What a response!

The press release that we published yesterday with Commtouch proved one thing for sure: Content filtering sells. Then again, maybe it was the headline:

Protecting Children from Mobile Porn Gets Push from National Governments

The irony, of course, is that we and Commtouch are trying to help mobile operators comply with child protection legislation and people seem to be more interested in porn than in content filtering. I suppose that should not be too surprising. But it does underscore the issue: Porn is big business. But, for better or worse, it’s still going to be big enough even if parents can protect their children from it with the help of their mobile network operators.

Quick Summary
Governments, including the UK, Ireland and Australia are debating the merits of requiring mobile subscribers to opt-in if they want to be able to receive certain content categorized as unsuitable for children.

Constantly changing content, new sites and user-generated sites with a mix of family-friendly and inappropriate content pose a challenge to operators who will be required to enable the regulation of specified content.

Mobixell Seamless Access Mobile Internet Gateway, using Commtouch GlobalView™ URL Filtering content categorization, enables telecom operators to manage complex content delivery policies, offering a variety of opt-in user protection services, including parental control, real-time rating and content verification.

For more information, check out the press release.

And for those of you celebrating, have a happy and safe Thanksgiving.

Seth Greenberg
Director of Corporate Marketing
Mobixell

I know we’ve quoted Yogi Berra* in a previous post. But he’s just so quotable, isn’t he?

If you were thinking that the coming  storm, predicted to flood mobile networks with streaming video, will make mobile data optimization too costly to implement down the road, think again. Today, Mobixell announced Mobixell EVO™. Mobixell EVO is an entirely new approach to mobile optimization which discourages mobile operators from optimizing overall data volume and, instead, focus on optimizing congestion in the network. Why? Good question.

We’ve been talking with our mobile operator customers, analysts and other industry experts for the last few months and they’ve been telling us how their projections for mobile infrastructure investment is going to outstrip data revenue in the  next few years. They’re telling us that data optimization is not going to make the situation any better. Until now, their optimization solutions expand incrementally as data volume grows. So our CTO office sat down and figured out a way to keep both infrastructure investment down and the optimization hardware footprint limited. It sounds almost ridiculous until you consider that the way many network operators look at optimization is outdated (or, it will be soon).

When data optimization is applied to reduce overall volume, there is little impact on Quality of Experience (QoE) in congested networks. But when optimization focuses only on congestion, predicting near-congestion before it occurs, not only does it require far less in hardware resources since it ignores traffic that doesn’t affect QoE. It also puts end users at the center of the solution – lower congestion means better video streaming and a browsing experience. Add to that an open, cloud-based architecture to call on hardware resources only when they are required and you’ve got Mobixell EVO.

Now, Mobixell EVO is, for the most part, just a framework at this point – a set of principles that are guiding R&D into the future. Mobixell Seamless Access already includes elements of the Evolved Optimization approach – DBRA, for example – and we are planning announcements in 2012 of more features conceived through this new approach. Same industry-leading Seamless Access platform. But now an even better bet for the future when mobile video hits levels that could otherwise get out of hand.

Check out today’s press release or download the new Mobixell EVO White Paper for more information.

We look forward to optimizing your network long into your future. Yes. There is a future for optimization and mobile broadband, thanks to Mobixell EVO. Whew.

*Again, if you are not familiar with American Baseball legends, or with Yogi Berra quotes in particular, check him out on Wikipedia for a few sparkling examples. He is a genius of accidentally brilliant quotes.

I’m not an iPhone or iPad user. It’s not as though I don’t love the design and the features. Samsung has done a bang up job with design. I will admit, though, that sometimes I get iPad envy at meetings. But I’ve been very happy with my Android phone for both work and play.

Then, something happened a couple of weeks and I realized I’d made the right choice (at least for now). I was meeting with someone about a position at Mobixell and she wanted to show me something on our website, mobixell.com. She pulled out her iPhone 4 and browsed to the site. Then she stopped on the home page and told me how weird it was that there was this great big white patch in the design at the top of the page. After my double-take, I realized what the problem was. I explained that the site was fine but that her iPhone was ignoring the Flash animation at the top of the page.

I browsed to the site on my Samsung Galaxy and showed her how it was supposed to look.

That experience was frustrating on several levels. First of all, it hadn’t occurred to me that there are elements of our own website that are affected by the Apple iOS restriction on Adobe Flash technology. (With 200 million devices running Apple iOS, that’s a lot of frustration.) She was frustrated that her really really cool iPhone didn’t perform and she didn’t know whether to blame the site, the phone or her network. From the Mobixell point of view, it seemed crazy that there was no way to get her iPhone to play the animation without paying for an app or some other workaround.

It was, however, an opportunity to practice my pitch about a new feature in Mobixell Seamless Access that we were about to announce which gives mobile operators the opportunity to deliver Adobe Flash video content on all iOS devices. I explained that the Flash animation would also be supported in an upcoming version. She expressed her hope that her operator would install Seamless Access. So, it wasn’t all frustrating (at least for me).

We’re going to be updating that banner on our site soon. Adobe Flash is the perfect tool for designging what we want. But as a marketer, I’m still concerned about all those iPhone and iPad users whose operators aren’t using Seamless Access yet. At least I have my Android phone.

(BTW, click here if you want want to watch a short video about Flash content on iOS with Seamless Access. And here’s a link to an announcement that went out yesterday.)

Seth Greenberg
Director, Corporate Marketing
Mobixell

Like snowflakes, no two mobile devices are alike. Even before screens started growing and services moved from voice to messaging to media and apps, each handset had its own unique set of characteristics. But today, even devices from a single vendor differ dramatically one from the other. An Apple iPad is not just a big iPhone and a Samsung Galaxy Tab is not just a big Galaxy.

To provide effective Web and video optimization, only experts with years of experience dealing with the literally hundreds of both physical and digital parameters for each device can make sure that end users get the quality of experience that they expect when they chose their devices.

For more on device-aware video optimization, see the entire article in Total Telecom.

Noam Green
VP Marketing, Mobixell

Noam Green, Associate Vice President of Corporate Marketing, Mobixell looks at the optimisation considerations central to quickly adjusting to current and future network challenges.

With the data explosion in full progress wireless networks are now approaching full capacity, forcing mobile operators to significantly increase their investment in wireless infrastructure. This major segment of operator expenditure is projected to grow extensively over the coming years as mobile data consumption continues to mushroom.

Click here to read the rest of the article on radio-electronics.com

A new report, issued by the international research firm Park Associates, reveals that while annual smartphone sales will exceed 215 million units in 2010, voice ARPU from 2009 to 2014 will decline by almost 30% in north America, 27% in Western Europe and 25% in Asia-Pacific.

With decreasing revenues from voice services, a constantly rising number of smartphone users and an ever-increasing competition (trying to attract and hold onto high-value subscribers), mobile operators will have to accommodate their business plans by creating new opportunities for data services. As explained by Laura Allen Philips, research analyst, Parks Associates, “Mobile operators are looking to their data-based services for revenue generation and to offset losses in voice revenues”. Such initiatives will include new suites of internet services for mobile devices, subsidization of smartphone handsets, branded mobile-app storefronts, network upgrades and more.

Cisco updated their Visual Networking Index, providing very interesting information regarding the broadband usage.

As could have been expected, the VNI continues to focus on video as a significant game changer in broadband traffic. As stated in the VNI “The most striking shift in application mix trends continues to be the growth of video as a percentage of traffic compared to P2P file sharing”.

Video related highlights are therefore:

• Peer-to-peer has been surpassed by online video as the largest category. The subset of video that includes streaming video, flash, and Internet TV represents 26 percent, compared to 25 percent for P2P
• Over one-third of the top 50 sites by volume are video sites. There is a high degree of diversity among the video sites in the top 50, including video viewed on gaming consoles, Internet TV, short-form user-generated video, commercial video downloads, and video distributed via content delivery networks (CDNs). Video sites appeared more frequently than any other type of site in the top 50.
• Contrary to popular belief, none of the top 50 global web sites (by traffic volume) featured explicit adult content. This represents a shift in content compared to the composition of top global web sites two years ago
• Online video fluctuates more than file sharing traffic. Online video’s volatility (defined as the spread of traffic volume during the course of the day) is 51 percent higher than that of file sharing. The peak video hour is 91 percent higher than the average video hour, while the peak file sharing hour is 64 percent higher than the average file sharing hour.

As the graph below shows, the top 50 sites in terms of traffic volume (globally) are dominated by online video, followed by software downloads and updates.

HTML5 came to the world with high expectations of being a game-changer by including features like video playback and drag-and-drop that have been previously dependent on third-party browser plug-ins such as Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight.

But in order to succeed, implementations and specifications have to do a delicate dance together. On one hand you don’t want implementations to happen before the specification is finished, because people start depending on the details of implementations and that constrains the specification, but on the other hand you also do not want the specification to be finished before there are implementations and author experience with those implementations, because you need the feedback…

In the current stage of the dance it seems that implementations will have to wait for the specifications to lead.

“The problem we’re facing right now is there is already a lot of excitement for HTML5, but it’s a little too early to deploy it because we’re running into interoperability issues,” including differences between video on devices, said the official, Philippe Le Hegaret, W3C interaction domain leader.

HTML5 should work across browsers; however this is currently not the case. HTML5-based applications can be deployed when there is a rendering engine acing on the server side.  This is not the case in “open web” where interoperability is a must.

Furthermore, HTML5 lacks a standard video codec, and it is not likely to change in the upcoming specification.

DRM (Digital rights management) is not supported in HTML5 as well. As HTML5 is an open standard, any solution for DRM will be hacked in no time. This means some video producers will not deploy their videos in HTML5 without this type of protection, he said.

HTML5 final approval is due in two to three years.

Till then though “iPad features Safari, a mobile web browser that supports the latest web standards — including HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript” as stated in Apple’s iPad website it seems that “HTML5 compared to Flash is like a hat compared to an umbrella. They can be used together, but a hat won’t replace an umbrella” . Well, at least not for now…

Apple’s (or better say Steve Jobs’) mantra is – “There’s a porn store for Android. You can download nothing but porn. You can download porn, your kids can download porn. That’s a place we don’t want to go, so we’re not going to go there.” Or as he responded to an e-mail:

“We do believe we have a moral responsibility to keep porn off the iPhone. Folks who want porn can buy [an] Android phone.”

Embracing Apple’s policy of maintaining questionable content off the App Store, Microsoft, in its Windows Phone 7 Application Certification Requirements (http://go.microsoft.com/?linkid=9730558) released last week, joins the “No Porn” trend.

As part of the certification requirements for Microsoft Marketplace, various content policies were introduced. One such policy refers to Adult Related Content which includes: “Content that generally falls under the category of pornography”, “Content that a reasonable person would consider to be adult or borderline adult content (images, text, or audio)” and more.

As it seems Microsoft, by setting very broad and strict guidelines, follows Apple’s course. Time would tell if Microsoft would also join its acute statements about “other” Operating Systems.

Looking forward analyzing consumers’ behavior will be quite interesting;

Will users approve this direction – “Thankfully for consumers, there is one smartphone that didn’t want to do business with this sleazy industry. Kudos to Steve Jobs and Apple…” (http://www.catholic.org/national/national_story.php?id=36589)

Would they be indifferent (as one may find porn on the internet J)…

Or.. will they stand up against this new uncompromising approach and say No to it – “If “wanting porn” is what it takes to gain freedom of choice, then damn it, we want porn. Loads of it. And we’ll proudly tell that to the world” (http://www.esarcasm.com/13639/android-porn-badge/) and move Android one step closer to being the most popular OS in the world.

Video and Internet service usage is growing tremendously and straining mobile networks. It is vital that the methods and systems operators employ to cope with these challenges are capable of making intelligent, fundamental decisions, including sophisticated handling of video.

Solutions are available in the form of intelligent video optimization platforms that can make smart decisions based on a wide range of network, service and user information to reduce the costs of video delivery while maintaining and often improving video viewing quality.

Read more in a recent article published in connect-world EMEA  http://www.connect-world.com/PDFs/articles/2010/EMEA_2010/EMEA_2010_07.pdf