell ARMADA beats Qualcomm Snapdragon, NVIDIA Tegra and Samsung/Apple Hummingbird in the SoC market [again] [Sept 23] (BTW the most popular post on my blog by far).

The details of the original plan were described in OLPC’s Negroponte says XO-3 prototype tablet coming in 2010 [May 27] with an accompanying video interview shown below:

OLPC and Marvell collaboration has since significantly been strengthened as evidenced by (emphasis is mine):

One Laptop Gets $5.6M Grant From Marvell to Develop Next Generation Tablet Computer [Oct 4]

Negroponte says the deal, signed in the past week or so but not previously announced, runs through 2011. “Their money is a grant to the OLPC Foundation to develop a tablet or tablets based on their chip,” he says. “They’re going to put the whole system on a chip.”

… it will form the basis of what might be called an interim step, a tablet developed by Marvell (and also apparently modeled partly on its own Moby tablet for the education market) that is intended for children in the developed world. As such, it won’t be the machine OLPC wants to distribute in developing nations. … The Marvell tablet will also utilize the Android operating system, while the XO 3 will be based on Linux, among other differences, Negroponte says.

“The first one would definitely not have our brand. It’s a First World machine,” Negroponte says. The plans are for Marvell to develop this initial machine, in partnership with OEMs and a partner in education, and release it for sale sometime in 2011, he says.

Negroponte says a follow-on version, based more completely on OLPC’s designs, will hopefully be ready in 2012. “The second one…would have our brand on it, because it will be identified with and for the developing world,” he says.

OLPC’s Negroponte: Tablets must be a ‘constructionist’ medium [Sept 30]

Tablets are all about consumption, said Negroponte. “You could say that Apple makes peripherals for iTunes,” he said. In a developing world and educational environments, you need haptics and ways to make tablets constructive. “You can’t turn these kids into couch potatoes,” he said. “You learn by making.”

Cloud computing won’t fly where OLPC plays. “Clouds are fine for us, but there are no clouds over Ethiopia, Rwanda and Gaza,” he said.

Marvell co-founder talks technology in education, R&D [Oct 7]

On her relationship with Negroponte, Dai said she met him five years ago and they talked about moral causes and technology. Marvell had the mesh networking technology used in the original XO. “The priority was affordable technology for poor countries,” she said. “Nicholas set a bar. In many ways, he invented the e-book, netbook microcosm and form factor. The other piece was to make those devices affordable.”

What’s the OLPC’s role today? Dai said that in many respects the OLPC is a design shop—something Negroponte has noted after laying out plans for the next-generation XO. “OLPC sets a bar and the industry takes it and commercializes it,” she said. “It’s like the old days where Bell Labs would create and others would commercialize it.”

Marvell Delivers Vision of 21st Century Classroom Technology at NBC News’ ‘Education Nation’ Summit [Sept 27]

Marvell to Fund Next Generation Education Apps [Sept 27]

Marvell, one of the world’s largest chipmakers, announced today that it’s launching a competition to recognize and fund the most clever new education apps for classroom tablets. The challenge invites ambitious, intelligent software developers around the world to create apps that transform the way students learn. Three winners will share prize money totaling $100,000, along with access to Marvell’s considerable engineering resources for support and testing.

The $100K Challenge, unveiled at the NBC News’ Education Nation summit, is a part of Marvell’s Mobylize campaign, the company’s long-range commitment to mobilizing technology innovation, speeding education innovation and bringing to students everywhere the inexpensive yet powerful tools they need to learn, connect and collaborate in new ways.

The campaign and the $100K Challenge were inspired by Marvell’s new Moby tablet reference design. The classroom-friendly Moby tablet reference design is a high-performance, low-power device based on Marvell’s ARMADA™ application processor and Google’s Android™ operating system. It’s the platform for which developers enter the $100K Challenge will design their applications – and it’s perfect for the part. It’s equipped with 1080p HD, advanced 3D capabilities and full Flash internet. For developers, the Moby tablet reference design provides far-reaching possibilities. For students, it opens vast horizons, at a price school districts can afford.

Marvell Co-Founder Weili Dai Named 2010 Entrepreneur of the Year by Major US-China Technology Association [Oct 4]

Ms. Dai is the only woman co-founder of a major, public semiconductor company in the world, and has helped lead Marvell’s 15 years of growth from start-up to a current market capitalization of $12 Billion.

… Today, Marvell is the third-largest fabless semiconductor company in the world, and ships more than a billion chips per year. Marvell provides two out of every three chips used in storage media critical to the infrastructure of the Information Age; its broad portfolio of leading network and communications solutions and high performance, low-power chips have rapidly become the technology of choice behind a broad range of connected electronics — such as tablets, smartphones and other mobile devices. From a half dozen employees in 1995, Marvell has today more than 5,700 employees on four continents.

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger Visits Marvell’s Silicon Valley and Shanghai Operations as Part of Historic Asia Trade Mission [Sept 12]

“It is my passion to work to bridge my two homelands – China and the U.S. – and try to promote cooperation and economic growth in both powerful nations, particularly in the areas of semiconductor, communications, education and green technologies,” said Weili Dai, Marvell’s Shanghai-born co-founder. “For that reason, I am very proud that the Governor chose to launch his Asia Trade Mission from Marvell’s Silicon Valley campus and then a few days later, visited our Shanghai design center.  I am also proud that Shanghai government officials were able to join Governor Schwarzenegger in highlighting the exciting new developments at our Shanghai design center.  It is an honor that reflects well on Marvell’s global leadership and growing industry influence.”

…

During his visit, the Governor toured demonstrations of Marvell’s latest communications, computing and consumer technology and presided over the dedication of the expansion plans at the company’s Shanghai Zhangjiang facilities, including the plans for a three-way research consortium between Marvell, China’s prestigious Tsinghua University and the University of California Berkeley.  Additionally, Marvell announced its support of the Governor’s Executive Order to promote integration of advanced technologies in early education with a donation of eReaders and tablets to PS7 Middle School, a St. Hope Public School in Sacramento, California, and Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Experimental Primary School in Shanghai, China.

In China, Marvell has operations in Shanghai, Beijing, Hefei and Shenzhen. Marvell’s Japan design center is in Tokyo; its South Korea operations are in Seoul.  Marvell has strategic business relationships with the world’s largest telecom, mobile, and consumer electronics manufacturers in the region.

The screen technology in question comes from Pixel Qi as per ONE LAPTOP PER CHILD AND PIXEL QI SIGN CROSS-LICENSE AGREEMENT FOR SCREEN TECHNOLOGY [March 30]. The details here are:

OLPC receives full license to all Pixel Qi “3qi” screen technology, including 70+ patents in process and all current and future IP developed by Pixel Qi for multi-mode screens. Pixel Qi is leading the design of new screens for OLPC’s next-generation XO laptops. The agreement also calls for Pixel Qi to receive full license to the dual-mode (indoor and outdoor) display technology used in the XO.

“A huge barrier to getting computers to mass use in the developing world is limited access to electricity. Pixel Qi is designing new screens for OLPC that will keep laptops going even longer between recharges and excel in long-form reading while providing color and video,” said Nicholas Negroponte, founder and chairman of One Laptop per Child.

… Mary Lou Jepsen, founder and CEO of Pixel Qi, added, “OLPC’s focus on the need for low-cost, low-power devices led me to invent power-efficient LCD screens that are optimized for reading. Commercial tablets, notebook computers and smart phones have precisely the same needs. This is one of the few examples in which cutting-edge computer technology first deployed for developing nations benefits the developed world as well.”

Pixel Qi is actually an almost three years old start-up by Mary Lou Jepsen, former CTO of OLPC. She made a very early commitment to support OLPC further on as described in her post about the Next Generation OLPC Laptop [May 21, 2008]. It contains a HUGELY important remark:

In essence, the future of computing is all about the screens.

She was a very early pioneer of that approach for the XO-1 computer designed by OLPC. Mark Foster, who was the engineering chief there, described her particular contribution (besides her overall influence as CTO) in Mark J. Foster at Stanford EE Computer Systems Colloquium (Part 1) [October, 2006] as (emphasis is mine):

Another thing that’s really unusual about our machine is the LCD display. Our CTO, in fact, has created something that is really special. What this panel does is unlike anything else I’ve ever seen. I’ve seen reflective color, I’ve seen transflective color, I’ve seen transmissive panels, I’ve never seen anything like this. This panel is truly a reflective monochrome panel. No backlight, you see a 1200X900 dot per inch seven and a half inch LCD. And it’s dense. At 200 DPI, we’re talking very close to laser print quality. Certainly from the original laser printers. It’s really nice.

And then, magically, you turn on the backlight, and you see color. Really unusual, pixel structure, it’s all 100% Mary Lou’s invention, and this is a really neat part of the machine. Completely new text, I’m really delighted to have this component in our box, because it gives all kinds of cool benefits that we can exploit. In particular, it’s inexpensive, straight, but also very low power consumption. And this ability to instantly go between a monochrome, a very high-res monochrome mode with a great reproduction of text or whatever it may be, and immediately flip to color mode when you want to is totally cool. I wish I had brought one with me today, and show you, my apologies that I did not.

But, it’s running, it works, and in fact, just this last week, we did some [xx] on the panel, that doubles it’s reflectivity. We actually measured, and the goal of double that reflectivity worked. So it’s a really neat trick, and again, there’s no other system out there like this. And it’s something that is invention purely of OLPC. Not that someone came and told us. Mary Lou created this, pushed it into the LCD manufacturers and made it real. Really neat stuff.

And Mark Foster is the person to judge that properly since himself has been introduced in the above Stanford EE talk as a true pioneer:

He’s led different projects in portable computing at Apple, at DEC [Digital], and at Zenith. He created the first notebook with Ethernet, which was the Z-Note [introduced on the same date as Windows 3.1, see the Z-Note press release [Apr 6, 1992]]. The first true sub notebook [with 8.5-inch (viewable) black-on-white VGA], which was the Z-lite [see the press release [Nov 16, 1992]]. And the thinnest notebook in the world at the time, which was the Hi-Note Ultra [From Digital].

Indeed, there were a couple of quite innovative ideas put into the XO-1 laptop as has been described by their inventor in A Conversation with Mary Lou Jepsen [Jan 17, 2008]

It defies conventional wisdom to put a display expert in charge of a laptop architecture, but since the cost of the screen in a laptop is more than $100, it was the main barrier of entry to building a low-cost laptop.

What I’ve found coming to this project is that people who design computers don’t know a lot about displays, and in fact by starting with the display and designing the computer kind of backwards, rather than just slapping a display onto a motherboard, we can design a whole new architecture.

The architecture we’ve created is very powerful, not just for low-cost laptops, but for high-end laptops as well.

… If you look at what’s been happening in computers for the past 40 years, it’s been about more power, more megahertz, more MIPS. As a result, we’ve had huge applications and operating systems. Instead, at OLPC we focused on an entirely different kind of solution space. We focused on low power consumption, no hard drive, no moving parts, built-in networking, and sunlight-readable screens.

… we had to design a laptop that was also the infrastructure. It has mesh networking, which is the last mile, 10 miles, 100-mile Internet solution. The solar repeaters and active antennas that we’ve added into the mix cost about $10 a piece and help to relay the Internet. If one laptop in a village is connected to the Internet, they all are.

Yes, it might be just a trickle, a low-bandwidth connection from the Internet to the laptop, but between the laptops is a high-bandwidth connection through the mesh network. We use 802.11s, which is the standard for mesh.

… We use an AMD chipset, the LX-700, which allows you to turn the CPU on and off in a hundredth of a second. It’s not noticeable to the users whether the motherboard is on or off because the moment they hit the keyboard or get a Skype phone call or what have you, the CPU and motherboard are back up and running.

That also allows us to run the mesh at extremely low power: 400 milliwatts, compared with my ThinkPad laptop, which uses approximately 10 watts just to run Wi-Fi.

… We had to get rid of the hard disk, because not only is it the second most expensive component in a laptop after the screen, but it’s also a huge power hog, and the number one cause of hardware failures is hard disk failure. That’s three strikes against it. Instead, we used flash memory, which people are starting to use.

… I should also talk about the low-power display. We did something I’ve been doing for a long time in different kinds of display technology: putting memory directly into the display itself. You can’t do that with amorphous silicon, which is the standard transistor process used in LCD. To keep costs to a minimum, I used a standard process for the screen. But you can add memory in the timing controller. That means the screen can stay on while the rest of the motherboard or the chipset is off.

Why would you want to do that? It turns out that most of the time you’re using a laptop or a desktop, the CPU isn’t really doing much, even while it’s running at multiple hundreds of megahertz. Right now I’m staring at my laptop. Not a single pixel on my screen is moving. What’s the CPU doing on? What’s the motherboard doing on? The way to get to low power—the big secret—is to turn stuff off that you’re not using. But nobody has ever made a laptop with a screen that self-refreshes. You really do have to keep flipping the liquid crystal molecule; they like AC fields. The liquid crystal molecules fall apart in DC. You need to keep only two images in memory for that, and you can keep the screen on all day long.

We also put a tiny ARM core in our Wi-Fi chip. We used the Marvell chip because it’s the only Wi-Fi chip with a tiny ARM core in it, which means Wi-Fi can also stay up and running while the CPU is off.

… I came up with this idea for a sunlight-readable screen by starting with a transflective process, which was used briefly on cellphones but wasn’t very readable inside or outside (it was very dim) and so was dropped from most products. What I did differently was to put color filters over the transmissive part of the pixel only, instead of the mirror part of the pixel, and I used—get this—a colorless color filter over the rest of the pixel as a spacer.

In a transflective display, part of the pixel is reflective and part of it is transmissive. People think of it as kind of the worst of both worlds, so it hasn’t been that popular. Again, these displays are considered dim, high power, and not that readable.

Each big LCD fab had developed a transflective process, so, I thought, why not use this process and then change the pixel layout by putting a little sliver of a color filter (red, green, or blue) over part of each pixel and then changing the bulk layout of the pixel as well? For best compatibility with minimal image-generation systems, I used diagonal stripes of color so that we would get square-root-of-3 resolution in X and Y in color mode, when compared with the black-and-white (grayscale) resolution. You see, each pixel is black-and-white (grayscale) in reflection and shows a single color in transmission (red, green, or blue when the backlight is on). Strictly speaking, therefore, you get one-third the resolution in color. The human visual system isn’t digital, however. It’s analog and biological, and through this pixel layout we get higher perceived resolution—about 800 by 600 in color. You get all this with a low-cost and low-power TTL (transistor-transistor logic) interface that can be used because the true pixel count is so low. I’m just making the pixels do double or triple duty.

Soon after this interview appeared on ACM Queue Mary Lou Jepsen made the announcement that Higher resolution than we thought – the XO laptop screen [May 28, 2008]

The XO screen has been shown to be higher resolution than we thought. Michiel Klompenhouwer from Philips Research says the color resolution is effectively 984×738, even though strictly speaking straight division indicates color resolution of 692×520 (this is 1/3 of 1200×900 our black&white resolution). We have been saying for some time that the resolution is about 800×600, but his new study shows a more exact way of measuring perceived resolution. Michiel presented an analysis of our screen and other display pixel layouts at the Society for Information Display Annual Meeting this week in Los Angeles in a talk entitled “Comparing the Effective Resolution of Various RGB Subpixel Layouts” SID08.

Because of that XO design she became a true ICT industry celebrity which is well expressed by the New Statesman in The NS Profile: Mary Lou Jepsen [April 30, 2009]

The XO is the cheapest, least power-hungry notebook computer ever produced, a device that may eventually prove one of the most important educational tools of its time – and for which last year Time magazine named Jepsen one of the world’s 100 most influential people.

Along the way, her design sparked a mainstream computing revolution. Jepsen’s primary intention was to “innovate at the bottom of the pyramid”, creating a simple computer for educational use in impoverished areas. But it turned out that computer users in industrialised countries also wanted inexpensive, environmentally friendly laptops. The netbook was born. Just two years after the XO was first released, nearly every major PC brand is selling an inexpensive, low-performance mini-laptop, and analysts predict sales will have reached 50 million by the end of the year. “Every time I meet with the CEO of a big laptop company, they tell me they ‘studied’ my design,” Jepsen has said.

While some could argue that her effort had nothing to do with the birth of netbooks (attributed to Asustek alone) the fact is that Taiwanese companies were intrigued by the idea of a low-cost PC from her 2005 and 2006 attempts with different Taiwanese manufacturers to collaborate. As was described by Ministry of Information (Taiwan) article Small Laptop, Big Splash [April 1, 2008]:

In December 2005, Barry Lam, chairman of Quanta Computer, agreed to manufacture the XO-1. Then, in April 2006, a second Taiwan technology group, Chi Mei Optoelectronics, joined at the urging of the conglomerate’s octogenarian founder and philanthropist, Shi Wen-lung.

… the head of the project at Quanta is Dandy Hsu, general manager and vice president of the company’s Educational Product Business Unit and one of two OLPC board members in Taiwan.

Hsu says bringing the XO-1 to mass production took Quanta nearly two years–an eternity by original design manufacturing /original equipment manufacturing (ODM/OEM) standards.

… Obviously, the XO-1 wasn’t a typical laptop project. “Normally, when we design a commercial notebook, we have Microsoft’s Windows or other software that will run on the device,” Hsu explains. Usually hardware engineers design commercial laptops around the requirements of the marketplace’s dominant operating systems (OS) and application program interfaces (API), then use these for testing as the design work proceeds.

Software was not available for the XO-1 because it was being developed simultaneously by OLPC, which oversaw a team of volunteer engineers designing a Linux-based OS for the XO-1 and writing code for its open source application programs.

… Engineers faced other surprises. In March 2006, when the XO-1 motherboards were ready for testing, OLPC held a “country conference,” which was attended by “delegates” from the governments that intended to purchase the machine. The result was a decision to upgrade the XO-1 with a more powerful CPU. This was no minor modification.

“Change the CPU and you’re talking about a completely new machine,” Hsu says.

Then, later in March, came devastating news. Quanta had recently completed the sale of its subsidiary, Quanta Display, and new owner AU Optronics decided not to manufacture the XO-1 screen, the most critical component of the project.

The XO-1 appeared dead. OLPC’s chief technology officer, Mary Lou Jepsen, disappointed and exhausted from more than a year of intense work for OLPC, left Taiwan for home. Hours later, she was near death as well, having gone into adrenal [mellékvese] failure on the flight to Boston.

In April 2006, two weeks after her illness, Jepsen returned to Taiwan and approached the Chi Mei Group, a Tainan-based conglomerate, to ask if it would manufacture the XO-1’s display.

“Mary Lou is one of the heroes of this project–a selfless, beautiful thing,” says Scott Soong of Chi Mei subsidiary Chi Lin Technology. Soong is the other OLPC board member in Taiwan, along with Quanta’s Dandy Hsu.

… By August 2006, Chi Lin Technology had a working prototype of the XO-1’s dual-mode screen. Jepsen says that without Scott Soong, “the display would not exist. He found ways around the seemingly impassable roadblocks during the design and production process.”

“In the concept, the engineering … we did that fairly quickly; then it was tweaking and tweaking and tweaking,” Soong says.

Later, Chi Mei assembled the Taiwan-made display components at its LCD factories in China.

Another Chi Mei contribution is the plastic housing, the fabulously cheerful green and white material that makes the XO-1 so recognizable.

Summing up, Soong says, “I’ll be honest with you. What Chi Mei has done is build a world-class display nearly at cost. This is not just another project for us. Nobody wanted to let this project down. Everybody went above and beyond to ensure success.”

“That is true for Quanta, and that is true for us,” he says. “And true for all of the other partners.”

From this chronology it is quite visible that OLPC XO-1 had ample publicity for notebook manufacturers of Taiwan to pick the idea, but in not so innovative way (they could not do that either because of intellectual property rights protection). Read the local Taiwanese news article of that time High Time for Low-priced Laptops [Nov 17, 2007] to understand the launch time situation for XO, Asus EeePC, and Intel Classmate (the latter also getting the lead from the OLPC idea).

Follow-up: Pixel Qi and CPT alliance for sunlight readability [Dec 22, 2010]
Follow-up: Pixel Qi’s first big name device manufacturing partner is the extremely ambitious ZTE [Feb 15, 2011]

For the even more industry paradigm changing output from Mary Lou Jepsen’s own company, Pixel Qi, read the following posts in her blog (the posts are in backward chronology):

  • CES [Jan 4, 2010]

Windows 7 tablets/slates with Oak Trail Atom SoC in December

November 1, 2010 10:10 pm / 7 Comments on Windows 7 tablets/slates with Oak Trail Atom SoC in December

Intel “is aiming to mass produce its Oak Trail platform for its Sleek Netbook segment targeting the tablet PC market in December 2010. The Oak Trail platform is a combination of Intel’s Lincroft (Atom Z6xx series) processor with Whitney Point chipset.”
See: Intel reveals Chief River platform for notebooks [Digitimes, Nov 1].

… specifically for tablet PCs, with the combination of Atom Z670 processor and SM35 chipset the initial product, according to industry sources.

The Oak Trail platform will sell at about US$25 with MeeGo, and the price for Oak Trail and Microsoft’s Windows 7 will be higher.

This notification given to Intel manufacturing partners in Taiwan might remove the long-standing barrier for Microsoft to introduce its long awaited Windows 7 slates to the market as early as in the second half of November, with retail availability in December. This would be even more than that since on November 20th the company will celebrate the 25th anniversary of Windows. Steve Ballmer might also have an additional, big case for celebration as whatever he has been telling in the last months there had been no sufficient evidence to back his claims, see: Windows slates in the coming months? Not much seen yet [July 13 – Oct 6, 2010]. And for people interested in technical details it has been well known all along that the Moorestown Atom chip (Atom Z6xx series) has not been developed to run the prime Windows software so Microsoft should wait for arrival of a Windows 7 capable version, code-named Oak Trail and originally promised for early 2011 availability only. See: Intel SoC for Cloud Clients [June 27 – Aug 23].

What kind of Windows 7 tablet/slate might soon arrive with Oak Trail availability? Will such a “sleek netbook” device (as per Intel’s new terminology) be able to compete with Apple’s highly successful iPad or even surpass that in capabilities. Before those devices are announced no definite answers could be given. Nevertheless there is sufficient evidence already that there could be very big surprises in that regard.

Here is Dell Inspiron Duo flipping tablet/netbook device first shown on the Intel Developer Forum in September:

Dell Inspiron Duo.jpg

Update: Dell is definitely the #1 Microsoft ally now as evidenced by Michael Dell: Developing Windows smartphones ‘easier’ than Android [Nov 2]

More information:
– Hybrid Dell Inspiron Duo Tablet : A Netbook and A Tablet Device [Sept 19]
– Dell’s Atom-powered Inspiron Duo: 10-inch netbook / tablet hybrid with a crazy swivel (update: more video and detailed press photo!) [Sept 14]
– Dell to Reinvigorate Its Brand Name with New Campaign [Oct 21]

The marketing campaign will include television spots, due to start November 6, and print ads about a week later. According to the company, the campaign would cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

Even Intel Free Press, a 3 weeks only Intel tech news initiative is drawing attention to it by a title telling a lot – Free Shot: Looking for Tablets this Holiday Season? [Oct 8]:

This is the first year when tablet computers have a chance of hitting a relative’s top 10 wish list for the holidays. In addition to the widely popular iPad, several new touch screen tablets are rumored to be coming before the end of the year, including the hybrid Dell Inspiron Duo tablet-netbook. Moving away from a physical keyboard and familiar computing experience might scare away many people, but Dell seems to have found a nice middle ground. This video shows how the 10-inch touch screen flips transforming the tablet slate into a traditional netbook with keyboard.

Look at the video and you will be more than convinced.

There is also an explicit confirmation from Microsoft in Ballmer: Windows 7 tablets to be seen by Christmas [Oct 5]:

A spokesperson said Microsoft can confirm three Windows 7 slates: one from Hanvon in China, Toshiba’s Libretto W100 (which doesn’t really count because it’s a limited-quantity prototype) and the Dell Inspiron Duo Tablet, which Dell has said will be available later this year.

We can already see from this that there will be other vendors with Windows 7 slates/tablets. There is more evidence to support that:
– Intel: Our Tablet Design Momentum Is Very Strong [Oct 13]
– Acer tablet PC line launching on November 23rd, priced from $299 to $699 [Oct 27]
– Acer set to unveil multiple tablets on Nov. 23 [Oct 29]
– Acer first tablet PC aimed at fulfilling telecom carrier demand [Oct 29]
– Asustek details tablet PC plans [Oct 29]
– Latest Update On ASUS Tablets – 7-Inch to 12-Inch Range [Oct 29]

Furthermore Intel has already started to mount a strong market attack:
– via their own CEO at the current earnings conference call with: Intel CEO praises iPad, throws down gauntlet [Oct 12]
– via the well-known market research company iSuppli explicitly stating: Intel Aims to Enter Tablet Market With Oak Trail Processor [Oct 19]
– via their own Intel Free Press with an extensive article about Reports of Netbook’s Death Greatly Exaggerated, Experts Say [Oct 26]

And this is all before the 25th anniversary of Windows! Watch the news!

IMT-Advanced (4G) for the next-generations of interactive mobile services, China is triumphant

October 24, 2010 1:56 pm / 6 Comments on IMT-Advanced (4G) for the next-generations of interactive mobile services, China is triumphant

See also: Mobile Internet (Aug’11) which is a total update on Aug 26, 2011 with a lot of additions to the original July 19, 2010 content on the following subjects:
– LTE and LTE Advanced — HSPA Evolved (parallel to LTE and LTE Advanced) — Heterogeneous networks or HetNets — Femtocells and Picocells — Qualcomm innovations in all that — Ericsson’s LTE Advanced demo — Current roadmaps on evolutions of current 3G+ broadband mobile networks

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) press release regarding its ITU Radiocommunication Sector (ITU-R) came a few days ago: ITU paves way for next-generation 4G mobile technologies – ITU-R IMT-Advanced 4G standards to usher new era of mobile broadband communications [Oct 21]:

In its recent meeting in Chongqing, China, ITU-R Working Party 5D, which is charged with defining the IMT-Advanced global 4G technologies, reached a milestone in its work by deciding on these technologies for the first release of IMT-Advanced. In the ITU-R Report, which will be published shortly, the LTE-Advanced and WirelessMAN-Advanced technologies were each determined to have successfully met all of the criteria established by ITU-R for the first release of IMT-Advanced. The Report is expected to be approved by ITU Member States at the ITU-R Study Group 5 meeting in Geneva in late November 2010.

… six proposals received by ITU in October 2009 were individually subjected to a rigorous assessment, supported by the work of independent external evaluation groups that had been established around the world. Industry consensus and harmonization fostered by ITU-R among these six proposals have resulted in the consolidation of the proposals into the two agreed IMT-Advanced technologies. These technologies will now move into the final stage of the IMT-Advanced process, which provides for the development in early 2012 of an ITU-R Recommendation specifying the in-depth technical standards for these radio technologies.

China Mobile Communications has reached a consensus with Apple under which the next-generation of iPhones to be sold in China will adopt TD-LTE technology developed by China Mobile, the Chinese-language Commercial Times quoted the China-based carrier’s chairman Wang Jianzhou as saying.

China Mobile has begun voice testing on its TD-LTE experimental networks in Shanghai and commercial operations of the 4G networks in China are expected to begin in 2012, the paper said.

By 2012, China Mobile also plans to set up over 40 experimental networks, 10 commercial networks and 20,000 base stations globally to promote the adoption of the TD-LTE technology, the paper added.

The thing which is talked about here is the future of the mobile Internet as presented by my core information article Mobile Internet [July 19]. Anyone not familiar with magic words and numbers mentioned above could easily get the essence of what is going on here from that “down-to-earth” overview. The explanation was started with the nomenclature of the second and third generation (2G and 3G) technology standards we are all using with our phones, smart ones or not. This allowed to present the whole expanded nomenclature in a form of an extended table coming in the end to the fourth generation (4G) technologies as:

4G (IMT- Advanced) 3GPP family LTE Advanced
WiMAX family IEEE 802.16m
now: WirelessMAN-Advanced (“WiMAX 2”)

The only new name here is WirelessMAN-Advanced, actually corresponding to the next version of WiMAX, we may say it will be a kind of WiMAX 2. In the new naming MAN is standing for Metropolitan Area Network which is indeed a better expression of the fact that with this “WiMAX 2” we are speaking of a high-speed, high-bandwidth efficiency and high-capacity multimedia service specifically designed for both residential and enterprise applications. (As well noted in the title of the excellent 2007 book Mobile WiMAX: Toward Broadband Wireless Metropolitan Area Networks).

Those who are interested in the process which led to the final stage of IMT-Advanced can read the materials which appeared in the No. 2 (Nov. 2008) issue of ITU-R e-Flash about IMT-Advanced. According to the IMT-Advanced submission and evaluation process the six proposals received were:

• Doc. IMT‐ADV/4 ‐ Acknowledgement of candidate submission from IEEE [802.16 Working Group http://wirelessman.org] under Step 3 of the IMT‐Advanced process (IEEE [based on evolving draft of IEEE 802.16m, supporting both TDD and FDD duplexing] technology)
• Doc. IMT‐ADV/5 ‐ Acknowledgement of candidate submission from Japan [ARIB] under Step 3 of the IMT‐Advanced process (IEEE [based on IEEE 802.16m, supporting both TDD and FDD duplexing] technology)
• Doc. IMT‐ADV/6 ‐ Acknowledgement of candidate submission from Japan [ARIB] under Step 3 of the IMT‐Advanced process (3GPP [their LTE Release 10 & beyond proposal with both FDD and TDD components ] technology)
• Doc. IMT‐ADV/7 ‐ Acknowledgement of candidate submission from TTA [Telecom Technology Association, Korea] under Step 3 of the IMT‐Advanced process (IEEE [currently using their own WiBro standard harmonized with IEEE 802.16e and going to evolve from that to 802.06m as this proposal, including both TDD and FDD duplexing] technology)

• Doc. IMT‐ADV/8 ‐ Acknowledgement of candidate submission from 3GPP proponent (3GPP organization partners* of ARIB, ATIS, CCSA, ETSI, TTA AND TTC [see: Global Standards Collaboration in wikipedia]) under Step 3 of the IMT‐Advanced process (3GPP [their LTE Release 10 & beyond proposal with both FDD and TDD components ] technology)
* Organisations explicitly named in the proposal (operators from China, Korea and Japan are highlighted in red): Alcatel-Lucent France, Alcatel-Lucent USA Inc., Alcatel-Lucent Shanghai Bell, AT&T Inc., British Telecommunications Public Ltd. Co, China Mobile Communications Corporation, China Telecommunications Corporation, China Unicom (Hong Kong) Limited, DaTang Telecommunication Technology&Industry Holding Co., Ltd, Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), eMobile Ltd, Fujitsu Limited, Hitachi Ltd., Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd, Japan Radio Co. Ltd., KDDI Corporation, KT Corporation, LG Electronics Inc., LG TeleCom Ltd., Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, Motorola Inc., NEC Corporation, Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT), Nokia Corporation, Nokia Siemens Networks GmbH & Co. KG., NTT DoCoMo Inc., OKI Electric Industry Company Ltd. (OKI), Panasonic Corporation, Qualcomm, Inc., Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd, Sharp Corporation, SK Telecom, SOFTBANK MOBILE Corp., Telecom Italia S.p.A., Telefon AB – LM Ericsson, Toshiba Corporation, ZTE Corporation

• Doc. IMT‐ADV/9 ‐ Acknowledgement of candidate submission from China (People´s Republic of) [Chinese administration] under Step 3 of the IMT‐Advanced process (3GPP [based on LTE-Advanced TDD standards developed there] technology)

ViodiView’s contributing editor Alan Weissberger, principal of DCT Advisors (see also his profile on WiMAX360 community site) published an excellent clarification arcticle on the further details: ITU-R Progresses LTE Advanced and WiMax 2.0 as 4G RAN standards [Oct 20]. Some notable excerpts:

  • the basis for specifying the “LTE-Advanced” technology in Step 8 is Document IMT-ADV/8, which is technically identical to IMT-ADV/6 and IMT-ADV/9 (except that IMT-ADV/9 contains only the TDD RIT component); and
  • the basis for specifying the “WirelessMAN-Advanced” technology in Step 8 is Document IMTADV/4, which is technically identical to IMT-ADV/5 and IMT-ADV/7.

…

We re-iterate that the LTE that will soon be deployed is NOT a 4G technology, but a 3G technology (3GPP Release 8) that is included in ITU-R M.1457-9 Detailed specifications of the terrestrial radio interfaces of International Mobile Telecommunications-2000 (IMT-2000 recommendation for 3G RANs).  We are worn out by all the 4G hype over LTE and Mobile WiMAX and feel compelled to set the record straight.  No, 4G is not a technology that’s faster than the initial 3G RANs. ITU-R defines the criteria for 3G and 4G and we wonder why so many pundits make up their own definition.

…

Motivation of LTE Release 8 (soon to be deployed)

Need to ensure the continuity of competitiveness of 3G systems for the future
-User demand for higher data rates and quality of services
-Public Safety optimized system
-Continued demand for cost reduction (CAPEX and OPEX)
-Low complexity
-Avoid unnecessary fragmentation of technologies for paired and unpaired band operation

LTE Release 8 Key Features:

…

The 3GPP candidate technology submission for IMT-Advanced (4G) is 3GPP Release 10 & Beyond (LTE-Advanced) has been accepted as a 4G technology at the Chongqing meeting of ITU-R Working Party 5D, having successfully completed Steps 4 through 7 of the IMT-Advanced process in ITU-R, complying with or exceeding the ITU established criteria in all aspects.

Mainland China went enthuasiastic about this ITU milestone. The leading English-language newspaper in the country, China Daily reported on the event as Chinese 4G mobile standard goes global [Oct 20]. A few notable excerpts [emphasis is mine]:

The TD-LTE-Advanced technology has a download speed of 100 megabytes per second, faster than the preceding third-generation TD-SCDMA technology. Industry analysts said Chinese telecom enterprises are set to benefit from the TD-LTE 4G standard, as it will help to open both domestic and overseas markets for them.

“The situation now is very different from 10 years ago, when TD-SCDMA was set up as a 3G international standard,” said Yang Hua, secretary-general of TD Industry Association in China. He said because China lacked an industry eco-system at that time, the use of TD-SCDMA technology was largely restrained to the domestic market. International enterprises were wary of investing in a technology developed in China, especially when it had not undergone a market test.

…

China Mobile launched its TD-SCDMA service in January 2009, and the largest mobile operator in the world will have invested 100 billion yuan ($15 billion) in it by the end of this year. Prior to September, the company had 15.27 million TD-SCDMA subscribers. Overall, it has 507 million subscribers, most of them using second-generation technologies.

…

Nearly all the best known international telecom companies, such as Ericsson, Nokia and Samsung, are engaged in the TD-LTE industry. They are determined not to miss out on the Chinese market again as they did in TD-SCDMA era, Yang at TD Industry Association said. “They lost many China Mobile contracts when bidding against companies such as Huawei and ZTE, because they ignored the development of TD-SCDMA and offered very few competent products,” Yang said.

Shi Guang, secretary-general of TD Forum, said Chinese telecom companies in the TD-LTE industry chain will be presented with a great business opportunity when they enter the international market. “They will go head-to-head with global companies. Who dares say that another Huawei or ZTE may not emerge in the process?” Shi asked.

According to a survey by Ovum, an international market consulting company, the TD-LTE technology will earn about $150 billion in revenue by 2015.

So China is triumphant because they own licences of their home-grown TD-LTE technology, therefore a much bigger chunk of that revenue will come to them (or remain with them) than before. In addition to that they will be able to move to real 4G (LTE Advanced) through their already accelerated TD-LTE program as noted in my post 3.9G TD-LTE rollout in 2012 with integrated 2G, 3G and 4G? [July 19]. Their leading operator, China Mobile, also the one with TD-SCDMA and TD-LTE technologies, published the following roadmap in its August 19 Interim Report (see slide 9):

The US situation has been described in my earlier post, “4G” WiMAX vs. 3.75G HSPA+ [July 24]. Please note that both the current major WiMAX provider, Sprint and the HSPA+ provider T-Mobile are absolutely wrong in calling their offerings 4G. (BTW this is what was meant by Weissberger’s words “We are worn out by all the 4G hype over LTE and Mobile WiMAX and feel compelled to set the record straight”. They are actually not alone with such mislead ing statements among operators.)

A kind of introduction to the worldwide competitive situation has been provided by another post of mine: WiMAX/WiBro <=> TD-LTE and LTE in general [June 28], which is also providing sufficient information on the roadmap of the global LTE leader, the Japanese NTT-DOCOMO . This had also a follow-up: Intel dismisses WiMAX Program Office [July 1]. The Mobile Broadband reality by Akamai [July 29] post provided actual data on average and average maximum connection speeds from 109 mobile carriers around the world.

The most important strategic market assesment, however, is in my post: Could China close the gap in mobile Internet? It should! [July 21]. The most dramatic findings were expressed with the following two diagrams (copied here as a kind of reminder):

October 2010 update

China’s three telecom operators have over 10 mln 3G users each by end-Oct, MIIT [Nov 24]:

According to statistics released on Wednesday by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), China’s 3G service subscribers reached 38.64 million by the end of October, up 10.4 percent month on month, and up 295.7 percent year on year.

By end of October, China Mobile’s TD subscribers came to 16.98 million, China Unicom’s 3G subscribers amounted to 11.66 million, and China Telecom’s 3G subscribers reached 10 million.

Q3CY10 update

I’ve made an update of the above numbers which is showing a similar gap, but for China Mobile relying on TD-SCDMA and TD-LTE only, there is an even more threatening situation.

China Unicom and China Mobile announced their subscriber statistics for September on Oct. 21 and 20, respectively. For the 3G part the results are 10.554M and 15.279M. Month by month 3G statistics are as shown on the following two diagrams:

China Unicom and China Mobile Q3CY10 3G Subscribers

The third operator, which also has wire business, China Telecom also released some statistics. Unfortunately they are providing only quarterly 3G subscriber information on their website (see: http://www.chinatelecom-h.com/eng/ir/kpi.php?cat=quarterly ) so I had to rearrange data to quarters in order to show both the absolute number changes and their own 3G penetration rates, as you could see both on the below diagram:

As you could see China Mobile was able to increase its own 3G penetration rate from 1.89% to just 2.68% during the last quarter. At the same time China Unicom had a significant increase of 3G penetration from 4.82% to 6.51%.

China Telecom achieved even more with Q3CY10 penetration rate of 11.03% since they made heavy invesment into CDMA2000 EV-DO 3G technologies. Their chances to grow even spectacularly during the current quarter could be even bigger since they were the first operator to release quite attractive smartphone subscription packages for less than 1,000 yuan [~ US$ 148] apiece. In both Huawei and ZTE versions there is a true, even mid-range level smartphone with 990 yuan calls included!

See:
– China Telecom roll out it’s first 3G-smartphone-Packages around 1000 yuan, with 990 yuan free calls [Oct 21]
– ZTE N600 cheep Android handset spotted [Oct 16]
– Huawei C8500 bargain Android phone hands-on video [Oct 14]

China Mobile therefore is taking urgent actions to accelerate its competitiveness. One of the most important elements is certainly to provide similar to China Telecom’s low priced bundles:

See:
– China Mobile Started Direct Purchasing of 6 mln TD Phones [Oct 22]
–Marvell beaten by Chinese chipmakers in sub 1,000 yuan handset procurement tender of China Mobile [Nov 15]:

… with prices ranging from 350 yuan [US$52.7] to 650 [US$97.8] yuan.

While the latest quarter business performance of China Mobile has been not bad, as reported by China Mobile Jan-Sept net profit up 3.9% on 3G [Oct 20], the same report states that:

China Mobile and its two major rivals, China Unicom (Hong Kong) Ltd. and China Telecom Corp., are competing for subscribers to their 3G services, whose faster data speeds and pricier service plans could boost the companies’ average revenue per user–a key gauge to determine long-term growth for telecommunications operators.

China Mobile’s ARPU fell to CNY72.0 in the nine months ended Sept. 30, from CNY75 a year earlier. The company’s ARPU has fallen as it has pushed farther into less developed regions of China to keep adding subscribers, including users of its less expensive 2G services.

…

Analysts said China Mobile’s introduction of new handsets could boost growth in the firm’s 3G business in coming quarters, though subsidies for these handsets and depreciation expenses for the carrier’s 3G network are likely to continue to weigh on profitability this year. The firm said in a statement its average revenue per minute of usage has been declining due to low usage by new customers, while its value-added services business has become the major driver of revenue growth.

In the mid-term 2012-15, however, China Mobile is going to have enormous advantage as ITU paves way for next-generation 4G mobile technologies one of which is the future Release 10 version of their TD-LTE (China Mobile is calling it TD-LTE+ on its roadmap slide included above). Whether they will be able to exploit that will solely depend on the value added services they should bring out to the market masterfully. But that is another story.

Microsoft Office 365 SaaS (now in limited Beta)

October 20, 2010 12:02 am / 1 Comment on Microsoft Office 365 SaaS (now in limited Beta)

Really big thing, an industry milestone similar to SAP’s (see: SAP’s Business ByDesign SaaS to be relaunched on July 31 with mobility as one of key attractions [July 28]).

Now Microsoft Announces Office 365 [Oct 19]. The number after its familiar brand name is reflecting the idea of “always on”, i.e. the cloud services to be provided by this new product are meant to be available throughout the 365 days of a year. Being curious I have signed up immediately to experience this new kind of cloud service. In return, however, I got an e-mail saying (emphasis is mine here and elsewhere):

We appreciate your interest in our recently announced limited beta for Microsoft Office 365. Due to the high level of interest, we will let you know if space becomes available. In the meantime, we hope you take the opportunity to learn more about Office 365 and keep up with the buzz.

Update: Mary-Jo Foley of ZDNet’s All About Microsoft has three excellent posts about Office 365:
– The road to Microsoft Office 365: The past [Nov 30]
– The road to Office 365: The present [Dec 1]
– The road to Office 365: The future [Dec 2]

Update: General Manager of the SharePoint Product Management Group Eric Swift on Office 365 [Oct 26]:

SharePoint Online helps organizations and professionals create sites to securely share information, insights, and important documents with colleagues, customers, and partners.

It’s simple to create Office documents and save them directly to SharePoint Online, easy to access your content off-line or on your phone, and quickly share information and insights using familiar tools.

And, with Office 365, organizations get the full benefit of Office, Exchange, Lync, and SharePoint because it is designed to work together.

For SharePoint developers and independent software vendors (ISV’s), the opportunities to configure and extend SharePoint Online today include the ability to:
– configure master pages, templates, page layouts, and site columns
– customize the site UI with custom Silverlight controls, navigation or functional controls
– build customized document workflows, using data and documents contained within SharePoint Online
– customize lists and content types
– use Sandbox Solutions to build custom web parts
– design browser based forms using InfoPath forms

Update: Azure, jQuery & SharePoint: Huh? [Nov 26]

… three permutations of how SharePoint can map to or integrate with the cloud:

  1. Office 365 (with specific focus on SharePoint Online). Office 365 represents the next wave of hosted productivity applications (and includes Office 2010 Client, SharePoint Online, Lync Online, and Exchange Online).
  2. SharePoint WCM. Essentially, building Internet-facing web sites using SharePoint 2010.
  3. SharePoint integrating with wider cloud services. This might be leveraging Twitter or Facebook to harvest social data and creating ‘socially intelligent’ solutions in SharePoint or using Bing or Azure to create expansive applications that integrate/leverage the cloud.

… a number of different patterns that cut across Twitter and SharePoint integration, oData and Office/SharePoint integration, Office Server-Side services, and SharePoint and Azure.

One pattern … was integrating jQuery and Azure in SharePoint. This pattern is interesting because you’re leveraging jQuery as a client technology in SharePoint and also using Excel Services, and you could potentially divorce yourself from server-side dependencies to integrate with Azure, thus no need to install assemblies on the server. This means that you have improved code reusability across SharePoint On-premises and SharePoint Online.

… Using jQuery is interesting; using it in the context of Azure service-calls to update views  is compelling (think financial models that depend on a cloud-service that delivers daily integer values that have significant cascading effects on the model).

This post showed you how you could leverage an Azure WCF service call and wrap with an ASMX SOAP call, which you could then use in JavaScript and jQuery to update an Excel view. The next step would be to craft an app that will eventually live and act entirely in the cloud—i.e. it uses data stored in Azure and uses jQuery to interact with an Azure WCF service.

Update : Chris Mayo’s Blog – SharePoint Development in the Cloud for more information continously updated

So this is what I could only do now.

Microsoft characterizes Office 365 in the press release as:

… the company’s next generation in cloud productivity that brings together Microsoft Office, SharePoint Online, Exchange Online and Lync Online in an always-up-to-date cloud service. … Office 365 is built on years of experience delivering industry-leading business cloud services ranging from the first browser-based e-mail [i.e. Hotmail] to today’s Business Productivity Online Suite [BPOS], Microsoft Office Live Small Business and Live@edu.

… With Office 365 for small businesses, professionals and small companies with fewer than 25 employees can be up and running with Office Web Apps, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Lync Online and an external website in just 15 minutes, for $6 or 5.25 euros per user, per month.

… Office 365 for enterprises introduces an array of choices for midsize and large businesses as well as government organizations, starting for as little as $2 or 1.75 euros per user, per month1 for basic e-mail. Office 365 for enterprises also includes the option to get Microsoft Office Professional Plus desktop software on a pay-as-you-go basis, for the first time ever. For $24 or 22.75 euros per user, per month1, organizations can get Office Professional Plus along with e-mail, voicemail, enterprise social networking, instant messaging, Web portals, extranets, voiceconferencing and videoconferencing, webconferencing, 24×7 phone support, on-premises licenses, and more.

… Office 365 will be available worldwide next year. Starting today, Microsoft will begin testing Office 365 with a few thousand organizations in 13 countries and regions around the world, and the beta will be expanded to include more organizations over time. Office 365 will be generally available in 40 countries and regions next year.

And here are two screenshots to illustrate the kind of capabilities (see more on Microsoft’s image gallery):

With Office Web Apps, you can review documents and do lightweight editing from virtually anywhere and on any device with a browser.

With Office Web Apps, you can review documents and do lightweight editing
from virtually anywhere and on any device with a browser. (The image is courtesy of Microsoft)

With co-authoring, edit the same document at the same time with others.
No more multiple versions or waiting your turn. (The image is courtesy of Microsoft)

From the Hello Office 365 [Oct 18] post on the new Microsoft Office 365 blog comes a more detailed overview of the differences from the well known Office product suite on our PCs:

… Office 365 is the next step in the future of productivity. Is this what’s next for BPOS? Yes. Is this what’s next for Office Live Small Business?  Yes.  Is this what’s next for Live@edu? Yes. Will Office desktop software be available as part of a cloud service? Yes. Is this productivity in the cloud? Yes.  And, it’s even more than that.

… With Office 365, everything is designed to work together.  Earlier this year, the launch of our flagship products, Office, SharePoint, and Exchange 2010 ushered in the future of productivity.  Together with Lync, these products provide the backbone for the modern business. Customers using these 2010 products are benefiting from super productive employees who can work from anywhere, on any device and from anywhere in the world. But what if you are the local cupcake shop on Main Street – have you been using all these kinds of tools for your business?  Probably not. What if you are a bigger business, trapped on legacy technology that limits accessibility behind the firewall – have your people been as productive as those using the latest innovations?  Probably not.

Now, you can have it all with Office 365.  We’ve not only designed and built our flagship products to work together, but with Office 365, we’re taking the next step and delivering all these capabilities as designed in the cloud.  ‘Rich presence’ suddenly lights up everywhere in Office, and you can see at-a-glance if a colleague is available and call, IM, e-mail, or even start a video conference in one click.  You can bring social networking to everyday work tasks like document sharing and collaboration – but with all the security and privacy that a business requires.  These are just a couple of the many amazing features you get with Office 365.

… You’ll be able to pick and choose services and tailor the package to fit your needs – whether you are a government agency, small business or enterprise company; whether you have information workers or factory floor workers, store managers on location or on the go, or a combination of all types.

‘Game changer’ is a big statement, but we believe this will change the way you do business. The technology is the latest, most up-to-date and comprehensive service you can find.  It’s based on Office, so you already know how to use it. It’s online and designed to work with the software, phones and browsers people use most today, including the new Windows Phones as well as a host of others. We are investing deeply and have tens of thousands of people around the world backing this service. We have secured the industry’s most rigorous security and privacy standards and will bring those to Office 365 along with 24/7 phone and community support. …

What Is Office 365? an official Microsoft video [Oct 19]:

What is Office 365? What the product-related Microsoft leaders are saying about a few of the productivity, communication and collaboration benefits of Microsoft Office 365?

Watch Chris Capossela, Senior Vice President, Microsoft Business Division; Betsy Webb, General Manager, Microsoft Business Division; Ron Markezich, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Online Services, and Takeshi Numoto, Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Business Division.

From the Office 365 site:

[mixed with a little additional information from this:] Office 365 Fact Sheet (docx file)

Microsoft Office: The world’s leading productivity tool on the desktop (Office Professional Plus) and on the Web (Office Web Apps) now seamlessly connected and delivered with cloud services – for the best productivity experience across the PC, Phone and Browser.

Sharepoint Online: Cloud-based service helps businesses of all sizes create sites to share documents and insights with colleagues, partners and customers. Includes enterprise social networking and customization options.

Exchange Online: Cloud-based email, calendar and contacts with the most current antivirus and anti-spam solutions. Includes the ability to get e-mail on virtually any mobile phone and options for voice mail, unified messaging and archiving.

Lync Online: Cloud-based instant messaging, presence, and online meeting experiences with PC-audio, video conferencing and screen sharing.

Office 365 FAQ

Microsoft Office 365 blog

More information:

In the Cloud With Kurt DelBene [Oct 19]. Microsoft News Center caught up with newly appointed Microsoft Office Division President Kurt DelBene to discuss the strategy and his view of cloud services. A Q&A type article.

Microsoft Office 365: The Power to Think Big and Be Small, to Be Big and Act Fast [Oct 19]. A Microsoft provided feature story to illustrate that the productivity power of the cloud just got a turbo boost for customers of all sizes. To show via a number of case studies that:

Any business will be able to transform the way it works with Office 365, and make it dramatically easier for people to connect to co-workers, partners, customers and the information that keeps business moving forward – instead of spending valuable time on technology management and maintenance.

Microsoft Online Services Team Blog

Microsoft Online Services gives your business the powerful productivity capabilities of Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server, Microsoft Office Communications Server, and Microsoft Office Live Meeting —all hosted online and all up and running quickly and easily without the upfront costs of an on-premise deployment. The suite of productivity tools enables your workers to communicate and collaborate effectively, while enabling your IT team to focus on more business-critical tasks. And with services hosted by Microsoft, you can have peace of mind knowing that experts are managing your IT and that your services will be available when you need them.

Erik Gunvaldson, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Online, http://www.microsoft.com/online

Office 365 and the Family Tree – Leadership [Oct 19]. New customers for the current BPOS (as the previous, not so full version available in production version, is named), and illustration of the completeness and leadership quality of the Office 365 composite parts via their evaluation by Gartner in their “Magic Quadrants” as:

Horizontal Portal Products – Leader

Corporate Telephony – Visionary

Web Content Management – Challenger

Unified Communications – Leader

Externally Facing Social Software – Challenger

Enterprise Wireless E-Mail Software – Leader

IT Project and Portfolio Management  – Leader

Secure Email Gateways April 2010 – Leader

Business Process Analysis Tools  – Leader

Business Intelligence Platforms (Public) – Leader

Unified Communications as a Service North America – Challenger

Social Software –  Leader

Enterprise Content Management – Leader

Information Access (Enterprise Search) – Leader

Managed File Transfer – Challenger

Web Conferencing – Leader

State of California Selects CSC and BPOS! Google Can’t Meet Needs of the State [Oct 19]:

… the State of California awarded CSC a contract to migrate its current multiple e-mail applications to a cloud-based solution with Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS).Please take time to read more about the announcement.

…

This decision for Microsoft is similar to recent announcements by the State of Minnesota’s, Commonwealth of Kentucky DOE even the Royal Mail in the UK to upgrade their messaging and collaboration software with Microsoft’s technology.

…

I found it odd when Google went very public with complaints of rigging and trickery on behalf of the State during the bid process only to later acknowledge Google Apps couldn’t meet the needs of the state. Such a PR smoke screen is a way to go on the offense with ton’s of players so no one notices you have an empty net. Gretzky would be proud.

What’s even more odd about Google’s tactics are that from what I understand some of their questions and concerns were answered or remedied by the State.  The Ad Company complained that many of the requirements put forth were too Microsoft centric or simply wrong to ask for in the first place.  Some of these radical features included elements like:

  • allowing a user to create a mail ‘folder’
  • ‘request delivery receipt’ for a email.
  • ‘ability to invite attendees as optional in calendar notices.’
  • ‘ability to create calendar appointments or task while off line’

Sorry Google, these are actual features used in businesses, especially in government where understanding and tracking information flow can be the law.

It’s not unfair for a company in any sector to request a set of features that reflect how they work. I’ve said it many times before, developing software is hard.  It’s gets harder the more users you get because everyone has different needs.  As a software company you balance this by building for what they need AND building for what you know they’ll want.  Google must understand that simply showing up isn’t good enough. Despite their attractive price, more and more customers share that ‘you get what you pay for’.

Then some more information is provided on this Google competitive situation with heated comments following that by Jim McNelis from a Google Apps Authorized Reseller, with answers to them provided by the same Microsoft author. An excellent glimpse into the current competition which could just intensify when Office 365 will become production ready in [the first half of] 2011 [presumably, as seen below]. A must read!

Ten more tidbits on Microsoft’s new Office 365 cloud play [Oct 19] from Mary Jo Foley of ZDNet. A very good analysis. Greatly recommended. Things like this are mentioned by the author:

1. When do the BPOS v2 services — the new Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Lync Online — go live?

A: Microsoft execs are saying 2011. But a Microsoft fact sheet I saw today said “early 2011.” This past  summer, Microsoft execs told partners that the new version of BPOS would be out in the first half of this year. So I’m saying (unless there’s a delay) that “first half of 2011″ is probably a safe bet — even though Lync Server 2010 still has not been released to manufacturing and the Lync Online update of that product won’t be ready until early 2011, at best.

…

Browser Requirements (for Administration Center and My Company Portal): Internet Explorer 7 or above, Firefox 3.x, Safari 4.x

Browser Requirements (for Outlook Web App): Internet Explorer 7 or above; Firefox 3 or higher; Safari 3 or higher on Macintosh OS X 10.5; Chrome 3 and later versions. Note: Outlook Web App also has a light version that supports a reduced set of features across almost any browser

…

The lowest-priced option is the basic version of Office 365, which is the new name for the Deskless Worker SKU. It includes e-mail and is priced at $2 per user per month.

For SMBs (primarily 1-25 users), Microsoft is offering a $6 per user per month SKU that was codenamed “BPOS Lite.” The high-end version of Office 365 is the full enterprise SKU, which includes licenses for Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Lync Online for $10 per user per month. Users can add licenses for their users of Office desktop software, on a subscription basis), raising the price to $24 per user per month.

…

Office Live Small Business is going away. From Microsoft: “The Office Live Small Business service will continue to run as it does today through at least October 2011. As a valued Office Live Small Business customer, you will be offered 3 months free of the Union (the codename for Office 365) service should you choose to transition your account to Office 365. Nothing will change for Office Live Small Business customers now.”

….

Live Meeting, the conferencing component of BPOS, goes away as a standalone product with Office 365. That functionality is going to be part of Lync Online.

Microsoft christens its cloud business suite as ‘Office 365’; launches beta [Oct 19] also from Mary Jo Foley of ZDNet. Equally good. Some additional “information nuggets”:

It’s been known for some time that Microsoft was refreshing its BPOS elements with a number of the features it has delivered (or soon will deliver, in the case of its Lync offering) as part of its “Wave 14″ on-premises software releases. Exchange Online in the new version of BPOS will get features from Exchange Server 2010 Service Pack 1. SharePoint Online will get some of the features — especially the Office Web Apps support — that are part of the SharePoint Server 2010 release. Lync Online will get selected features from the Lync Server 2010 product that Microsoft is expected to release to manufacturing any day now. (The Live Meeting conferencing product, which used to be part of the BPOS bundle, is being subsumed by Lync.)

…

On the promised feature list, in addition to updates to the core products in the suite, were also single sign-on with identity federation; a redesigned User Interface (for the console); More administration and access control; support for new markets and languages; and an enhanced Syndication partner interface. (”Syndication” is Microsoft’s program allowing mostly telco companies, but also some other partners to private-label its BPOS services.)

HTC: the most promising ICT brand in Taiwan

October 18, 2010 6:56 pm / 2 Comments on HTC: the most promising ICT brand in Taiwan

Major updates: HTC expects business performance to bottom out in 1Q12 [Feb 7, 2012]

Taiwan-based smartphone vendor HTC expects its business operation in the first quarter of 2012 to bottom out due to a decreased average selling price along with the process of transitioning from old smartphone models to new ones, with consolidated revenues projected to decrease by 31.0-35.9% on quarter to NT$65.0-70.0 billion (US$2.19-2.36 billion) while gross margins and net operating margins are expected to slip to 25% and 7.5% respectively, according to company CFO Winston Yung at an online investor conference on February 6.

HTC expects sales to increase beginning in the second quarter of 2012 along with the launch of several new flagship smartphone models, with gross margins and net operating margins to rise to levels seen in the first three quarters of 2011, Yung indicated.

HTC has been faced with hot competition from Apple and Samsung Electronics in the US market and less competition in the Europe market, but has performed well in the Asia market, especially in China, Yung pointed out.

As smartphones are increasingly popular, HTC will cater to each market segment by launching price competitive models yet with functional differentiation to increase added value to maintain gross margins, Yung pointed out.

While sales performance of LTE (Long Term Evolution) smartphones fell short of expectation in 2011, HTC expects increased adoption of LTE models by mobile telecom carriers in the US, Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea in 2012, Yung indicated.

HTC: Financial report (NT$b)

Item

4Q11

Q/Q

2011

Y/Y

Consolidated revenues

101.42

(25.33%)

465.79

67.09%

Gross margin

27.12

down 0.89 percentage point

28.30%

down 1.79 percentage points

Net operating margin

12.71

down 2.15 percentage points

14.77%

down 1.06 percentage points

Net profit

10.94

(41.40%)

61.98

56.77%

Net earnings per share (NT$)

13.06

73.32

Source: Company, compiled by Digitimes, February 2012

– Mid-market Android Meltdown – HTC Warns Big Again [Forbes, Feb 6, 2012]

HTC has issued another massive revenue warning.The company is now guiding 1Q12 revenues to T$65-70 Billion, way below the T$89 Billion consensus expectation. January revenue crashed by 52% YoY. You read that right – in the overall smartphone market where at least volume growth probably was close to 50% in January, HTC sales halved year on year. Operating margins are now heading below 8% in 1Q12. What seemed like a triumphant success story just last autumn is rapidly turning into a bitter rout that has some intriguing parallels with Motorola in 2007.

This follows two major warnings from 4Q11 – warnings that should have lowered analyst expectations to realistic levels for 1Q12. Instead, many leading firms like Sanford Bernstein have continued insisting that HTC will do just fine. The size of the latest sales guidance cut clearly indicates that HTC is suffering from a post-Christmas inventory hangover that is far more serious than Wall Street expected.

…

We see once more how dangerous the impulse to protect strong operating margins can be. It demolished Ericsson‘s once so proud handset division in mid-Nineties, it killed Nokia’s innovation in mid-Noughties, it hamstrung Motorola around 2006.

In 2011, HTC refused to dive deep into low-end smartphone market in order to protect its mid-teen operating margins. It opted to compete head-to-head against iPhone at the high-end.

As a result, HTC now risks losing the handset success it spent half a decade building. Welcome to the club.

The market capitalization showing the real value of HTC, however, is just right on the spot:

End of major updates

The news 4 days ago were HTC Becomes Most Profitable Listed Company in Taiwan [Oct 14, 2010]:

Thanks to increasing popularity of smartphones worldwide, the Taiwan-based High Tech Computer Corp. (HTC), a globally leading vendor of smartphones its under own brand, reported an EPS (earnings per share) of NT$30.29 for the first nine months of this year, unseating MediaTek Inc., a world-caliber handset IC designer, as the most profitable listed company on the island in the period. Launching a couple of hot-selling smartphones, such as Desire, Wildfire, Legend and Incredible, to boost its market shares worldwide, HTC has enjoyed explosive sales growth and remained one of the most successful brands in Taiwan.

…. The firm raked in NT$27.058 billion [US$0.88B] in combined revenue for September, sharply up 129.65% from a year earlier to hit an all-time high. This pushed up its combined revenue and net profits for the third quarter of the year to NT$75.849 billion [US$2.47B] and NT$11.098 billion [US$0.36B], or NT$13.61 per share, respectively. Meanwhile, HTC`s aggregate combined revenue and net profits for the first nine months of the year reached NT$174.756 billion [US$5.7B] and NT$24.735 billion [US$0.81B] …

HTC has set an internal goal of shipping 54 million smartphones in 2011 but the goal is expected to be difficult to attain because the company will be faced with strong competition from Apple’s new generation of iPhone and Nokia’s Windows Phone 7-based new smartphones in the fourth quarter, according to industry sources in Taiwan.

Based on the ASP of US$359 recorded in the first quarter of 2011, HTC’s second-quarter shipments of smartphones will top 11.5 million units, an increase of 18.6% from 9.7 million units shipped in the first quarter, and better than the company’s projection of 11 million units, the sources indicated.

With demand for HTC’s Android-based smartphones still growing steadily and HTC set to begin selling its naked-eye 3D model, the HTC EVO 3D, in Europe in July, the company is expected to garner revenues of NT$135-140 billion (US$4.7-4.88 billion) in the third quarter with its smartphone shipments reaching 12.5-13 million units, estimated the sources.

HTC is also expected to roll out new models for the year-end holiday season and to fulfill its annual shipment target, said the sources, noting that HTC will be able, at least, to ship 50 million smartphones in 2011, double from the amount shipped in 2010.

Smartphone vendor HTC has announced that unaudited consolidated revenues for December 2010 totaled NT$33.087 billion (US$1.131 billion). Total consolidated revenues of fiscal 2010 came to NT$278.761 billion [US$9.529 billion], up 92.92 % on year. Consolidated operating income was NT$44.185 billion, consolidated net income was NT$44.696 billion before tax and NT$39.330 billion or NT$48.24 a share after tax based on 815,239,000 weighted average number of shares.

HTC has reportedly informed its suppliers that it will eventually need parts and components for the production of up to 60 million handsets in 2011 compared to shipments of 20 million units projected for 2010, according to industry sources.

… to 50 million units in 2011 from an estimate of 25 million units for 2010, according to institutional investors.

… Worth mentioning is that HTC is likely to announce its foray into the tablet PC segment soon, and will launch its first model in 2011 as its ace in the hole to drive business operations. So far, the firm has kept completely silent on the product launch plan though.

HTC has reported consolidated revenues of NT$38.484 billion (US$1.258 billion) for November 2010, hitting a monthly record for the second consecutive time. HTC’s November consolidated revenues were 4-10% higher than the originally expected NT$35-37 billion, according to investors. HTC is expected to generate consolidated revenues of NT$33-35 billion in December, resulting in fourth-quarter figures of NT$105 billion [US$ 3.49B] which is higher than HTC’s forecast NT$100 billion, the sources pointed out.

HTC’s shipments of Android and Windows Phone 7 smartphones have been short of demand and its booming shipments will continue and reach 8.5 million units in the first quarter of 2011, the sources indicated.

… The office space is to accommodate HTC’s expanded R&D staff during the construction of its headquarters building 230 meters away from the purchased property, HTC pointed out. The building, with 17 stories and five basement levels, will have a total floor area of 85,620 square meters to accommodate 2,200 employees, with completion scheduled for the end of 2011, HTC indicated. 11 floors of the new building will be used to house R&D capacity, HTC noted.

In related news, HTC is expanding its production capacity at a factory in northern Taiwan, and another in Shanghai, eastern China, with combined monthly capacity to be increased to four million smartphones at the end of 2010, HTC noted. [This will be ~48% of total Taiwan handset output capacity. See the report below.]

Taiwan’s handset shipments hit a record in the third quarter of 2010. First-tier handset vendors Nokia, LG Electronics (LGE), Sony Ericsson and Motorola all expanded JDM or ODM orders to Taiwan, and Taiwan’s own-brand smartphone vendor High Tech Computer (HTC) also saw shipments increase, spurring Taiwan’s total handset shipments to top 21 million units.

In April this year HTC was positioned among the Global 2000 ICT companies from Taiwan as follows (source: Forbes Global 2000 Country List [Apr 21]):

Global 2000 Taiwanese ICT Stocks by Forbes -- 21-Apr-2010

The market value has dramatically changed since then for most of those companies (sources: Forbes Global 2000 Country List [Apr 21] and Reuters Stocks [from which market values were taken on Oct 15]:

Global 2000 Taiwanese ICT Stocks Market Value -- 15-Oct-2010

The red line above corresponds to the ~10% average increase for those ICT stocks, so here we can also see the above the average new increased (or below the average new decreased) value of the companies by looking at the columns themselves (while the data label numbers show the percentage value as of Oct 15 vs. March 1).

It is also worth to look at the exact numbers (by clicking on the link here you will get a PDF which provides all the source data links as seen on the image by the usual hyperlink presentations, so you could have full background, including company overviews):

Global 2000 Taiwanese ICT Stock Numbers Forbes-Reuters -- 21-Apr-15-Oct-2010

One could see here that HTC became the #3 most valuable ICT company from Taiwan jumping from the #5 place to the current #3 in just 7.5 months. Meanwhile such well established Taiwanese brands as Acer and Asustek are much behind of HTC. Also all of the PC/notebook ODMs (Original Design Manufacturers), Quanta, Compal, Wistron and Inventec are much behind HTC now. Only Hon Hai Precision Industries, well known outside Taiwan as Foxconn Technologies, is significantly bigger in market value, but Foxconn Technologies is a huge contract manufacturer owning 50+% of the worldwide Electronics Manufacturing Services (EMS) market. And certainly Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is even more valuable, not surprisingly, because TSMC is the #1 chip foundry in the world.

Ranking (2008 ranking)

Brand

Brand value (US$100 M.)

1 (3)

Acer

12.41

2 (1)

Trend Micro

12.35

3 (2)

ASUS

12.26

4 (4)

HTC

12.03

Source: Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA)

Here is an Oct 23, 2009 ranking from Global Recession Reshuffles List of Top-20 Taiwanese Brands 2009 rankings show China`s rising [Oct 23, 2009]:

The reason? Here are two press releases from iSuppli which might somewhat explain (I will devote a whole post later to this question):

Android Drives Success in Q2 Smart Phone Market by [Oct 14] – Makers of Android-based handsets outperform the market (emphasis is mine):

Droid phone specialist HTC Corp. achieved industry-leading growth, with its smart phone shipments rising by a stunning 63.1 percent in the second quarter compared to the first.

… HTC’s Android success can be traced to wireless operators that want to showcase the capabilities of their upgraded networks by offering handsets with sophisticated features to subscribers. For example, U.S. wireless carrier Sprint Nextel Corp. is offering HTC’s EVO 4G, a feature-packed Android handset that can capitalize on the high speed of its WiMAX-based 4G network. To keep its momentum going, HTC is expected to offer an Android phone that supports Long Term Evolution (LTE)—the other major standard for 4G.

HTC’s share of global smart phone shipments in the second quarter rose to 8 percent, up from 5.3 percent in the first quarter, allowing the company to solidify its No. 4 position in the market.

HTC Intensifies Android Push, Starts Cloud Service [Sept 14]:

HTC shipped 5.4m smartphones in Q2 2010, an 80 per cent increase year-on-year. HTC owes this strong performance in no small part to its Android-based devices which were greeted with both critical and commercial success.

Initially a white label manufacturer catering to operators, HTC changed course two years ago and invested heavily in building its own brand identity, mostly on the high-to-mid end of the market. This led to the launch of Sense, which is aimed at maintaining a differentiator in a market increasingly crowded by Android devices. Screen Digest believes this strategy should prove successful in helping HTC reach 20m handsets shipped in 2010.

The move towards online services might seem surprising at first given the existing syncing options offered by Google as part of Android, but can be interpreted as a way for HTC to build further loyalty through additional complementary services.

Global Recession Reshuffles List of Top-20 Taiwanese Brands
2009 rankings show China`s rising

Microsoft (Ray Ozzie, Steve Ballmer) on the cloud clients

October 9, 2010 5:30 pm / 7 Comments on Microsoft (Ray Ozzie, Steve Ballmer) on the cloud clients

There have been great expectations about what Microsoft will be offering against the incredibly successful Apple iPads. Microsoft ‘s CEO Steve Ballmer was also raising the expectations this summer and only this week has this been calmed down by him telling that:

… what you’ll see over the course of the next year is us doing more and more work with our hardware partners creating hardware-software optimisations with Windows 7 and with Windows 7 Media Center …

… Media Center is big and, when people say ‘hey, we could optimise [that] more for clients’ I think what they generally mean is ‘Big Buttons’.  Big Buttons that’s, I think, a codeword for Big Buttons and Media Center is Big Buttons not Little Buttons. I’m not trying to trivialise that – it’s a real issue.

We’re not going to do a revamp of Windows 7 over the course of the next year for that purpose.  Whether we should, or we shouldn’t, we’ve put all our energy around doing a great job on that and other issues in the next version of Windows …

See that and more on my earlier blog post which was regularly updated in recent months:
– Windows slates in the coming months? Not much seen yet [July 13 – Oct 6, 2010]

One should keep also in mind that Intel will be ready with sufficiently low-power x86 processors just in Q1 2010 as shown in my another post Intel SoC for Cloud Clients [June 27, 2010].

The major thing, however, is that Microsoft is pursuing a much different and broader strategy than Apple. This is the so called “three screens and a cloud” approach which has been extensively articulated by Microsoft a year ago. Nevertheless, in extensive web discussions about Windows slates vs. Apple iPad issue this clear and quite rational strategy has not beeen mentioned at all. Even such highly appreciated analyst firm as Gartner has not taken the implications of that strategy into account (at least not to a sufficient degree) as evidenced by Gartner: Global Tablet PC Sales to Top 100 M. Units in 2014 [Oct 5, 2010]. See also other recent reports such as:
– iPad leads the tablet PC charge as mini-note shipments plummet, says DisplaySearch [Oct 4, 2010]
– iPad-Killers Take Aim at the Tablet PC Market [Oct 4, 2010]

Therefore, in the post below I will first give a retrospective on the “three screens and a cloud” strategy (Part I.), and then give an overview of the company’s current standing on that strategy from the point of view of the cloud clients (Part II.)

I will also recommend to read additional posts of mine because they are quite closely related:
– Microsoft strengths for the PC -> cloud transition [June 27, 2010]
– Microsoft going multiplatform? [Sept 17, 2010]
– Microsoft to lead standards compliance and implementation? … or how Microsoft is aiming to create a radically new Windows client platform via a set of “whole computer capable rich web” standards. [Sept 20, 2010]
– WHAT? … Windows Live Spaces SaaS moving to WordPress.com SaaS? … It is part of a NEW strategy with Windows Live Essentials 2011 released now! [Oct 2, 2010]

Part I. Retrospective on Microsoft’s “three screens and a cloud” strategy

Ray Ozzie [& Bob Muglia] Day 1 Keynote: Professional Developers Conference 2009, Los Angeles, Calif. [Nov 17, 2009], see also the video recording in the time interval indicated by me with square bracketed numbers in the below text:

… [4:33] whether you’re developing for servers or services or PCs, phones or browsers, all of this diversity means that it’s a very complex software environment out there. Many platforms mean many choices. And whether users or enterprise IT, we all want everything just to work together very, very simply, interoperating as one.

And so across PCs, phones, TV, Web, and cloud, across our many products and platforms, across products serving both consumers and business, we at Microsoft have but one simple strategy, and that is to focus on leverage and seamlessness in everything that we do.

We aspire to deliver compelling, seamless, multi-screen experiences for users, and to enable skills leverage and investment leverage for developers and IT.

Of course, this is the very same vision that I laid out at last year’s PDC right here on this stage, and it’s a strategy embodied in a very simple picture we’d like you to keep in the back of your minds, and that is of [5:45] three screens and a cloud, three primary classes of screens, surrounding the Web as the hub of most everything we do.

Note: Those watching the video will notice that Ozzie was actually using a different picture, and before that a corresponding to that “N Screens and a Cloud”. I’ve put a different one here which I think is more expressive, and also putting the TV and XBox experience to the same screen which will be the case with Kinect delivered, as you could see from Steve Ballmer’s latest speech transcripts excerpted below.

Three screens and a cloud strategy #4

With this picture you can visualize our fundamental belief in a world of Web-centric experiences that are also extended richly through apps on your desktop, through apps on the phone in your pocket, and delivered on the inherently shared big screen on your wall; experiences delivered from clouds in private datacenters or from the worldwide public cloud. [6:19]

More information on the “three screens and a cloud” strategy:
– Microsoft Cloud Services Vision Becomes Reality With Launch of Windows Azure Platform, Microsoft Press Release [Nov 17, 2009]

In his keynote address, Ozzie described the company’s “three screens and a cloud” vision, where software experiences are seamlessly delivered across PCs, phones and TVs, all connected by cloud-based services. Underscoring the IT industry’s shift toward a hybrid approach of online services combined with on-premises software, Ozzie described the programming model for a powerful new generation of applications for both businesses and consumers, enabled by new Microsoft development tools and technologies. He also demonstrated customer and partner commitment to Microsoft’s development platform with Seesmic, WordPress and Cheezburger Network.

– Read this Interview of Ray Ozzie, on Cloud Computing [Dec 22, 2009]
– Exclusive Interview With Steve Ballmer: Products, Competition, The Road Ahead [Sept 24, 2009]
– Steve Ballmer: Vision Forum Keynote [Nov 4, 2009]

Part II. Microsoft’s current standing on the cloud clients strategy

Steve Ballmer European Tour 2010 [Oct 4-8, 2010]: Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer, was visiting Sweden, UK, Germany, France and Spain as part of his European tour to drive cloud computing adoption and discuss Microsoft’s innovation in the technology. He was also discussing Microsoft’s consumer strategy, highlighting the upcoming launch of Kinect for Xbox 360 and other products.

Microsoft has provided transcripts and Q&As for the major events on that tour. From this the following excerpts are providing a quite excellent overview of the company strategy regarding the cloud clients (emphasis used there is mine, if one goes through only that then one could have already enough information to grasp the essence of their current standing with the strategy):

Sweden Cloud Keynote, Cloud Day Summit, Stockholm, Sweden [Oct 4, 2010]

… when we talk about new client hardware and software, we’re not talking about clients turning away from the Internet and from standards, we’re talking about new ways in which clients — phones, PCs, and TVs — can embrace the cloud, but bring the benefit of intelligence on the device and the advantages of intelligence in the cloud together, and that’s really what we’ve done with Internet Explorer 9.

… it’s about integrating the smart client with standards from the cloud. … how to use the full advantage of PC hardware to make things go fast, and it treats applications on the device and websites both as first class citizens that can be mixed and matched and run concurrently, and we think that is an important part of the way we embrace this boundary between the cloud wants smarter devices, the cloud wants devices like Windows to know about it, to love it, and to treat cloud applications and client applications similarly and both as first class citizens. And I think by building an Internet Explorer 9 experience that loves the cloud and loves the Windows PC you start to see the direction in which we’re taking that.

Seizing the Opportunity of the Cloud: the Next Wave of Business Growth, LSE in London, UK [Oct 5, 2010]

The Cloud wants smarter devices. This is – it was semi-controversial; I think it is now 100% obvious. When we first started talking about the Cloud there was a view that said ‘yes, OK the devices that we use will all get dumb and all of the intelligence will move back out into the Cloud’. And what we have found is quite the contrary. People want smarter devices but smarter devices that can connect with the Cloud in intelligent ways. We just launched a new version of Internet Explorer 9 that really integrates with Windows. Why is it important? Because it’s about both supporting Cloud standards, HTML5 etc, but by doing a better job against those, by taking advantage of the hardware and hardware acceleration capabilities that are built into the PC.

As we buy smartphones people are writing little front-end applications that can talk intelligently to Cloud services. We are on the verge of launching a new such phone. But perhaps the device that I’m most keen on that will launch this Christmas season, which shows a different kind of relationship between the device and the Internet, is the next generation of our Xbox product, which allows you, with your body and your voice, to control everything that is going on on your TV screen. We say you are your control. And yet all of the important content, and information and interaction with friends is all happening out through the Cloud. So you want a smart device processing ‘me’, talking to a smart Cloud on the back end.

[Kinect video plays]

You will again see more when we actually ship next month, but it gives you a sense of why the Cloud might want smarter devices. You want the ability to do things locally; you want the ability to use natural user interface and process language and voice and action locally. And yet you do want to be able to participate in games and track meets and dance competitions with friends, potentially, around the globe. So we need to think about using the intelligent TV, the intelligent PC and the intelligent phone to participate in this new kind of application that people are really going to want to write.

… [in response to a question about what makes Microsoft’s Cloud computing offering distinctive] On the consumer side of the Cloud, I think we have some strengths and we definitely have some opportunities to improve our market share. Certainly with Windows, with IE, with Hotmail and Messenger, we have some strong positions. And I’ll say on the phone and all of the cloud infrastructure that backs it up, I’ll be pleased to announce our next generation of phone here in another week or two. And obviously the Kinect stuff. I’d say the whole sort of Cloud TV connectivity thing is really early. But if you take a look at what you can do with an Xbox this holiday, I think it’s quite a bit ahead of anything that at least our traditional competitors have.

… [in response to a question about making money out of the cloud while Microsoft has lost a pile of money in the past few years on that]
We had a round in the early 2000s where people were telling us we were wrong to do Xbox. I don’t feel wrong to be doing Xbox with the kind of profit that it’s making and the innovation that we’ve got. I don’t feel wrong about it at all. Does that mean that there aren’t things that I wish we’d done differently along the road and we’d be even more successful and even more profitable? Of course I do. That would be the case almost no matter what.

… [in response to a question about his take on the future of our tablet computing in relation to the Cloud, the growth of Google’s Android operating system and Apple iOS devices hindering the growth of Windows in that region] … the thing for at least most of us in the developed world is: we are going to want to have and be able to afford to have technology in our pocket, on our big screen, and our mediumsize screen. Big screens are great for social activities with multiple people. You saw that a little bit in the Kinect demo. There’s nothing quite like having a bit of intelligence in your pocket. And, you know, on the pocket side, we got out to kind of an early jump. We’ve had competition come back in ways I’m not excited about. Now we’ve got to come back against competition. And I think, with our new Windows phones, we really have a beautiful product.

… The bigger screen form factor slate/tablet, very different discussion. We, as a company, will need to cover all form factors, and certainly we have done work around the tablet as both a productivity device and a consumption device. …

And so exactly where the form factors are and how they evolve – and you’ll see, you know, slates with Windows on them. You’ll see them this Christmas. You’ll see them continue to change and evolve. But if you really want most of the benefits of what a PC has to offer – the ability to create and consume, take documents of all types – a form factor that actually has been tuned for a lot of things over a number of years, we certainly have a superior device, and you’ll see us continue to expand the footprint that Windows does a good job of targeting over time.

But the job one thing, right now, is: we’ve got to get back seriously into the game of phones.

The Future of Cloud Services, BITKOM Conference ( of the German association of IT, Telecommunications and Consumer Electronics Enterprises), Cologne, Germany [Oct 6, 2010]

… the cloud wants smarter devices. When the word “cloud” first popped up two or three years ago, I think the view was with the cloud everything goes and becomes recentralized, and we use very dumb devices at the end of the day, and all the intelligence is in the cloud.

All the data since then is, no, we actually want smart devices, but we want smarter devices that think more intelligently about how to use the cloud.

Our new version of Internet Explorer we support HTML5 and the standards, but we’ve also taken advantage of the power of the PC to speed those things up and run them faster than you could in any other way.

… We’re going to launch a new version of the Xbox here in the next month called Kinect where literally you can control the TV set with your voice and your body motions. Well, that takes some intelligence, but you still want it designed so you can play games and connect with people intelligently across the cloud.

So, it will be a world of a next generation of smart device, a next generation of datacenter, a next generation of software that supports those, and a next generation of applications built on the corpus of information of the Web and the corpus of information of the social graph.

Kinect Press Event, Paris, France [Oct 7, 2010]

… back 10 years ago when we started down the Xbox path, we started and said, look, we’ve got to be very good at videogames, and videogames is a very important, big market. Over that time, we’ve sold over 42 million Xboxes around the world. … with the launch of Kinect and with the broadening out of experiences on the Xbox, based upon the kind of partnership that we’re talking about today with Canal Plus, I think you’ll see a real broadening out of the demographic, and we’ll really think about the Xbox as a family entertainment, TV entertainment center as we go forward.

Kinect will launch in November. You’ll be able to buy it in stores here in France in early November, November 10th. We have had a chance to show it in a few places. … so far the visceral response from people is really quite amazing to have such a powerful sensor technology, recognizing your voice and taking action, recognizing your body, and as we say, letting you be, if you will, the controller.

… As we think about the future of user interface to all devices, the notion of having the machines understand you, your actions, your behavior, your gestures, your writing, your voice, those natural interface techniques, they’re going to be very important across the gamut, from the family entertainment and TV, all the way through to important industrial applications.

… we have 25 million subscribers on Xbox LIVE out of a total of 43 million users. If we can dial up the number of users and the percentage of subscribers and the number of people who buy a sensor, I’m pretty — I’m enthusiastic

… One of the nice things is because we have a live service, we can tune the ability of the system to respond to voice and gestures. We’re getting smarter all the time. Kind of one of the magic of let’s call it the cloud approach, we don’t have to build one technology that recognizes voice the same way for the next — for the next few years; we get smarter the more voices we hear, again with appropriate privacy and all of that ensured.

… [in response to a question about whether they intend to use the Kinect with Windows] Do we plan on using — certainly these technologies will be used in all — at some point in different ways with all three screens. Initially we’ll launch the Kinect with the Xbox. But we do have certainly people in our labs who are experimenting with what I would call appropriate applications for various environments?

This sensor, as you will know when you get your hands on one, it actually works very well if you’re about three feet away to about 10 or 15 feet away — one meter to about four or five meters. And if you get too close it encourages you to get a little further back, and if you get too far away — and, of course, the technology will continue to improve, but if you think about at least many PC environments where you’re sitting less than two feet away, this particular technology would need to continue to evolve.

Now, there are plenty of places where the PC might be doing work on your behalf but you’re not sitting next to the PC, and we have a lot of work we’re doing to pioneer some of those applications.

… [in response to a question about what Steve Ballmer sees as job No. 1 among all things Microsoft is doing]

For Microsoft — the family entertainment scenario.

Microsoft is a company that — you know, in a sense I would say we have six different things we’re trying to get done as a company. It’s not the 52 that some people think, and it’s not the three that some of our — or one or two that some of our competitors are after. We’re trying to do great software and experiences for phone, for PC, and for TV, which is really what the Xbox is. It’s broader than just gaming. We’re certainly engaged in search with our Bing search engine; that’s very important to us. We provide tools at work and at home for people to be productive, Office and the like. And then we build platforms that are really enterprise specific and software developer specific for people to build applications and deploy them whether it’s in the cloud or the enterprise datacenter. So, that’s six, it isn’t 10, but it’s not two or three.

Microsoft Days – France [Oct 7, 2010]

The cloud wants smarter devices. A few years back, I think the theory would have been that as things move to the cloud, people are actually going to have less and less intelligence in their devices, and everything is going to operate in the cloud. We’ve seen exactly the opposite happen. We have smarter phones, but phones that are being built with the notion that says they’re going to plug into the cloud from the get go.

We see smarter and smarter PCs being redesigned around this notion of the cloud. What we’ve done in Internet Explorer 9 to speed up the cloud and integrate it with the smart Windows PC is such an example. We showed you the Xbox and the Kinect technology. You couldn’t do that with a dumb client. You can only do it with a smart client, but it’s got to participate in the cloud. So, our clients are being redesigned to be user friendly, easy to take care of and from the get go very cloud-aware.

Next week we get a chance to launch our Windows Phone 7 and the new Windows Phones I think are very good examples of this kind of next generation cloud-oriented, smart phones. We have an application model. I get a chance later today to go judge a little contest of some of the app developers here in France who have been doing applications for Windows Phone 7. We’ve got a new kind of a user interface that assumes that what you really want to do is focus not just on applications, but actually on the people and data that’s most important to you. And so we’ve re-pivoted the user interface consistent with some of the things that we think are possible in the cloud. It’s very different kind of user interface.

Nueva Economica Forum, Madrid, Spain [Oct 8, 2010]

… in the world of the cloud we can think of all of the world’s people and in all of their different personalities as individuals, as employees, as citizens, we want to be able to write new innovations to provide new solutions.

… New devices, there’s new devices coming. We’re always in big competition with other guys out there, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It’s really a tough world out there.

But we all know there’s a need for new devices. This meeting proves it. There’s a lady here with pencil and paper. I’ll prove I have one, too. I’m not giving her a hard time. (Laughter.) If I lose this paper, my whole week of action items is gone. That would be bad. There must be a digital form that’s better. But no matter what device you pull out today, if you sit there and start typing, it’s not very sociable, it’s not very pleasant, in some cases it’s not even very efficient compared to jotting a quick note.

We have lots of room to continue to invent what does the future of the television look like, what is the future of the PC, the phone, the note-taking device, the reading device.

WHAT? … Windows Live Spaces SaaS moving to WordPress.com SaaS? … It is part of a NEW strategy with Windows Live Essentials 2011 released now!

October 2, 2010 6:37 pm / 6 Comments on WHAT? … Windows Live Spaces SaaS moving to WordPress.com SaaS? … It is part of a NEW strategy with Windows Live Essentials 2011 released now!

The news from Microsoft: WordPress.com and Windows Live partnering together and providing an upgrade for 30 million Windows Live Spaces customers [Sept 27]

Then Paul Kim, the VP of user growth from WordPress.com: Welcome Windows Live Spaces Bloggers [Sept 27]

Then a 3d party correction from the web: Microsoft: Windows Live Spaces already dead, WordPress.com will only get 1% of 30M users [Sept 30] which could be much understated as noted by Paul Kim’s response in the end:

Paul Kim, Automattic’s vice president of user growth, responded: “We don’t have an exact estimate for how many Spaces bloggers will move over to WordPress.com in the next 6 months, but in the first 48 hours we’ve completed close to 50,000 migrations which is very promising.” That number is impressive enough. Real measure will be the next 48 hours or 48 days.

There was a real surge in posting activity on wordpress.com. After 5 days the graph showed the following:

As you could see from the numbers there were approximately three times as many additional postings in the last 3 days of the first 5 days period, than in the first two. That quite probably would mean ~150,000 additional migrations giving the total number of migrations to ~200,000 already in the first 5 days.

So the 1% of 30 million Windows Live Spaces customers could indeed be an understatement, even a great one. Would be interesting indeed to see the numbers in the coming months. Microsoft PR meanwhile made a refinement by saying that those 30 million include the viewers as well, while the number of authors is “just” 7 million.

If the final number of migrated blogs will be in the range of several millions than this will indeed be a huge gain for the WordPress.com. The current number of blogs on that site is 13.9 million, so an increase of 10% to 30% for nothing would indeed be a great win for them.

But what is the win for Microsoft? Their announcement is giving the following reason:

WordPress powers over 8.5% of the web, is used on over 26 million sites, and WordPress.com is seen by over 250 million people every month. Not only that, Automattic is a company filled with great people focused on improving blogging experiences. So rather than having Windows Live invest in a competing blogging service, we decided the best thing we could do for our customers was to give them a great blogging solution through WordPress.com.

The Why is Microsoft giving away web traffic and abandoning users? [Sept 28] question is answered by Tim Anderson as:

Part of the reason may be that blogging itself has changed. The original concept of an online diary or “web log” has fractured, with much of the trivia that might once have been blogged now being expressed on Facebook or Twitter. At the other end, blog engines like WordPress have evolved into capable content management systems. Many blogs are just convenient tools to author web sites.

Microsoft gives up on Live Spaces: blogs to be shifted to WordPress.com [Sept 28] on the guardian.co.uk has a similar reasoning:

You’ve got six months before it disappears into the great Bit Bucket where Geocities has gone. …

Following the news that Vox is closing (on 30 September), and that its parent Six Apart (which created Movable Type) is joining with VideoEgg to create a new company called Say Media, one has to think that the pool of hosted blogging platforms is shrinking rather rapidly. Atthis rate, pretty soon it’s only going to be Blogger and WordPress.

And if that’s what it comes down to, you’d have to say that WordPress has the edge. It’s being taken up by the British government, even for non-blogging websites, where it acts as an effective content management system.

That though may overlook the emergence of “superfast blog” systems such as Tumblr, which strip away a lot of the stuff on the outside – which can make blog upkeep complicated or tedious.

Even so, it’s not clear from here where blogging, as a separate activity, is really going. I still have the sense – as I said last year – that the long tail of blogging is dying. Microsoft’s capitulation over Live Spaces seems an acknowledgement of that (its previous post, linked in that quote above, notes how much of a problem spam blogs and comment spam have been; indeed, when I used to trawl blogs for Technology content, Live Spaces blogs were notorious for being pure splogs or copy/paste jobs).

WordPress.com has done a better job keeping the spam out. The question now is whether it is building its business on top of an iceberg in a warming sea – or on dry land.

And indeed quoting from the referred The long tail of blogging is dying [June 24, 2009] post on the guardian.co.uk (emphasis is mine):

But recently – over the past six months – I’ve noticed a new trend: fewer blogs with links, and fewer with any contextual comment. (I’m defining a blog here as an individual site, whether on Blogger or WordPress or an individual domain, with regular entries.) Some weeks, apart from the splogs, there would be hardly anything. I didn’t think we’d suddenly become dull. Nor was it for want of searching: mining for blog comments, I use Icerocket.com. Technorati.com and Google’s Blogsearch.

Where is everybody? Anecdotally and experimentally, they’ve all gone to Facebook, and especially Twitter. At least with Twitter, one can search for comments via backtweets.com – though it’s still quite rare for people to make a comment on a piece in a tweet; more usually it’s a “retweet”, echoing the headline. The New York Times also noticed this trend, with a piece on 9 June about “Blogs Falling In An Empty Forest“, which pointed to Technorati’s 2008 survey of the state of the blogosphere, which found that only 7.4m out of the 133m blogs it tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. As the New York Times put it, “that translates to 95% of blogs being essentially abandoned”.

I see it: NetNewsWire, my RSS feed reader, has nearly 500 feeds. When one of them hasn’t been updated for 60 days, it turns brown, like a plant dying for lack of water. More and more of the feeds I follow are turning brown. Why? Because blogging isn’t easy. More precisely, other things are easier – and it’s to easier things that people are turning. Facebook’s success is built on the ease of doing everything in one place. (Search tools can’t index it to see who’s talking about what, which may be a benefit or a failing.) Twitter offers instant content and reaction. Writing a blog post is a lot harder than posting a status update, putting a funny link on someone’s Wall, or tweeting. People are still reading blogs, and other content. But for the creation of amateur content, their heyday for the wider population has, I think, already passed. The short head of blogging thrives. Its long tail, though, has lapsed into desuetude.

It is important to realize that Microsoft didn’t get WordPress.com hosting in exchange for this migration. Matt Mullenweg made this quite clear in his last year’s post of WordPress and Windows Azure [Nov 29, 2009]:

Are you moving WordPress.com to Azure?
No. WordPress.com, which is Automattic’s hosted blogging service, is going to stay on its existing infrastructure. Martin Cron from the Cheezburger Network launched a new blog Oddly Specific on Azure, which some people confused with Automattic.

Do you use Azure at all?
Yes, we’ve been testing out their blob storage as an alternative to Amazon S3 and Rackspace Cloudfiles. We don’t currently use it in production.

And nothing has changed since then. The Microsoft: Windows Live Spaces already dead, WordPress.com will only get 1% of 30M users [Sept 30] post is mentioning the following:

As for platforms, Kim responded: “WordPress.com, where these migrating Spaces bloggers are moving to, runs on Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP.” In a follow-up e-mail, Kim responded: “We don’t plan to host any of these blogs on Windows Azure at this time.”

So there should be some additional gains for Microsoft in order to pass millions of authors and tens of millions of readers, as well as the advertising revenue attached to that. And indeed there are:

1. Microsoft’s lost eight years online: More than $6 billion down the tubes [Aug 13] which particularly stating that:

In fiscal 2010 ending June 30, Microsoft reported an operating loss of $2.35 billion on revenue of $2.2 billion for its online services division .

… [see the previous financial year data to see how there is an accumulated loss of more than $6 billion] …

[ZDnet’s conclusion:] Microsoft has generated no return on its Internet ventures. It has been nearly a lost decade for Microsoft online. Looking at the profit and losses, you could make an argument that Microsoft would have been better off avoiding the Internet. Strategically, that argument is absolutely crazy. On the financial front, shareholders may just want a dividend. Things could change. Perhaps Microsoft’s online investment has helped it with the transition to cloud computing somehow. As things stand today, the Web is one big money pit for Microsoft.

So saving some money with Windows Live Spaces migration is an important point for Microsoft, although not the major one as we would see further on.

2. What Microsoft is abandoning now is the thing of the distant past. One can easily understand that when reading again a 3d party authorative source Why are 30 million Microsoft refugees headed to WordPress.com? [Sept 28] (emphasis is mine again):

Microsoft had very good founding concepts for MSN Spaces in 2004 that later overlapped with Facebook. At the time I first met with Microsoft managers about its online services strategy, I was an analyst with the now defunct JupiterResearch. Microsoft product managers outlined a clear and compelling strategy about people publishing content for whom they know. The Web is too big, they rightly asserted. What matters is contenting your stuff to people who would be most interested in it, like family, friends and coworkers. I liked what I heard.

Four years ago, I compared Six Apart’s Vox to Windows Live Spaces. In August 2006, I wrote at the now defunct Microsoft Monitor blog: “Features are highly comparable. Both services are free, ad supported and provide mechanisms for blogging, sharing photos, music or videos and connecting to a widening circle of friends and family.” Vox is shutting down in two days. Windows Live Spaces will be gone in six months. Is it coincidence that these two services with similar design goals and features are shutting down around the same time? I think not.

Facebook has fulfilled most of the same philosophical and development goals articulated by Microsoft managers six years ago. In early 2007, Facebook had about 30 million subscribers — about as many as Windows Live Spaces today. Facebook now claims more than 500 million subscribers, although some people dispute they are all active. Facebook users share photos, status updates and other content with a circle of friends, family and other known or accepted relationships, which is exactly what Microsoft wanted to accomplish with Spaces and connected Live services.

3. Microsoft has reworked all of its Internet and web related strategies. I’ve already reported a few of that (but will report much more very soon). See these posts on my blog:
– Microsoft strengths for the PC -> cloud transition [June 27]
– Mobile search SaaS battle [June 28]
– Windows slates in the coming months? Not much seen yet [July 13]
– Microsoft going multiplatform? [Sept 17]
– Microsoft to lead standards compliance and implementation? … or how Microsoft is aiming to create a radically new Windows client platform via a set of “whole computer capable rich web” standards. [Sept 20]

4. Their on-line services strategy part has just been completely rearranged by Windows Live Essentials 2011 available for download now [Sept 30]. The key elements of this change are (only some of the emphasis is mine here):

Windows Live Essentials 2011 was designed and built to connect your PC to the services you use every day. We’re also announcing today that Dell will be the first global PC manufacturer to ship PCs with Windows Live Essentials 2011 and Windows 7 pre-installed, just in time for your holiday purchases. Many other PC manufacturers are also planning to make Windows Live Essentials 2011 available and we’ll continue to keep you updated as they start releasing.

… Windows Live Essentials 2011 was designed from the ground up for Windows 7. You can pin your applications to the taskbar and use jump lists to quickly get to common tasks. The ribbon brings common tasks to the front, letting you filter photos, change your font, or publish to your favorite services in a single click.

For parents, Windows Live Family Safety gives you the tools to help keep your kids safer on the Internet.

… If you have more than one PC, or a PC and a Mac, Windows Live Mesh helps you sync your files and folders across your PCs and connect back to your PC from virtually anywhere.

… Use Window Live Photo Gallery to share photos with your friends on SkyDrive [this is now the one Microsoft on-line service outside of Windows Live Essentials], Flickr, SmugMug, Facebook, and more.

… Create a video using Windows Live Movie Maker and instantly publish it to YouTube.

… Stay in touch with your friends on Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace using the new Windows Live Messenger.

… Use Windows Live Writer to update your blog on WordPress.com [with Essentials 2011 it is the default], Blogger, TypePad, and many more blogging services.

… Use Windows Live Mail to keep track of your email from Hotmail [this is now the other Microsoft on-line service outside of Windows Live Essentials], Gmail, Yahoo, and more.

… Together with Windows 7 and the new Internet Explorer 9 beta, Windows Live Essentials completes your Windows experience and connects your PC to the services you use every day. Try it out and let us know what you think!

My final conclusion: Microsoft is not abandoning its eight years of on-line investments (which produced $6B+ loss so far) but splitting that among its classic strategic business lines. What we see now by Windows Live Spaces SaaS moving to WordPress.com SaaS and with the introduction of Windows Live Essentials 2011 is for the current (Windows 7) and the next generations of Windows clients.  Windows clients will continue to be free of any advertisements and hence there is no service should be in Windows Live Essentials which could only be financed through advertisement revenue. With Flickr, SmugMug, Facebook, YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, WordPress.com (with Essentials 2011 it is the default], Blogger, TypePad, Gmail, and Yahoo mentioned as important partner services, there is a clear demarcation line between Windows Live and 3d party services. In addition Windows Mail is that part of Windows Live Essentials which integrates both the 3d party web mailing services (Gmail,  Yahoo etc.) and Microsoft’s own Hotmail Service. Hotmail thus remains the critical on-line service for Microsoft as well as the Live Messenger service of the Windows Live.

This is a very nice and rational on-line services strategy for the Windows clients. Please note that Microsoft Bing services are offered on their own, and those are the ones which should be supported by advertisement revenues in the long run. Also the Hotmail and Live Messenger services could be covered — at least partially — by advertising revenues in the long run. And certainly there is SkyDrive and Office Web Apps on SkyDrive which are in fact services that could mostly be covered by the Microsoft Office business line. BTW this is also true to a certain degree for Hotmail and Live Messenger.

Look at the Windows Live site for more information! You will even more clearly see that Microsoft did not lost its mind by migrating Windows Live Spaces to WordPress.com in such a “no return” way.

Marvell ARMADA beats Qualcomm Snapdragon, NVIDIA Tegra and Samsung/Apple Hummingbird in the SoC market [again]

September 23, 2010 2:32 pm / 11 Comments on Marvell ARMADA beats Qualcomm Snapdragon, NVIDIA Tegra and Samsung/Apple Hummingbird in the SoC market [again]

Follow-ups: – Marvell SoCs to win both Microsoft and Nokia for Windows Phone and Windows 8 platforms (after the Kinect success) [Feb 1, 2012]
– First real chances for Marvell on the tablet and smartphone fronts [Aug 21 – Sept 25, 2011]

While in the last 2 years Qualcomm Snapdragon, then NVIDIA Tegra and Samsung/Apple Hummingbird (Samsung’s S5PC110 and Apple’s A4 via Intrinsity’s acquisition) got by far the biggest public attention in the System-on-a-Chip (SoC) space it has been Marvell’s ARMADA the real winner all along.

Follow-up: Marvell to capitalize on BRIC market with the Moby tablet [Feb 3, 2011]
Follow-up: Kinoma is now the marvellous software owned by Marvell [Feb 15, 2011]
Follow-up: ASUS, China Mobile and Marvell join hands in the OPhone ecosystem effort for “Blue Ocean” dominance [March 8, 2011]
Follow-up: High expectations on Marvell’s opportunities with China Mobile [May 28, 2011]

Update [Jan 17, 2011]: Report: iPad 2 to use fast graphics chip [Jan 17, 2011] (emphasis is mine)

The iPad 2 will sport powerful, new graphics hardware, along with a higher-resolution display, according to a report.

That graphics chip would be Imagination’s SGX543, according to Apple Insider.

If this rumor is on the money, it is, indeed, a potent graphics technology. Imagination describes the POWERVR SGX543MP as allowing “up to 16 cores…in a high-performance, multiprocessor graphics solution without performance or silicon area compromises.” This graphics tech would be used in conjunction with a dual-core ARM processor, as CNET previously reported.

And Apple’s next-gen iPhone 5 would also feature this chip design–the so-called Apple A5 processor.

“This makes sense,” said Linley Gwennap, principal analyst at the Linley Group, a chip consulting firm. “The A5 processor must have at least dual Cortex-A9 CPUs (central processing units) to be competitive with [Nvidia’s] Tegra 2 and other current smartphone CPUs,” Gwennap said in response to an e-mail query. The Cortex-A9 is a design being used by most major ARM chip suppliers, such as Texas Instruments, Samsung, and Nvidia.

Gwennap continued. “The single-core SGX543 does not have enough graphics performance to keep up with Tegra 2, but a dual-core SGX543 should be within the same range. Even a dual-core SGX543 would fall well behind the graphics performance of Marvell’s new Armada 628, which should be in phones in 2H11,” he said. (Imagination also has the SGX545.)

Addition [later]: Marvell’s tri-core ARM chip has near-PS3-level graphics [Sept 2010], since Sony Playstation 3 GPU has 250 million triangles per second performance vs. ARMADA 628’s 200 MT/s.

Update [Nov 4]: Marvell ARMADA with sun readable and unbreakable Pixel Qi screen, and target [mass] manufacturing cost of $75 on this blog [Nov 4]

Update [Nov 2]: Sehat Sutardja: An Engineering Marvell by IEEE Spectrum [Nov 2, in print Oct 27 but with the title of Marvell Inside] is describing the extremely deep electronic engineering mentality lead with its CEO as the secret recipe for success from the very beginning:

Sehat already had plans for the first product: a better read channel for disk drives. It sounds incredibly specialized and it is, but it’s also one of the drive’s key components. The read channel takes the analog signal coming from the magnetic head as it scans the disk, converts the noisy signal to digital, and puts that information out onto the bus that will take it to the computer. Existing read channels used a bipolar transistor on a complementary-metal-oxide semiconductor substrate (BiCMOS), but Sehat planned to use only CMOS. That way the channels could be manufactured by a chip foundry like the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., so Marvell wouldn’t have to build its own fab. Using CMOS also meant that the device would consume less power. This would, however, present an engineering challenge: Existing CMOS read-channel designs were much slower than BiCMOS.

… they convinced Seagate Technology to take a chance. Ken Burns, an executive at Seagate, told them that the company’s next-generation drive would need a read channel at 240 Mb/s—could Marvell deliver? … They told Burns yes. In less than three months the Marvell team hit the 240-Mb/s mark, and Seagate became Marvell’s first customer. … Today, in terms of units sold, Marvell has about 60 percent of the market for hard drive systems-on-a-chip.

“This little start-up, with one product line, put Texas Instruments out of the read-channel business,” Ohr [an analyst with Gartner] says.

Now we have a new ARMADA SoC processor product from Marvell which is making that lead even more evident:

Marvell Raises Technology Bar Again with World’s First 1.5 GHz Tri-Core Processor Delivering Dual Stream 1080p 3D Video for Smartphones and Tablets [Sept 23] – Game Changer: Ultra-low power, ultra-high performance ARMADA three-core processor first to feature 3D graphics performance with quad unified shaders for 200 million triangles per second delivered on mobile devices

Marvell-ARMADA-628

Marvell ARMADA 628 has indeed an impressive set of features on a single die. To quote from the press release (emphasis is mine):

Key Features

  • World’s first “tri-core” application processor
    – Up to 1.5 GHz for the two main cores and 624 MHz for the third low power core
    – “Heterogeneous  multiprocessing” with “hardware-based Cache Coherence”
    – 1 MB System Level 2 Cache
    – Platform leading multimedia capabilities, including support for both WMMX2 and NEON acceleration; and a highly optimized pipelined VFPv3 floating point engine
    – Member of the ARMADA family of processors for easy software porting
  • 1080p dual stream 3D video applications (30 FPS, multi-format)
  • Ultimate 3D graphics performance with quad unified shaders for 200 million triangles per second (MT/s)
  • High performance, integrated image signal processor (ISP)
  • Ability to project images on multiple simultaneous displays
    – 2 LCDs
    – 1 HDMI
    – 1 advanced EPD [like the ones used in E-Ink based e-readers, e.g. Amazon Kindle] controller
  • Peripherals support: USB 3.0 Superspeed Client, MIPI CSI, MIPI DSI, HDMI with integrated PHY, UniPro, Slimbus, SPMI

Addition [later]: Marvell’s tri-core ARM chip has near-PS3-level graphics [Sept 2010], since Sony Playstation 3 GPU has 250 million triangles per second performance vs. ARMADA 628’s 200 MT/s.

We should emphasize two additional facts from the press release:

The new ARMADA 628 tri-core processor incorporates a number of advanced processing and power management features. The tri-core design integrates two high performance symmetric multiprocessing cores and a third core optimized for ultra low-power. The third core is designed to support routine user tasks and acts as a system management processor to monitor and dynamically scale power and performance. The tri-core architecture provides superior performance and lower power over dual-core designs while maintaining industry compatibility and leadership – ensuring a richer, faster and smoother experience than any other ARM-based processor available today.

… In addition to the tri-core CPU, there are six additional processing engines to support stunning 3D graphics, 1080p video encode/decode, ultra high fidelity audio, advanced cryptography, and digital photo data processing – for a total of nine dedicated core functions.

Additional information from Linley Gwennap‘s Marvell Debuts Tricore Architecture [Sept 23] infonugget: The chip is manufactured in 40 nm geometry [note, this is the first such mobile processor from Marvell publicly announced], all three processors use Marvell’s high-end Sheeva PJ4 design, the third CPU uses however a different circuit layout, based on the same synthesizable core, but optimized for lower speed and lower power, the new chip is fully compatible with ARM’s Neon instruction set (unlike the previous versions of the PJ4), the 3D graphics performance [200 MT/s] is more than four times of the current high-end ARMADA 610 [45 MT/s], and the introduction of an optimized third CPU is an innovative feature which should deliver better battery life than a dual-CPU chip that simply shuts down one CPU. According to Linley Gwennap:

To maximize battery life, the processor uses the smaller CPU most of the time, but it can shift to the powerful dual CPUs when maximum performance is required. The new Marvell processor is currently sampling and due to enter production next March.

With the current availability of the samples to the customers it is “just” the time needed to create the high-volume, consumer market products for the mass availability. Because the ARMADA 628 is a member of a whole family of processors designed for easy software porting it is not a great engineering challenge to develop the new devices based on this new and “marvelous” SoC. Hopefully the device vendors are also well ahead in their business development activities for  ultra-low power but at the same time ultra-high performance handheld products in the smartphone and tablet space. If not yet then they will have enough market experience for early next year when all the supply (in addition to the hopefully mass-produced by that time ARMADA 628 SoC) and distribution arrangements could be organised by them.

How the competition is standing up against this leadership offering? Badly, since there is nothing comparable to ARMADA 628 in a 1-2 years timeframe ahaead of us:

Qualcomm: 1.5GHz dual-core Snapdragon devices to arrive at end of 2011, 1.2GHz in Q1 [Sept 8]
Qualcomm 1.5GHz Snapdragon due end of 2011, not Q1 [Sept 8]

NVIDIA CEO: Tegra 3 almost done, Tegra 4 on the way, expect a new Tegra annually [Sept 21]
NVIDIA Finds Its Rhythm: Tegra 3 Imminent with Annual Updates [Sept 21]
which titles may sound quite competitive but in fact these are just mumblings by their desparate CEO as evidenced by these two videos from an unrelated press conference (obviously the CEO was just using the opportunity to “fend-off” the upcoming annoucement known to him already):
– NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsen Huang talks about Tegra [Sept 21], with a very low quality voice recorded by someone in the audience
– the other one, with a better voice record, embedded in the above mentioned NVIDIA Finds Its Rhythm: Tegra 3 Imminent with Annual Updates article which is making it obvious that the only real specific what was said was:

Tegra 2 is just our first entry (into the mobile market), Tegra 3 is almost done, Tegra 4 is being built. Just think in the context of the NVIDIA rhythm. Every single year, there will be a new Tegra.

Nothing more!

Finally regarding comparable high SoC processor plans from Samsung/Intrinsity[Apple] combo there is no new information at all. The Hummingbird chip (Samsung’s S5PC110 and Apple’s A4) is even no match to the #2 (after ARMADA 628) Qualcomm 1.2 GHz dual-core Snapdragon, also in the sampling phase right now.

When considering the competition one should also consider that Marvell has even high-impact end-customer initiatives as parts of  its long-term strategy:

– Moby for education/learning and healthcare/medical (see also their $75 tablet project with Pixel Qi and OLPC, mentioned before, as the natural evolution for Moby)

Follow-up: Marvell to capitalize on BRIC market with the Moby tablet [Feb 3, 2011]

– Plug Computer with only 2 watts of power dissipation (complete for the below spec) for typical applications such as a high performance home server, multimedia server, web proxy etc. The latest CES 2011 release [Jan 5, 2011] is stating even more:

Marvell's Plug Computer 3.0 announced on CES 2011 with a 2 GHz ARMADA™ 300 processor, Embedded Wi-Fi, Bluetooth enabled, 512MB flash, 512MB DDR2, 1.8 inch HD, 1 USB 2.0, 1 Mini USB, 1 10/100/1000 (Gigabit) Ethernet, and SDIO slot.

From streaming the latest winter vacation video to a connected TV in the bedroom, to enjoying favorite music on a Wi-Fi enabled receiver in the living room, Plug Computer 3.0 makes enjoying media on intelligent devices throughout the home easier and on-the-go more enjoyable than before.

The release of Plug Computer 3.0 opens up additional applications and usage in key new markets: Smart Grid, Home Automation, Medical Monitoring, Multimedia Content Sharing, Security and Access Control, Industrial Automation, Agricultural, Mesh and Grid Computing.

More information

* Quite important note for the information given above and below: Marvell has developed and continuing to develop two types of synthesizable cores: PJ1 and PJ4. Unfortunately there is no public information on that except the appearance in various processor products. These cores allow different kinds of core optimisations (an example is the 3d CPU vs dual high-peformance ones in ARMADA 628) and various ARM Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) implementations (as seen below in our product catalogue references). This is a highly competitive differentiator for Marvell.
Update: the PJ1 was also called 88SV331x, and the codename for it “MOHAWK”

“We believe that the PXA920 solution will help us realize China Mobile’s vision of sub-1000 RMB [~$150, unsubsidized] TD OPhones in the near future,” said Bill Huang general manager of China Mobile Research Institute. “Marvell has worked with us from the start of the PXA920 program and we are excited by the rapid progress we have made towards realizing this milestone. China Mobile will work closely with Marvell and handset eco-system partners to deploy the PXA920 and we look forward to the rapid launch of next generation TD-SCDMA OPhones based on the Marvell PXA920.”

Update: That opportunity was realized only 2 years later. See:First real chances for Marvell on the tablet and smartphone fronts [Aug 21, 2011]

The ARMADA family of application processors sets a new standard by offering CPU cores with PC-class performance, support for Adobe Flash technology and Blu-ray functionality. Additional features include complete broadband connectivity for the next wave of innovative electronics, spanning price points from low cost consumer gadgets all the way to premium performance devices. Customer adoption has been rapid: to date, Marvell ARMADA application processors have won more than 50 design wins.

The ARMADA 300 series offers more than 2.0 GHz processing horsepower in a sub 2W power envelope [it is even less for the ARMADA 310: “under normal load, this device operates on average in less than one watt power consumption envelope” said Sahat Sutardja, Marvell’s CEO at the March 4, 2010 Earnings Call] for the entire System on Chip – a level of performance never before seen with this class of processor – and the flexibility, interfaces and price points that fit the needs of today’s digital economy.

  • Marvell Changes the Game Again – New ARMADA 610 Application Processor First to Bring 1080p Full-HD Encode and Decode and 3D Multimedia Performance to Mobile Connected Devices [Jan 5, 2010]: the introduction of the second Sheeva PJ4*-based member of the ARMADA family. The ARMADA 610 has been designed for mobility, features a 1 GHz CPU, has an integrated 3D engine which renders 45M triangles-per-second (via a complete floating point pipeline and unified vertex and fragment/pixel shading) for an immersive gameplay experience with the ability to drive the latest in 3D enabled user interfaces, a lot of integrated peripheral controller on the same die etc. It is targeted at “eReader, Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs), tablets, smartbook/netbooks, connected portable media players, smartphones, and new personal information appliances.” Subsequently it was “designed to use extremely low power while maintaining high processing performance [2.42 DMIPS/MHz] and attractive price points for manufacturers.” It was “currently sampling to early customers.”

Based on the same CPU architecture as the Marvell® ARMADA™ 500 and 600 processor series, Marvell’s quadcore implementation can deliver gigahertz-plus processing per core and is designed for customer-specific products such as mass consumer market and high volume gaming applications.

“Introducing our quadcore technology to the world represents a pivotal moment in CPU development for the consumer electronics industry,” said Ms. Weili Dai, Marvell’s Co-founder and Vice President and General Manager of Marvell Semiconductor, Inc.’s Consumer and Computing Business Unit. “Today’s media-rich consumer applications are already pushing the limits. By making quadcore capabilities available to our customers we will enable the newest generation of cutting edge devices that consumers will always demand — more horsepower, higher performance, better battery life, and more attractive price points than ever before for mass consumer market adoption.”

Marvell has a long history of delivering multicore technology to customers for use in a broad variety of applications ranging from pachinko machines, printers, gaming, networking, gateways, all the way up to computing-intensive enterprise applications. This announcement of the first implementation of quadcore technology for the ARM ecosystem further demonstrates Marvell’s ability to deliver high performance, flexible technology that meets the silicon requirements of numerous tier-one customers, regardless of the end application.

“With the introduction of the ARMADA line of processors, we see the wide variety of devices that Marvell’s application processors can power,” said Rob Enderle, Principal Analyst for the Enderle Group. “Before ARMADA, the ARM ecosystem was thought to be limited by performance barriers. Now, with this announcement of its quadcore technology, Marvell is showing the world the ARM ecosystem’s true potential while cementing its position among the leaders in advanced CPU development for mass market consumer applications.”

Marvell’s quadcore solution is designed to meet customer specific requirements for mass consumer market opportunities. For more information about Marvell quadcore technologies please visit www.marvell.com or contact a sales representative.

… the Company will demonstrate its quad-core processing, enterprise-class cloud computing platform, Marvell® ARMADA™ XP (Extreme Performance).  The ARMADA XP is the fastest ARM processor available on the market today for enterprise class applications. The new platform integrates four Marvell designed ARM compliant 1.6GHz CPU cores along with a host of I/O peripherals to offer one of the highest levels of integration in the industry. By employing advanced design methodology and process technology, the ARMADA XP is optimized to consume strikingly low power at 1.6GHz, delivering the best performance per watt [16,600 DMIPS performance at less than 10 watts see below in the “Key Features” section] to empower emerging cloud computing applications ranging from high performance networking and web servers to high volume home server products like Network Attached Storage (NAS) and media servers.

Marvell’s introduction of a powerful solution for enterprise-class cloud computing applications is a very important milestone in the mobile Internet revolution—cloud computing mobile servers like those powered by the ARMADA XP are the key link in what I envision to be a seamless, unified ecosystem of mobile connected devices, information appliances and smart ‘furnishings,'” said Weili Dai, Co-Founder of Marvell.  “Marvell’s leadership in mobility, consumer, storage, enterprise networking and Wi-Fi products completes the circuit, delivering a powerful end-to-end total solution to anyone connected to the new global mesh, from consumers to small business and the enterprise.”

The ARMADA XP supplements the Marvell Plug Computer initiative by enabling a new class of mobile servers to serve the growing performance demands of connected consumer devices like smartphones and tablets. The new quad-core further builds on the success of the Marvell® Discovery™ Innovation and ARMADA 300 series by maintaining software compatibility to offer existing Marvell customers significant advantage in terms of reduced development cost and faster time to market.

About ARMADA XP series

The ARMADA XP is based on Marvell-designed ARM v7 MP compatible CPU offering 1.6GHz processing per core performance, delivering 16,600 DMIPS to make high performance computing affordable for mainstream applications. It integrates 2 MB of L2 cache and supports 64-bit DDR3 memory interface with ECC at 800MHz clock rate to enable a high throughput memory sub-system design. The ARMADA XP is a highly integrated System-on-a-Chip (SoC) that combines quad x4 PCI-express (PCI-e) interfaces, multiple USB ports, Gigabit Ethernet ports, SATA ports, security engine and other I/O peripherals to make system designs simple and economical.  With ARMADA XP’s advanced power management architecture, it offers the industry’s best performance per watt to alleviate the challenges of energy and cooling costs faced by enterprise and server class systems.

Key Features

  • Industry’s first quad-core ARM processor for enterprise applications
    • Up to 1.6GHz processing performance for each ARM v7 compliant core
    • 16,600 DMIPS performance at less than 10 watts
    • “Heterogeneous  multiprocessing” (SMP/AMP/Mixed) with “hardware-based Cache Coherence”
    • Up to 2MB system level two cache
    • Supplements the ARMADA family of single, dual-core and tri-core processors for easy software porting
  • 64-bit DDR2/DDR3/DDR3L memory interface with ECC support at up to 800MHz clock rates
  • 4 PCI-e Gen 2.0 units
  • 4 enterprise class Gigabit networking ports
  • Up to 16 high speed Marvell SERDES lanes with multi functionality (PCI-e, SATA, SGMII, QSGMII)
  • Multiple USB ports
  • Ultra low power consumption with advanced power management capabilities

Comprehensive Development Tools Marvell offers complete development platforms for the ARMADA XP enabling customers to start system development without waiting for hardware. Development platforms are available including software drivers and board support package.

Availability

Marvell’s ARMADA XP will be on display at the ARM Technology Conference on November 9-11, 2010 at booth #200. The ARMADA XP is currently sampling to customers.

Official Marvell product catalogues

  • ARMADA 100 the current Sheeva PJ1*-based, “cost sensitive” application processor products (showed along with the preceding PXA3xx – Monahans which came with Intel’s XSCale aquisition). Frequency: 0.4 – 1.2 GHz (the upper limit is missing on the ARMADA* overview page). Instruction Set Architecture (ISA): ARMv5 / XScale.
  • ARMADA 300 the Sheeva PJ1*-based embedded processors, currently the ARMADA 300/310SoCs (high-performance ARMADA 300 with frequency of 1.6 – 2.0 GHz, low power ARMADA 310 with frequency of 0.8 GHz and 1.0 GHz), which came in addition to the “pre-ARMADA” Discovery (single core with frequency of 0.6 – 1.2 GHz and dual core with frequency of 0.8 – 1.0 GHz) and Kirkwood (single core with frequency of 0.6 – 2.0 GHz and dual core with frequency of 0.8 – 1.0 GHz) series of PJ1* based products. Instruction Set Architecture (ISA): ARMv5.
  • ARMADA 500: the high-end Sheeva PJ4*-based application processors for high performance consumer devices such as netbooks and smartbooks (now would rather be called slates, tables etc.). Currently the ARMADA 510 SoC with frequency of 1.2 GHz. Instruction Set Architecture (ISA): ARM v6 / ARM v7. One of the industry’s first running ARM v7 instruction set.
  • ARMADA 600: the high-end Sheeva PJ4*-based application processors bringing high performance to the most compact form factors, such as smartphones and embedded mobile devices. Currently the ARMADA 610 and ARMADA 618 of 1.0 GHz SoCs (check for documentation on ARMADA 628). Instruction Set Architecture (ISA): ARM v6 / ARM v7. One of the industry’s first running ARM v7 instruction set.
  • ARMADA 1000: for digital entertainment application processors, i.e. “the next generation of connected full-HD consumer devices, delivering immersive viewing experiences and offering a variety of networked applications at mainstream price points”. Currently the Sheeva PJ1*-based two-core ARMADA 1000/88DE3010 High-Definition Media Processor with frequency of upto 1.2 GHz. Instruction Set Architecture (ISA): ARMv5 / XScale. TDP: 5W (see: Nixeus Fusion XS Brings Marvell into the DMA Market [March 11, 2011]
  • ARMADA XP: for enterprise-class cloud computing applications, i.e. “empower emerging cloud computing applications ranging from high performance networking and web servers to high volume home server products like Network Attached Storage (NAS) and media servers”. Quite probably based on Sheeva PJ4* cores, with one, two and four core versions, and a corresponding variety of I/O peripherals on the same chip.
  • In the ARMADA XP Product Brief (quite worth to look at) you can find a broader target market defined as: “With its broad offering of 5 pin compatible chips, the ARMADA XP is ideally suited for applications ranging from high-performance networking, wireless infrastructure and web servers to high volume products like NAS, home servers, laser printers and other embedded applications.” This is also showing that the ARMADA XP series SoC is a companion to Marvell’s embedded products as well (shown under embedded for this reason as well), i.e. the Sheeva PJ1* based Discovery, Kirkwood and ARMADA 300 series. The ARMADA XP series of Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) is ARM v7 (ARM v6 is not mentioned why it could — quite probably — have an enhanced Sheeva PJ4* core).
<!–[if gte mso 9]> 12.00 <![endif]–><!–[if gte mso 9]> Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE <![endif]–><!–[if gte mso 9]> <![endif]–> <!–[endif]–>88F6000 SoCs

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