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Inside This Issue:

This Week’s Stories Qualcomm’s Net Income

Plummets 40% As Battle With

Apple Rages On

WBA Extends Wi-Fi Roaming Program To 17 Cities This Summer Koehler: IBM Cloud Advances With Integration, New Services

Products & Services This Is Microsoft’s Gorgeous New Nest Competitor 5 Upcoming Android Phones That Will Be Worth The Wait: Pixel 2, Galaxy Note 8, And More

Emerging Technology Google Street View Now Lets You Tour The International Space Station This Startup Wants To Replace Your Office With 3D Holograms

Mergers & Acquisitions Amazon Quietly Buys A Startup To Make Alexa Smarter First News Briefs: Sandvine And Procera, AT&T, Sprint, U.S. Cellular

Industry Reports T-Mobile Adds 786K Net Postpaid Phone Subscribers In Q2, ‘Continues To Fire On All Cylinders’ Society Just Scratching The Surface Of IoT Potential, Report Finds

Week Ending: July 21, 2017

This Week’s Stories Qualcomm’s Net Income Plummets 40% As Battle With Apple Rages On July 20, 2017 Shares of Qualcomm sank this morning after the company posted a lackluster fiscal third quarter due largely to its ongoing licensing dispute with Apple. The chip making giant posted $5.4 billion in revenue, down 11% year over year, and net income fell a whopping 40% to $900 million. Operating income came in at $1.6 billion, down 51% year over year. The results were generally in line with Wall Street expectations, but investors seemed surprised nonetheless, sending shares down more than 5% by midday Thursday. “We delivered better-than-expected results in our semiconductor business this quarter, which drove EPS above the midpoint of our expectations versus our April updated guidance,” Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf said in a prepared statement. “Our products and technologies continue to enable the global smartphone industry, and we are expanding into many exciting new product categories, including automotive, mobile computing, networking and IoT. We believe that we hold the high ground with regard to the dispute with Apple, and we have initiated new actions to protect the well-established value of our technology.” The San Diego-based firm is in a massive battle with Apple that began in January over patent royalties. The iPhone vendor earlier this year filed a $1 billion lawsuit against Qualcomm, contending the chipmaker insists on onerous royalties for its technologies and demands payments for technologies it didn’t develop, such as Apple’s Touch ID. Apple claimed in that suit that it “has been overcharged billions of dollars on Qualcomm’s illegal scheme,” although the suit seeks damages of just less than $1 billion. Qualcomm filed a countersuit in April, claiming among other things that the iPhone vendor “breached” and “mischaracterized” agreements with the chipmaker and interfered in deals with Qualcomm licensees. Apple returned fire last month, saying in a legal filing that evidence increasingly indicated Qualcomm’s business model is “illegal.” The new claims alleged that Qualcomm’s strategy “burdens innovation,” Bloomberg reported, and that some patents for which Qualcomm is demanding royalties are invalid. Apple also said Qualcomm has failed to fulfill its obligation to charge fair and reasonable rates for the patents. The standoff escalated even further this week when four contract manufacturers joined Apple, filing a lawsuit claiming Qualcomm’s licensing practices are illegal, The Wall Street Journal reported. Meanwhile, Qualcomm is fighting multiple other legal battles around the world. In April, Nvidia sued Qualcomm in London, alleging it had unfairly forced Nvidia to pull the plug on the Icera business it bought in 2011. Qualcomm also faces a fine in South Korea of $853 million over alleged antitrust violations.

Weekly Wireless Report

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And earlier this year, the FTC filed suit against Qualcomm, accusing it of using anticompetitive tactics to “maintain its monopoly” as the dominant vendor of semiconductors for phones and other mobile gadgets. The agency said Qualcomm imposed “onerous and anticompetitive supply and licensing terms” on hardware manufacturers, violating the FTC Act on several fronts. fiercewireless.com

WBA Extends Wi-Fi Roaming Program To 17 Cities This Summer July 20, 2017 The City Wi-Fi Roaming project was so successful last year that organizers are running it for a second year and adding more cities. AT&T, BT, Orange, Telstra and Korea Telecom are among the 38 operators that are contributing to the project, which is facilitated by the Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA). The project enables consumers and visitors to automatically and securely roam between public Wi-Fi networks in 17 major cities around the globe. It started June 20 and runs until August 20. Last year, the City WI-Fi Roaming project involved just four cities. This year, the project expands to include Barcelona, Spain; Birmingham, U.K.; Bradford, U.K.; Dublin, Ireland; Singapore; Kazan, Russia; Leeds, U.K.; Limerick, Ireland; Moscow, Russia; New York City; Nizhny Novgorod, Russia; Perm, Russia; St. Petersburg, Samara, Russia; San Jose, California; Sendai, Japan; and Yekaterinburg, Russia. The WBA defined the framework and best practices for roaming for the project through its Next Generation Hotspot (NGH), which is based on Passpoint technology and WRIX, or Wireless Roaming Intermediary Exchange. The framework for Wi-Fi Roaming services provided by the WBA covers interconnection, data clearing, financial clearing and the exchange of Wi-Fi location information between operators. “The free Wi-Fi roaming service is based on the WBA’s NGH, which not only allows consumers to seamlessly connect to Wi-Fi hotspots across major cities across the globe, but also ensures extra security and a better user experience are delivered to those that connect,” said Shrikant Shenwai, CEO of the WBA, in a release. Besides the 38 operators, the project is supported by interconnectivity partners Accuris Networks, Syniverse and BSG Wireless, with infrastructure providers Cisco, HP’s Aruba and Ruckus Wireless. GlobalReach delivers the captive portal and provides a Wi-Fi AAA/Hotspot 2.0 online signup platform. The Wireless Broadband Alliance is supported by more than 120 leading names in the telecom industry, including operators and technology companies such as AT&T, BT, Cisco, Comcast, NTT DoCoMo, Google, Intel, Liberty Global and Orange. AT&T has said it sees Hotspot 2.0 as a “critical requirement” in its network and customer premises equipment. Hotspot 2.0 is designed to make public Wi-Fi as simple, secure and seamless for subscribers as cellular roaming. Passpoint-enabled networks use 802.1x to authenticate users onto WPA2 encrypted connections. Key benefits for end users include instant access to a network and security without the need of a VPN.

fiercewireless.com

“The free Wi-Fi roaming

service is based on the WBA’s

NGH, which not only allows

consumers to seamlessly

connect to Wi-Fi hotspots

across major cities across the

globe, but also ensures extra

security and a better user

experience are delivered to

those that connect.”

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Koehler: IBM Cloud Advances With Integration, New Services July 17, 2017 Bryson Koehler, CTO of IBM Watson/Cloud, predicts a more unified face, powerful compute engine for IBM Cloud in coming year. With its acquisition of The Weather Company 16 months ago, IBM has moved from a Rube Goldberg approach to cloud computing toward a simpler, more integrated offering with a clearer path forward, according to IBM CTO for Watson and the IBM Cloud, Bryson Koehler. Koehler, the former CIO of The Weather Company, became part of IBM in January 2016 and his former CEO, David Kenny, was named senior VP of the Watson Platform business. Koehler sat down with InformationWeek at IBM's "cloud garage," the Galvanize developer center at 44 Tehama Street in San Francisco, to discuss the future of the IBM Cloud on July 12. IBM Cloud is integrating many different services from Watson, The Weather Company, SoftLayer and BlueMix into a single cloud offering, and will architect how those services are orchestrated in-house, Koehler said. When Koehler arrived at IBM, its approach to cloud services "was a mix of things," he said. He soon realized he and Kenny had been given the positions they hold to accelerate a process of transformation of IBM into a more unified cloud company. IBM is breaking away from the pattern of cloud infrastructure established by Google, Amazon and Microsoft. IBM's future cloud offering can be based on whatever form of virtualization and server hardware that IBM chooses, as opposed to following the model of all x86 Intel architecture that Amazon Web Services and most other providers do. "Electricity that comes out of the socket gets produced by a mix of coal, solar, hydro and nuclear, but it's still 120-volt electricity," Koehler said. By implication, he was saying in the future, cloud compute power may likewise stem from a mix of x86, IBM Power, Z series and graphics processors. Backing Off OpenStack A Bit That may be good news to IT managers running enterprise data centers who've wanted someone that understood their legacy needs, including mainframe applications, to come up with a cloud strategy. The IBM Cloud of 2018 is likely to present more of unified face and single virtualization environment to the world and won't necessarily resemble the odd combination of BlueMix, SoftLayer and assorted online services of the IBM clouds of 2016. For x86-style virtual machines, IBM has already chosen the Xen hypervisor, Koehler said. At some point in the future, if the IBM Cloud is running, say, Z series hardware, IBM would also use its own hypervisor, since it invented virtualization on the mainframe back in 1972. That's one of the many possibilities that will open for IBM as it re-architects its cloud management software. But one of the casualties of such an approach is IBM's previous focus on an OpenStack architecture. It's been a long time since IBM has made much mention of OpenStack, even though it's a clear supporter of the Cloud Foundry platform as a service; among other things, Cloud Foundry is designed for ease of implementation on OpenStack. "In the past, much of the control plane of the BlueMix Cloud was based on OpenStack. But IBM is not going to use OpenStack as it moves into a hyperscale world," Koehler said.

“IBM Cloud is integrating

many different services from

Watson, The Weather

Company, SoftLayer and

BlueMix into a single cloud

offering, and will architect

how those services are

orchestrated in-house.”

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The default hypervisor for OpenStack is Red Hat's KVM. Instead of depending on KVM, IBM has taken Xen, forked it, and will use its own version for its cloud, much as Amazon Web Services does to produce Amazon Machine Images. When the customer environment in the cloud is completely virtualized, the operating system and underlying hardware become less important to end users, provided they can run their application in a virtual machine, Koehler noted. Existing cloud services amount to x86 "pizza box servers stacked together," which may or may not be the optimum way to present cloud services. Google, Amazon and Microsoft have negotiated with Intel to produce server chips that are customized to fit their cloud designs, but they are still chips with an architecture that started its life as a personal computer engine. Cloud servers might look significantly different if they start out from a different point of view, he said. IBM has the ability to produce its own silicon design from the ground up as large server engine. BlueMix was platform as a service, packed with all the tools, languages and middleware that IBM could muster, offered from a handful of locations. It was also a Cloud Foundry implementation. SoftLayer, on the other hand, was infrastructure as a service, designed originally for small and medium-sized business and offered from dozens of data centers around the world. But it remained something of a stepchild within an enterprise-oriented IBM three years after it was acquired. For a description of its ongoing small business orientation, see this report on the Gartner Magic Quadrant for infrastructure as a service in 2016. Koehler said despite its move away from OpenStack for hyperscale cloud data centers, IBM will continue to recognize and support OpenStack APIs, so that customer who have built OpenStack cloud or wish to interface to OpenStack APIs may do so. IBM will use a unified cloud architecture to offer Watson-based analytics and other AI and data management services, including machine learning. IBM now offers 55 data centers in 19 countries, giving customers the option of data residency and management within their own national boundaries, as required in Germany and other countries. It might sound like IBM is getting to its own concept of a unified cloud late in the game, given the number of customers both Amazon and Microsoft have already garnered. But Koehler said he doesn't worry about that. "Only 5% of all workloads have migrated into the cloud today," he said, with 95% of the market remaining to be developed. "I'll take that market opportunity," he said. informationweek.com

Products & Services This Is Microsoft’s Gorgeous New Nest Competitor July 20, 2017 Microsoft's vision for the smart home is finally taking shape. Following a demonstration of how its Cortana virtual assistant would work in cars and living rooms last May, the company just revealed it's working on a smart thermostat called GLAS. The device was built by Johnson Controls and is powered by Microsoft technologies like its Azure cloud platform, Cortana voice helper and Windows IoT core, a version of Windows 10 that's optimized for smaller devices.

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The company unveiled GLAS in a new YouTube video that offers a brief overview of what it's up to. Contrasted with rivals like the Nest Learning Thermostat and Honeywell Lyric, both of which have round shapes that resemble more traditional thermostats, GLAS appears to be a sleek, transparent touchscreen mounted on a wall. It can tell when a user is present in the room as well as monitor air quality, then change its settings accordingly. Based on the video, it looks like owners will be able to set the thermostat to different modes such as "home" or "away," and can program the system to "auto," "heat," or "cool." The screen can also be used to summarize energy savings, display a calendar and outline air quality. This isn't the first time Microsoft has worked with a partner to further its presence in the smart home. In late 2016, the company touted its Invoke speaker, an Amazon Echo alternative made by Harman Kardon that supports Cortana. With its GLAS announcement, Microsoft seems to be approaching the Internet of Things market in step with its PC business: by shopping out its software platforms to partners that can build the hardware. The news also comes as an increasing number of home devices are adding support for Amazon's Alexa virtual assistant. Microsoft has not yet revealed pricing or availability. time.com

5 Upcoming Android Phones That Will Be Worth The Wait: Pixel 2, Galaxy Note 8, And More July 18, 2017 Picking an Android phone is hard enough with all the choices out there, but it can be downright paralyzing when you factor in all the phones that are going to be coming out in the near future. There's nothing worse than buying a phone, then finding out it's yesterday's news right away. Carefully considering what's coming out of the rumor mill can save you from that. So, let's lay it all out there. Pixel 2 Google's first-generation Pixel ended the company's tradition of producing "good enough" hardware with great software. The Pixel was a flagship phone that could stand toe-to-toe with the likes of Samsung and Apple. The Pixel 2, if rumors are to be believed, will take it to the next level with a big redesign. The larger of the two Pixels will gain an edge-to-edge OLED display courtesy of LG, which will allegedly manufacture the device.

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The best piece of info we have on this device comes from Android Police, which produced a render of the device based on confidential leaks (see above). The phone will have very slim bezels, and the glass front panel will curve downward. The frame will reportedly also be squeezable like the HTC U11, allowing you to trigger Assistant or Google Lens. The smaller of the two Pixels may have a design similar to the first gen, but both will have the same high-end hardware. You can expect a Snapdragon 835, 4GB of RAM, and 64GB of storage in the base model. Start saving your pennies now, though. The Pixel 2 will be expensive. Moto Z2 Motorola has been trying this modular smartphone thing for the last year, and it hasn't caught on yet. Maybe all it's missing is a properly compelling phone. And perhaps, that phone will be the Moto Z2, which could be announced in as little as a few weeks. Motorola already launched the Moto Z2 Play as a mid-range phone, but the regular Z2 will be a flagship phone.

We can say several things about this phone for certain because of the Moto Mod system. This phone (technically phones, regular and Force) will have a flat back panel with a Mod connector at the bottom, and the screen will be around 5.5-inches. The regular Z2 will be thin with a correspondingly small battery. Meanwhile, the Force variant will be thicker with a shatter-resistant screen and maybe the return of the headphone jack. The Force might only launch on carriers like Verizon and AT&T, but at least the regular Z2 will be available unlocked. The Mods include things like extended batteries, zoom cameras, and gamepads. The Moto Z2 family should have the latest Snapdragon 835 and 4GB of RAM. The price will probably be over $600, and the Mods will be extra. However, there are usually some launch sales that throw in a free Mod or two. Samsung Galaxy Note 8 Samsung took a real beating last year when the Note 7 showed a propensity to burst into flames. The device had to be recalled, and was only recently re-launched in South Korea as the Galaxy Note Fandom Edition. The Galaxy S8 doesn't seem to have the same issues, and it's selling well. Since consumers seem to have forgiven Samsung, the Galaxy Note 8 has a shot at setting sales records again.

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This phone will be a lot like the Galaxy S8 with the on-screen navigation bar and curved AMOLED display. It'll also come with an S Pen stylus tucked inside. This is what makes it a Note, after all. The display will have a taller aspect ratio like the Galaxy S8, so the overall measurement might be as large as 6.3-inches. You can expect another mediocre rear-facing fingerprint scanner on this phone, unless Samsung has magically figured out the in-display sensor. Inside will be a Snapdragon 835 and 4GB of RAM. As with all of Samsung's phones, it'll be tuned for battery life rather than performance. Rumors claim the price for this phone could be close to $1,000, so Samsung had better bring its A-game. LG V30 LG made a lot of improvements this year with the G6. It ditched the modular chin accessories from the G5 and moved to a sealed metal and glass chassis. Much of the V30 is still a mystery, but we have an announcement date. LG will unveil the V30 on August 31st at IFA in Berlin. From the IFA invitation, we can be certain this phone will have an edge-to-edge display similar to the LG G6. However, rumors suggest this will be the first phone to launch with LG's new OLED display tech. This is the same thing we're expecting to see on the Pixel 2.

Past V-series phones have had ticker displays above the main one, but there's no confirmation that will continue. It may simply use the top of the OLED like a ticker, and the screen itself could reach almost to the top like the missing-in-action Essential Phone. The dual-camera setup will likely remain, though. We'll know for sure at IFA.

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Moto X4 While some people might be desperate for a super-powerful flagship phone, the Moto X4 could be ideal for those who want something without as many bells and whistles for a more reasonable price. The Moto X series was quietly discontinued a few years ago after Lenovo took over the company, but now a fourth iteration is on the way. Dubbed the Moto X4, this phone could be announced this summer or fall. This phone won't have the Mod connector like Z phones, but it will include a dual camera array. It's not clear what it will do, but a leaked Motorola presentation refers to something called "Smart Cam." The front of the phone is home to a 5.2-inch 1080p display under 3D curved glass. Below that is a fingerprint sensor like other recent Moto phones have had.

The Moto X4 will probably pack a Snapdragon 660 SoC or possibly the 630. Either way, it won't be as powerful as the 835 in other late-2017 phones. However, Motorola's clean build of Android is well-optimized. Even more modest phones like the Moto E4 are reasonably fast. This device won't cost nearly as much as other upcoming phones, so it might be a good option if you want to save some cash. forbes.com

Emerging Technology

Google Street View Now Lets You Tour The International Space Station July 20, 2017 Google is bringing you to space. The search engine giant announced Thursday that its popular map imagery tool, Street View, will allow anyone a peek inside the International Space Station. Viewers will have access to complete 360-degree, panoramic imagery that shows how astronauts aboard the space station live. “We will never know what it’s like to live and work in space, but that doesn’t mean we can’t bring a taste of that to all the people who have ever dreamed of being an astronaut,” Deanna Yick, global program manager for Street View, told USA TODAY.

“While clicking through each of

the 15 parts of the space

station — or modules — as well

as Space X’s Dragon spacecraft,

users will see dots overlaid on

top of objects which, when

clicked on, show annotations

explaining what each item is

and its purpose.”

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While clicking through each of the 15 parts of the space station — or modules — as well as Space X’s Dragon spacecraft, users will see dots overlaid on top of objects which, when clicked on, show annotations explaining what each item is and its purpose. For example, viewers will see exercise equipment folded up. An annotation reveals what it looks like in action and explains how astronauts exercise in zero-gravity.

The ISS was launched into Earth’s lower orbit in 1998 as a joint research hub for the US, Canada, Russia, Japan and Europe. At any given time, astronauts from several countries live and conduct research aboard the space station orbiting 250 miles above the planet. Google’s Street View team has completed similar projects in hard-to-reach locations, including on top of mountains in the Alps and the bottom of the Great Barrier Reef. This is the team’s most ambitious project yet. Mapping in a zero-gravity environment presented a unique set of challenges for Google. Typically, someone with a camera will physically go to a location Google wants to map. But since the ISS is orbiting the planet, that wasn’t possible. With the help of NASA and an educational organization called CASIS, Google was assigned a French astronaut from the European Space Agency. The astronaut, Thomas Pesquet, used equipment already on board the ISS to map the entire station for Google. Then there was the issue of gravity — or the lack thereof. Individuals mapping for Google usually put a camera on a tripod, which is then rotated to get a full 360 degree view. In space, a tripod would just start floating. “We usually use tripod to ground the imagery at a single point and rotate the camera around that point,” said Yick. “Without gravity, it’s basically impossible to have a single point that you’re rotating around.” Google had to design an entirely new gravity-free method of collecting images. Working with a replica of the space station at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, the company developed a solution: affix two bungee cords to the walls of a module, thus creating a fixed point for the camera. Pesquet then rotated himself around the point.

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For four months, from February until May, Pesquet gradually collected photos which were then sent back to Earth and stitched together to form a 360 view. “The ISS has technical equipment on all surfaces, with lots of cables and a complicated layout with modules shooting off in all directions—left, right, up, down. And it’s a busy place, with six crew members carrying out research and maintenance activities 12 hours a day,” said Pesquet in a statement. “There are a lot of obstacles up there, and we had limited time to capture the imagery, so we had to be confident that our approach would work.” The result allows people on Earth an immersive look into what it feels like to be in space. Yick said Google doesn’t have any more plans to bring Street View to space, but added that if they had the opportunity to bring cameras on the moon or Mars, she’s be “open” to it. usatoday.com

This Startup Wants To Replace Your Office With 3D Holograms July 18, 2017 Meta is testing the augmented reality technology on its own employees. One recent morning, Stephanie Rosenburg arrived at work to find her PC monitor had vanished. She looked around the office and saw that members of her team were wearing headsets with see-through visors and grabbing invisible objects with their hands. Rosenburg had just returned from vacation so it took her a few seconds to process what was happening before she clued in: "Oh," she thought. "It's my turn now." Rosenburg handles marketing for Meta, a San Francisco startup that makes augmented reality headsets that overlay holographic images on the real world. Users can manipulate 3-D models with their hands or browse web pages, send emails and write code from floating virtual screens. Her boss, Meta founder and Chief Executive Officer Meron Gribetz, is determined to end what he calls the "tyranny of the modern office" by replacing monitors, keyboards and eventually even cubicles with augmented reality. To get there, he’s using his own employees—including Rosenburg—as test subjects to help Meta figure out what works and what doesn't. That experiment is the subject of this week's episode of the Decrypted podcast. When Gribetz revealed the plan last year at the TED Conference in Vancouver, he was under no illusions about the challenge. "I was extremely nervous about this," he recalls. "You're going against 50 years of computing tools." Gribetz, 31, founded Meta in 2012 after studying neuroscience and computer science at Columbia University. He made the first Meta prototype with an oven-heated knife and hot glue gun. Last year, Meta raised $50 million from investors like Lenovo Group Ltd. and Tencent Holdings Ltd. Today, its devices are used by developers and companies—ranging from architects to designers to auto manufacturers. By year-end, Meta expects more than 10,000 people will be using the $949 headset. Meta’s goal is to make its augmented reality technology a seamless extension of the real world—enabling people to interact with holograms much the way one interacts with real objects. Instead of clicking, dragging and pushing buttons, the technology lets users control 3-D content with their hands. Gribetz believes AR hardware will become quickly commoditized, so he’s focused on perfecting the software, taking inspiration from Apple’s intuitive user experience. In his vision, office workers will huddle around holograms to collaborate on pretty much any kind of task. That means no computers, cubicles, regular desks, or chairs. Gribetz's own office provides a

“Instead of clicking, dragging

and pushing buttons, the

technology lets users control

3-D content with their

hands.”

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glimpse of how a future workplace might look. He has a thin slab of wood at standing height as a desk. It’s just wide enough for the headset to rest on it. He plans to redesign the rest of Meta's office in a similar way. Tall with impeccable posture, Gribetz solemnly describes his vision as "cognitively healthy computing" that helps users close "the latency between imagination and creation." He believes AR will eventually place a meta-layer (get it?) of information around everything in the real world. Touch a piece of food and immediately see its nutritional content, hold a flower and see its DNA, shake someone's hand at a conference and see a sort of virtual LinkedIn page appear. Some may find that creepy, but Gribetz believes augmented reality is about bringing people closer to the real world. "This won't happen overnight," he says. "But certainly if you move forward about a decade or even less, people will have strips of glass that will look very much like the glasses I have on, that will be able to do everything that a computer, a tablet, or a phone will be able to do, and a whole lot more." Meta isn't the only company with big ambitions for augmented reality. Microsoft Corp. and Apple Inc. are also devoting considerable resources to developing the technology; Apple's Tim Cook told Bloomberg he was so excited about AR that he wanted to "yell out and scream." Gribetz believes he has a chance of snatching the lead from better-financed rivals by testing his technology on employees who are focused the singular goal of transforming the workplace through AR. Many tech companies use this tactic, known as dog-fooding, but employees at larger firms often have multiple projects and incentives. The experiment is being overseen by a team of neuroscientists who are collecting data from Meta's employees: how people's eyes and bodies feel in the headset, how much work gets done compared with using monitors and the overall experience day-to-day. Meta is also encouraging employees to write daily logs about the experience. Even though the goal is to make an operating system that Gribetz says will be 10 times easier to use than an iPhone, the technology is still in its infancy. So as expected, the rollout has been a demanding experience for employees and executives alike.

Meta's experiment began with the engineering team, which happens to be one of the largest groups with the highest-pressure deadlines. It went badly. The engineers complained that they couldn’t get their work done on time without their monitors. Not all of the software packages that the engineers used day-to-day were compatible with the headset. They also had trouble testing and writing code at the same time. Coder Ben Lucas describes his early experience with the technology as "discombobulating," like being on a boat. Plus, the headset didn't fit his head shape correctly so he attached a weight to the back to make it more comfortable.

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Eventually, Gribetz let the engineers revert to monitors and transitioned small groups at a slower pace, starting with marketing, sales and administration. Before long, useful feedback began pouring in. Some employees reported a distracting jitter when using the technology. The coders tweaked the algorithms and the problem disappeared. The hand-tracking and stability of the images improved. Employees participated in a company-wide hackathon to create various applications. Among them: a 3-D data visualization tool, a sticky note app and a stress-relieving orb that makes different musical notes when prodded. The company has filed several patent applications that cover concepts and tools developed during the dog-fooding process. Inevitably the technology made some jobs easier and others harder. Esther Lekeu is designing the next-generation headset. In the past she would bring two-dimensional drawings to design-review meetings. Now, everyone dons a headset and looks at the mockup as a 3-D hologram, moving it around and viewing it from all angles. "That's been night and day in terms of communicating my idea," Lekeu says. On the other hand, the early phases of the design process were harder for Esther in the headset. It was painstaking to make small iterations to sketches in augmented reality, compared to being able to make quick changes on the fly in Photoshop. It’s not that this is necessarily a limitation of augmented reality, she says, just that the technology—at least for now—is better for some tasks than others. Lekeu sees a future where AR is one of various tools we use in our everyday lives, much the way we still use pen and paper for some things, and our phones and monitors for others. Her boss, of course, believes AR will supplant everything.

The benefits of the technology are clear for companies that make physical products. Carmakers can speed up the gestation of a new model thanks to instant holographic renderings of life-sized prototypes. For the average office worker, the perks are more nuanced. Based on the experiences of Meta employees, the biggest productivity gain is having virtually boundless space for an unlimited number of screens. That means focusing on one task while distractions–email, social media–can literally sit behind you. Some Meta employees say that making a spreadsheet of data enormous can make it easier to spot interesting trends in the numbers. It’s also made brainstorming easier, they say, since you can collaborate on giant, holographic pages. Many employees were reluctant to give up their monitors but, after ditching them for good, said that doing daily work was a much more immersive and visceral experience, so much so that returning to the real world after spending a few hours in augmented reality could be jarring. "Suddenly everything seems very small again," says Kharis O’Connell, senior director of user experience. "I pick up my phone, sort of squinting at it after being in the headset for a while, and suddenly you're like, 'wow, I can't believe we have such small rectangles around us all of the time.'" Lis Owuor, a copy-

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writer, sometimes struggles to grab objects when she re-emerges. The tongs at the startup’s salad bar are a challenge. "I was trying to grasp it like it was a hologram!" If Meta employees are a hard sell you can imagine how tough it will be persuading the general public of augmented reality's benefits. Many tech companies doing futuristic work employ an in-house evangelist to get the word out. Meta's evangelist is Ryan Pamplin, who builds partnerships and support for AR among the general public. An avowed AR enthusiast, Pamplin already spends much of his day augmenting reality. He even brings the headset home and on airplanes, where he likes to watch movies on wider screens. Like his boss's office, Pamplin's workspace is a study in minimalism: a white desk with nothing on it except a headset and keyboard, and some awards and news clippings pinned to one wall. Put on the headset, though, and you step into Pamplin's dream office. Photos of his girlfriend are plastered all over. A holographic bust of Steve Jobs and a model of the Tesla 3 float nearby. A YouTube video of the Katy Perry Roar plays from a midair screen. A virtual shelf sits on the desk of the real office. It's basically Meta's version of a standard desktop, a stand-in for the traditional icons on a screen. If Pamplin wants to check his email, he grabs the web browser image from the shelf and a screen opens, suspended in the air. He has a bunch of other things on the shelf that aren't strictly work-related, including crackling fire for ambience. There's also a holographic eyeball. It's designed for medical students, but Pamplin just thinks it's cool. "It's like real life," he says with boyish enthusiasm. "You're reaching around the office and you're grabbing objects, just like you would in a real office.'' bloomberg.com

Mergers and Acquisitions

Amazon Quietly Buys A Startup To Make Alexa Smarter July 20, 2017 Amazon.com Inc. acquired a Santa Barbara data analysis and search engine start-up in May to help improve its Alexa virtual assistant and other services, according to four sources familiar with the deal but unauthorized to discuss it. The previously unreported acquisition of Graphiq Inc. and its more than 100 employees has given Amazon a new Southern California outpost. It recently began looking to hire additional software developers and data associates in Santa Barbara to work on Alexa. Investors in Graphiq made out with more than they put in, according to a source, suggesting the deal was worth at least tens of millions of dollars. Another source estimated the deal's value at $50 million. Amazon and Graphiq declined to comment. Founded in 2009 as FindTheBest, the company sought to collect and organize details about products, places and people to simplify online research. Graphiq Chief Executive Kevin O'Connor has said he came to the idea after struggling to find a reliable way to compare ski resorts while he planned a vacation and colleges as his son eyed further education. He wanted to see key information such as prices, hours and ratings in one online spreadsheet. Data came from public sources, employees and users. The company started generating revenue by selling ads alongside its tables. The company later introduced features to tailor comparisons around individual preferences. And it launched websites and apps focused on specific topics such as technology, genealogy, real estate and government data. They draw millions of monthly readers.

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Graphiq not only created a large, internal content development team, but also developed graph and chart tools so that news partners such as the Los Angeles Times, Reuters and the Associated Press could provide interactive visualizations in their articles. Last month, Graphiq announced that features for news publishers would no longer be available after Friday. A company spokesperson last month declined to comment beyond a statement about that decision. The statement said, "We greatly enjoyed working with publishers over the last few years to help them tell the news and look forward to continuing to use our technology in other exciting areas." The technology Graphiq has developed to connect the dots between billions of pieces of information could be valuable to Amazon as it tries to make Alexa smarter. Akin to Siri on the iPhone, Alexa answers queries about the weather, sports and other topics on devices such as Amazon's Echo speaker. Last year, Graphiq produced a now-unavailable Alexa app that aimed to answer questions such as "What is the fastest 2016 sedan?" according to app aggregation website ChatBottle. Amazon also gave Graphiq access to a database about books to put its technology to the test, according to a source. Amazon faces competition from most of the world's largest tech companies, including Alphabet, Apple, Microsoft and Baidu, in delivering answers to consumer questions faster and more conveniently. O'Connor told Inc. magazine last fall that "people are going to realize" that Graphiq's technology is "extraordinarily strategic." "You can see it happening with the Amazon Echo, Siri, Google Now," he said. "Rather than making people think like computers, we're making computers think like people." Graphiq also drew interest from Google and IBM before settling on an agreement with Amazon, according to sources. The deal marks the second significant purchase of a company co-founded by O'Connor. He founded and led ad tech firm DoubleClick through 2005, when the company was sold to private equity firms for $1.1 billion. Two years later, in its biggest acquisition ever at the time, Google spent $3.1 billion in cash on DoubleClick to vastly expand its ability to place ads across the Internet. O'Connor then became a fixture in the Santa Barbara tech community. He's heavily recruited from UC Santa Barbara and has used his wealth to invest in start-ups such as construction software maker Procore and event planning app MeetUp. Graphiq had raised about $32 million in private financing, according to Crunchbase. Its biggest venture capital backers included Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Pritzker Group Venture Capital. Montgomery & Co. and Silicon Valley Bank also provided some funding. Representatives for the firms declined to comment or didn't respond to requests to comment. It's unclear whether Graphiq, which went through a round of layoffs last summer, has trimmed staff further as part of the transaction. LinkedIn data show a slight drop in headcount to 131 employees from 145 in March. Departures have included the company's head of people operations. In May, Graphiq, whose headquarters in the Summerland neighborhood overlook the Pacific Ocean, terminated its California business license, stopped posting to social media and updated its terms of service and privacy policy. Such changes often coincide with an acquisition. Elsewhere in Southern California, Amazon maintains software development workforces in Irvine and San Diego and several sprawling fulfillment centers in the Inland Empire. mobile-tech-today.com

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First News Briefs: Sandvine And Procera, AT&T, Sprint, U.S. Cellular July 17, 2017 Private equity firm Francisco Partners is set to acquire Sandvine for some $44 million ($562 million Canadian), and merge the company with Procera Networks. The cash price of $4.40 per share figures out to a 40 percent premium on top of Sandvine’s closing stock price of $2.48 per share on May 25. Ontario-based Sandvine is a networking equipment company that specializes in network policy control products for fixed, mobile, and converged service provider networks. Procera, a California-based company, reportedly provides network visibility, intelligence, and control across mobile and fixed broadband networks.The combined company will retain Sandvine’s moniker, and be led by Procera’s current CEO Lyndon Cantor and CFO Richard Deggs. Sandvine CEO Dave Caputo will join the Board of Directors of the combined company as Non-Executive Chairman. “This is a very exciting next step for Sandvine and Procera. As technologies and networks continue to evolve, I firmly believe that the combination of Sandvine and Procera creates the premier provider in our markets — with the scale and innovation needed to address our customers’ opportunities to build more intelligent networks,” Caputo commented. AT&T's SVP and FirstNet head Chris Sambar will head to Capitol Hill this week to testify before the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, Innovation, and the Internet. The hearing will center on “An Update on FirstNet,” and will be held at 10 a.m. Thursday, July 20. Sprint has first dibs on TCL Communication’s latest BlackBerry smartphone. The carrier is reportedly the first to offer the new BlackBerry KEYone, which is available for $22 per month on an 18-month installment plan. The device features a 4.5-inch display with a 12 mp rear camera, Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 chip, and Qualcomm Adreno 506 GPU. “This is a highly anticipated launch as we partner with Sprint who is among the first U.S. carriers to offer the award-winning BlackBerry KEYone,” said Steve Cistulli, president and GM of TCL Communication, North America. “Expanding the availability of the BlackBerry KEYone is a significant milestone for BlackBerry Mobile, furthering our commitment to offer the best in mobile security and a distinctly different communication experience to customers across the U.S.” U.S. Cellular announced the hire of Jay G. Spenchian as its new senior vice president of marketing. Spenchian will lead the marketing organization and will be responsible for the development of strategic branding and communications initiatives that drive customer growth and loyalty, while optimizing products, services, and offerings to provide the world's best customer experience. Spenchian comes to U.S. Cellular from Tempur Sealy International, where he served as executive vice president and global chief marketing officer. He previously served in other marketing leadership roles at Olive Garden, Red Lobster, General Motors, The Pillsbury Company, Sara Lee Corporation, H.J. Heinz Company, and Pepsico. "Jay has a proven track record of driving customer growth, identifying consumer trends, and marketing innovative products, and his expertise in a variety of marketing initiatives make him a great fit for the fast-paced wireless industry," U.S. Cellular COO Jay Ellison said in a statement. "As a key member of our leadership team, he will help us successfully execute on our business objectives by ensuring that we offer the latest products and services that customers care about and that our brand messaging resonates with consumers and businesses.”

wirelessweek.com

“This is a very exciting next

step for Sandvine and

Procera. As technologies and

networks continue to evolve,

I firmly believe that the

combination of Sandvine and

Procera creates the premier

provider in our markets —

with the scale and innovation

needed to address our

customers’ opportunities to

build more intelligent.”

networks

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Industry Reports

T-Mobile Adds 786K Net Postpaid Phone Subscribers In Q2, ‘Continues To Fire On All Cylinders’ July 19, 2017 T-Mobile posted yet another impressive quarter in terms of both subscribers and the bottom line, leading some onlookers to wonder whether the carrier should participate in any M&A activity in the near future. The nation’s No. 3 wireless network operator reported 1.3 million total net additions for the quarter, marking 17 straight quarters of more than 1 million new net customers, and it saw 817,000 total branded postpaid net additions. T-Mobile also posted a record low branded postpaid phone churn of 1.1%, down 17 bps year over year and 8 bps sequentially. Total revenue came in at $10.21 billion, beating Wells Fargo Securities’ estimate of $9.9 billion and outpacing the $9.29 billion it posted during the same period last year. T-Mobile increased its guidance range for branded postpaid net customers additions for 2017 to a range of 3 million to 3.6 million, up from its previous forecast range of 2.8 million to 3.5 million. It also ratcheted up its adjusted EBITDA target to a range of $10.5 billion to $10.9 billion, up from $10.4 billion to $10.8 billion. “This was a competitive quarter. It was the first full quarter with all the unlimited plans in the market; it was also a quarter in which one desperate company gave away service for free,” T-Mobile CEO John Legere said during the company’s earnings call, referring to a recent Sprint promotion. “And yes, we even had a new entrant from cable.” Shares of T-Mobile jumped roughly 3% in after-hours trading following the company’s earnings release. Here’s a close look at some other key first-quarter metrics from T-Mobile: Subscribers: T-Mobile posted 786,000 branded postpaid phone net additions, solidly beating both the 602,000 additions predicted by Wells Fargo analysts and the 596,000 predicted by a consensus of other Wall Street analysts. Prepaid net additions sank to 94,000, marking a steep decline from the 476,000 T-Mobile added a year ago, but Legere attributed the drop-off to a prepaid market that has become extremely competitive over the last two years. “MetroPCS continues to win customers at a healthy pace, but we also made it clear that we chose not to respond to irrational offers from some of our competitors,” he said. Legere also noted that T-Mobile’s prepaid ARPU was a record $38.65 during the quarter, up 2.1% year over year. Financials: Earnings more than doubled to $581 million from $225 million a year earlier, as MarketWatch noted, as earnings per share jumped to 67 cents a share from 25 cents a share. MarketWatch said analysts surveyed by FactSet had predicted earnings of 38 cents a share. Service revenues of $7.4 billion were up 8% year over year and marking a record high, although they fell short of the $7.54 billion forecast by Wells Fargo analysts. Net income came in at $581 million, up 158% year over year. Network: T-Mobile’s network now covers 315 million U.S. POPs and the company aims to target 321 million potential customers by the end of 2017. It said its deployment of 700 MHz spectrum is “essentially complete,” having gone live in 575 markets and covering 271 million POPs, and it plans to begin deploying services on the 600 MHz airwaves it won during the FCC’s recent incentive auction in

“The nation’s No. 3 wireless

network operator reported

1.3 million total net additions

for the quarter, marking 17

straight quarters of more

than 1 million new net

customers, and it saw

817,000 total branded

postpaid net additions.”

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the next several weeks. The carrier plans to open a total of 3,000 new T-Mobile and MetroPCS stores by the end of the year, aligning with its ongoing strategy of expanding its network and then growing its retail footprint to approach consumers in those new markets. Summary: T-Mobile’s second quarter surpassed already-high expectations by most metrics despite ever-increasing competitiveness in a market where growth has all but stalled. The carrier has long been at the center of rumors of potential tie-ups in the wireless industry, of course, and CFO Braxton Carter threw a little gas on that fire two months ago when he suggested T-Mobile might be interested in a tie-up not only with Sprint but also with multiple companies including cable operators. But T-Mobile’s ability to maintain its momentum in a brutal wireless market may prompt the carrier to bide its time during what could be a flurry of M&A activity on the horizon, Craig Moffett of MoffettNathanson wrote. “Despite a generally poor operating environment in wireless, T-Mobile continues to fire on all cylinders. In the second quarter, they beat on virtually every growth metric and on most financial results,” Moffett wrote in a note to investors. “No, we wouldn’t suggest that a merger (with Sprint) would be a bad idea. But we would question whether now is the right time. With a host of questions about relative valuations, postmerger leverage, and regulatory prospects, one has to wonder whether T-Mobile and its parent Deutsche Telekom wouldn’t be better served to wait until relative valuations are more appropriately aligned with reality.” fiercewireless.com

Society Just Scratching The Surface Of IoT Potential, Report Finds July, 17 2017 Every day more and more devices and ‘things’ are connected: lightbulbs, TVs, cars, just to name a few. But the Internet of Things revolution has only scratched the surface of its potential to impact and benefit all sectors of society, a new report from the BSA Foundation claims. Current estimates say only about 1 percent of things that can be connected, are, but that number is poised to explode in the next few years, with as many as 50 billion devices connected by 2020, according to the report. That figure comes in contrast to an estimate of 18 billion IoT-connected devices by 2022 put forth by Ericsson in its latest Mobility Report issued last month.BSA contends the growth of interconnected things in our physical world could mean enormous gains in almost every area, including driving an $11.1 trillion a year gain in economic impact by 2025. “By simply connecting the ‘things’ around us that have never been connected before, intelligence can be embedded into the world around us,” the authors write. “These devices – when connected to the internet and coupled with cloud-enabled data analytics – have the potential to revolutionize our personal lives, our work lives, and how fast we can grow our economies.” It’s not just the economy that could benefit. Almost 300,000 lives could be saved over a decade from a 90 percent reduction in traffic fatalities through autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicle technologies if widely deployed, the report says. Society could also see a 20 to 22 percent reduction in crime rates through connected city sensors and new kinds of remote home security monitoring. Home energy use could drop by 10 percent, along with a 20 to 30 percent drop in factory energy use.

“Current estimates say only

about 1 percent of things

that can be connected, are,

but that number is poised to

explode in the next few

years, with as many as 50

billion devices connected by

2020, according to the

report.”

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Chronic disease drives about 75 percent of all health costs, the report says, and if connected sensors are widely deployed, chronic disease treatment costs could drop by 50 percent. While the potential benefits are vast, achieving IoT’s full potential will not be without challenges. The report outlines key obstacles that will determine how quickly these technologies will be adopted and how widely spread.Security is at the forefront of adoption. People must trust that data and device will be secured, but this step is a shared responsibility, the report argues. “To enable a trusted device world, the private sector, technology users, and governments alike all have a shared responsibility for adopting best practices, enabling risk-appropriate security measures, and establishing the same level of trustworthiness for a connected device, as for a computer,” the authors note. Privacy goes hand in hand with security. Devices can potentially collect personal data, so consumers need to trust that their data will be protected and have confidence about who can access their data and under what circumstances. Governments can aide this effort by adopting smart and clear privacy laws that expedite innovation, the report adds. Another challenge is overcoming a skills gap in the number of people who can code, which will be necessary as more devices are created that need apps. Currently, the U.S. has roughly 500,000 computing jobs unfilled, and less than 50,000 computer science graduates in the U.S. entering the work force last year, according to the report. Computer science has become a basic skill, essential for the 21st century economy, the authors argue. That argument is bolstered by a separate report issued by The App Association in April that similarly found a half million computing jobs remain unfilled. The App Association said that figure is expected to rise to 1 million unfilled posts by 2024 because the industry is “starved for skilled workers with computer science training.” But building the devices and apps isn’t enough, it’s also important that intelligent devices can be connected with one another to avoid the creation of silos where they are unable to talk to each other. To do this the industry must also create interoperable standards in order to maximize network effect opportunities, the report says. Governments should develop policies that depend on consensus-based global standards, according the authors.A final challenge reported is cloud adoption. The report contends that in order to achieve “many of the most fundamental IoT benefits” governments must urge and facilitate broad cloud adoption. To achieve the full potential of IoT, smarter policies need to accompany the development of smarter devices. Policymakers need to discuss how to remove barriers to make the most of prospects for consumers, business, and society, alike, the authors conclude. wirelessweek.com

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