Blackphones coming in three weeks, will ship in millions, backers say

Carriers in Europe and the Americas have committed to selling the security-focused smartphones, Silent Circle and Geeksphone say

The Blackphone security-focused smartphone will go on the market in three weeks and "a few thousand" have already been sold through pre-orders, executives from the device's makers say.

Encrypted communications provider Silent Circle and manufacturer Geeksphone introduced the Blackphone earlier this year to give users a way around data collection by governments and private companies. The $629 device, made by a Swiss joint venture called SGP Technologies, runs a custom Android-based OS and was designed from the ground up to prevent hacking. It will offer secure and private voice and video calls, text messaging, and file exchanges, as well as anonymous Internet use, the companies say.

Through partnerships with service providers in Europe and in North, Central, and South America, the companies have commitments to deliver millions of phones, Silent Circle President and cofounder Phil Zimmermann said on Tuesday at MIT Technology Review's Digital Summit in San Francisco. KPN, which has already said it will sell the Blackphone in Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands, is committing to hundreds of thousands of phones, he said.
The device, along with Silent Circle's service, offers end-to-end encrypted communications from one Blackphone to another. Even if one person doesn't have a Blackphone, communication will be encrypted from the phone to Silent Circle's servers.
Silent Circle doesn't hold the encryption keys itself, so it can't give governments access to users' communications even if asked, Zimmermann said. The phone also keeps carriers and app providers from collecting user information, he said.
"If you get a free service like Facebook, there's a catch. ... If you're not paying for the product, then you are the product," Zimmermann said. "What we're doing here is, we're making you pay for the product." Growing awareness and concern about data-collection practices should help to expand demand for the phone, he said.
The Blackphone is designed to protect users from "driftnet phishing" for user information by organized crime and government entities such as the National Security Agency, but it can't defend against targeted attacks, according to Zimmermann. "If NSA really, really wants to get into just your phone ... they're going to get into your phone," he said.
The companies will update the phones to protect against any vulnerabilities that may be discovered in the future, Geeksphone cofounder Javier Aguera said.
Building an encrypted communications service and a secure phone creates strange bedfellows, according to Zimmermann. A former antiwar activist, he found himself working with former U.S. Navy Seals to form Silent Circle. A hacker who sells zero-day attacks for a living is giving the company advice, he said. And while some people in the NSA probably aren't happy about the prospect of such a device, agencies in the U.S., Canada, and Australia use Silent Circle and are interested in the Blackphone, Zimmermann said. "It depends in which part of these intelligence agencies you're asking," he said.

DoCoMo introduces wearable SIM for network access

Portable SIM card stores authentication information to wirelessly connect any smartphone or tablet to a network with the wave of a hand

Instead of burying them in phones, Japanese mobile carrier NTT DoCoMo wants people to start wearing their SIM cards.
It has developed a SIM card that can wirelessly connect smartphones and tablets to networks and the Internet simply by waving one's hand. The card can also transmit a user's number and other info, separating connectivity from mobile devices themselves.
 Unveiled Tuesday, DoCoMo announced a pocket-sized prototype of the technology that it's calling Portable SIM. Subscriber identities can be instantly transmitted to mobile devices with the prototype. That means users don't have to physically insert SIM cards into phones as they do now.
Aside from linking to phones or tablets via Bluetooth and NFC, the SIM contains a user's phone number, usernames and passwords. DoCoMo said it's the world's first SIM-based authentication device that can provide wireless network access.
The prototype, currently 8 cm long, 4 cm wide and weighing 20 grams, will be shrunk so it can fit into a bracelet-style wearable computer, DoCoMo said. Earlier this year, the carrier announced a health-monitoring wristband and smart clothing.
In a series of demonstrations at DoCoMo headquarters in Tokyo, a staffer held the prototype Portable SIM near a SIM-less phone. By linking the two through an app, the phone could receive a call to the number registered on the Portable SIM.
The process, which took a few seconds, was then repeated with a different SIM-less phone.
In another demo, the Portable SIM was used to link different phone numbers to the same phone -- first a number for personal use, and then one for business. The idea is that the same smartphone could be used with different phone numbers in the SIM depending on the time of day, and each number would also trigger certain apps or other custom settings.
"We were considering what comes next after the smartphone and we zeroed in on what functions were essential to customers," Akira Shibutani, manager of the Advanced Technology Group at DoCoMo's Communication Device Development Department, said in a briefing on the device. "We felt that this boiled down to authentication."
The SIM might also be used to connect to other devices too, including PCs, in-car information systems, public phones or bathroom scales. Travelers, for instance, could leave their smartphone at home but get online by waving their Portable SIM in front of a hotel TV, he said.
"When people use multiple smartphones and tablets, this Portable SIM will be a very convenient way to allow you to link to all of them," Kazuaki Terunuma, managing director of the department, said during the briefing.
DoCoMo, Japan's dominant mobile carrier, has applied for Japanese and overseas patents related to the Portable SIM. It's still in the research phase and is not yet compatible with smartphones or tablets on the market.
The company has not decided when the device might be launched in Japan. Overseas sales are a possibility, but this sort of device would be have to be discussed at international standards forums, DoCoMo officials said.
DoCoMo will show off the Portable SIM prototype at Mobile Asia Expo, which kicks off Wednesday in Shanghai.

New tech, venture capital feed "gold-rush" among India's IT start-ups 

 

In India's IT services outsourcing sector, local start-ups, often backed by U.S. venture capital funds, are nipping at the heels of industry heavyweights such as Tata Consultancy Services Ltd and Infosys Ltd
These nimble start-ups, most of them based in Bangalore, offer niche cutting-edge technology products, solutions and services that traditional outsourcing companies don't offer, or can't offer at competitive rates.
To be sure, Tata Consultancy (TCS), Infosys and Wipro Ltd  still account for the bulk of the $100 billion-plus core IT industry's sales and employ hundreds of thousands of engineers. But as these focus on routine services like application development and IT infrastructure management, the start-ups are stealing a march in newer areas such as cloud computing and mobile technology.
The value of outsourcing contracts for digital technologies - social, mobility, analytics and cloud (SMAC) - is set to soar to $287 billion by 2016 from $164 billion last year, says Rajat Tandon, a senior director at the National Association for Software and Services Companies, an outsourcing sector lobby group.
Start-ups will lead the race in providing solutions based on these SMAC technologies, says the group, which predicts the number of start-ups in India will top 2,000 by 2015, from 450 in 2012.
"There's a gold rush. Start-ups are rushing in to serve markets that were never served before," said Sharad Sharma, co-founder of iSPIRT, a think-tank and start-up consultancy.
HEAD-TO-HEAD
One such relative newcomer is ISGN, a mortgage technology and services company backed by California-headquartered New Enterprise Associates and India's KK Birla group. With a modest workforce of 1,200, the 2007 start-up is already taking business from its bigger, established rivals, winning outsourcing contracts from leading U.S. mortgage companies.
ISGN last year won a $75-$100 million renewal order from one of the top five U.S. mortgage companies which had previously placed work with one of the major Indian IT firms, said CEO Amit Kothiyal, a former Infosys veteran. He declined to give details, citing a confidentiality pact.
"We have a couple of large deals going on right now, where we're competing head to head with some of the traditional Indian IT majors," he added.
India's big outsourcing companies have thrived for years by providing IT and back-office services to global corporations such as Citigroup (C.N) and BT Group Plc (BT.L), tapping a vast cheap local workforce. But they are now coming under pressure from smaller firms with venture capital funding, a technological edge and staffed often by skilled engineers who have quit well paid jobs at the large IT companies to take on the challenge of a new venture.
"Today, the deal isn't about labour arbitrage ... to be competitive, companies need to provide technology, and services become an add-on to that," said Ben Mathias, a partner at New Enterprise Associates' India unit. "Without the technology you lose the competitive edge."
U.S. retailer Target (TGT.N), for example, is working with five Indian start-ups on areas ranging from automating the generation of rotating 3D images to the personalisation of search and product recommendations, said Navneet Kapoor, its India managing director.
Sudin Apte, CEO and founder of advisory firm Offshore Insights said the so-called Global 2000 firms - from the Forbes list of the world's biggest public companies - are expected to spend 15-16 percent of their IT services and outsourcing budgets on SMAC, with India forecast to export $16 billion worth of SMAC software and services in fiscal 2018.

BUSINESS MODEL REVOLUTION

 Reuters spoke to five start-ups, four of which said that more than 60 percent of their revenues came from clients in the United States and Britain, and there's almost always an incumbent IT player they have to compete against.
Client demands range from quick project turnaround and customised marketing solutions to a need for a competitive edge in using digitisation, mobile, social media and other platforms.
The adoption of digital technology has substantially changed business models across the financial services, healthcare, entertainment and telecoms industries, says Sudin Apte, CEO and founder of advisory firm Offshore Insights.
For example, Mumbai-based Emart Solutions, a loyalty management company, won a deal with a global energy company by developing new mobile technology that cut the time needed to process sales data from several weeks to a few seconds, co-founder Srikanth Chunduri told Reuters.
In traditional IT services, affordable options like Zoho, which offers customer relationship management solutions to small and mid-sized firms, prompted EcoMark, a Denver, Colorado-based solar energy firm, to migrate from a similar Salesforce.com (CRM.N) platform, the start-up told Reuters. Zoho, based in Chennai, said EcoMark saved more than $1,000 per month for 30 users by switching to its platform. EcoMark and Salesforce.com did not respond to requests for comment.
"One can't ignore that for every account we speak to there's always an incumbent you have to contend with," said Puneet Jetli, chief operating officer at Happiest Minds, whose investors include Canaan Partners and Intel Capital. Jetli says at least 60 percent of the Bangalore-based start-up's new projects come from companies which are already working with established IT groups, but want a change.

FUNDING INNOVATION

Venture capital funding has long been a missing link for budding tech start-ups in India - from the days when the seven co-founders of Infosys pooled $250, mostly borrowed from their spouses, to start the company more than three decades ago.
The country is now seeing a boom in early-stage investment with a large number of funds, including U.S.-based Accel Partners, Lightspeed Venture, Charles River and Sequoia Capital, chasing innovative ideas.
Venture capital funds invested around $190 million in early-stage tech firms in India last year, up by almost a quarter from 2012, according to Hong Kong-based Centre for Asia Private Equity Research Ltd. A total of $623 million has been invested by venture funds in India since 2011, three-quarters of which was used to buy stakes in software services and e-commerce start-ups, data from the research house shows.
"India is undergoing a transformation. The Internet is catching up and is becoming a basic need here. That makes India an incipient market for businesses that leverage that," said Prayank Swaroop, Senior Associate at Accel Partners in India.
The attraction for venture funds was underscored by Facebook Inc's (FB.O) acquisition in January of Bangalore-based Little Eye Labs, a start-up that builds performance analysis and monitoring tools for mobile Android (GOOGL.O) apps. VenturEast Tenet Fund, an early-stage investor in Little Eye Labs, made a return of multiple times its initial investment, people in the industry said. Sateesh Andra, managing partner for VenturEast, which has close to $300 million under management, said returns on Little Eye were "attractive", but declined to give details.
"There's a lot of innovation to come and that can only happen if capital is made available," said Bejul Somaia, India managing director for Lightspeed, whose investments in India range from $1 million to $25 million. "It's encouraging to see that more capital is being made available to fund innovation at a time when these technology platform shifts are underway and as more young entrepreneurs take the risk of starting companies."
The established IT companies are taking note, and are open to partnering with start-ups to reach a wider range of clients, instead of developing all the facilities themselves.
"We proactively deliver value using our start-up ecosystem and innovation, which in turn helps us differentiate from our competitors," said K.R. Sanjiv, Chief Technology Officer at Wipro.

Facebook expands users' ad targeting profiles with website data

 

Facebook Inc is expanding the internal user profiles that underpin its targeted advertising system, for the first time including personal information based on activities that did not occur within the boundaries of its social network.
While Facebook has long maintained internal profiles of users based on the comments they make and the posts that they “like” within its social network, the company will now flesh out those profiles with information based on some of the external websites and mobile apps its members use, a move that could further inflame concerns about how it treats personal privacy.
The enhanced profiles will allow marketers to deliver more relevant ads, Facebook said in a blog post announcing the change on Thursday. If a Facebook user researches a new television on an external website or inside of a mobile app, their profile might now indicate an interest in televisions and in electronics, making it easier for advertisers pitching electronic devices to reach that user on Facebook.
Facebook already has access to much of this information through tools that it uses to measure the performance of its ads as well as through "plug-ins" that integrate Facebook features on third-party websites, but the company has not until now incorporated the data into its users' ad targeting profiles.
To quell potential privacy concerns, Facebook will for the first time give users the ability to review and edit their internal advertising profiles. By clicking on a button alongside Facebook ads, a user can see all the “interests” on their record, remove unwanted categories and add any desired categories.
Facebook said it will also provide a link to an industry website that will allow users to not have their activities on websites tracked, as well as a link to the appropriate controls within their smartphones to eliminate mobile app tracking.
The new ad capabilities come as Facebook strives to ramp up its advertising revenue amid competition from Google Inc while addressing persistent concerns about personal privacy on the world’s No.1 social network.
In April, Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg announced new features that lets users limit how much personal information they share with third-party mobile apps.
Facebook, Google and other online companies have faced increasing scrutiny and enforcement from privacy regulators as consumers entrust ever-increasing amounts of information about their personal lives to Web services.
In 2012, Facebook settled privacy charges with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission that it had deceived consumers and forced them to share more personal information than they intended. Under the settlement, Facebook is required to get user consent for certain changes to its privacy settings and is subject to 20 years of independent audits.

Apple's Swift not so swift after all

Programming language doesn't fare as well as Objective-C in some benchmarks, but Swift's easier syntax gets a thumbs-up

 

Apple cited speed as a key attribute of its Swift programming language when it was introduced last week. But developers who have independently run tests on the new language have found it lacking in performance in some instances.
Apple claimed that Swift outperforms Python when it comes to handling complex object stores and RC4 encryption. So Mac software builder Splasm Software decided to run benchmarks on the language to gauge how well Swift handles tight-looped and scalar data types and arrays.
Without leveraging optimizations in Apple's Xcode tool set, Splasm found that Swift was between six and 40 times slower than Objective-C, Splasm official Keith Gugliotto said. "What we were curious about was for the things that we do in-house, which is a lot of array work and a lot of working with these types of data, was Swift going to be as fast as Objective-C? In our tests, it wasn't."
Even after turning on the optimizations, Splasm found that Swift ran 10 to 20 percent slower than the original test numbers in some cases and 10 to 20 percent faster in other cases. But Swift was still slower than Objective-C. In another test, detailed on the Stack Overflow site for developers, a tester in Finland found that performance was slow when implementing an algorithm in Swift, with C++ and Python vastly outperforming Apple's fledgling language.
Gugliotto cautioned, however, that Splasm's benchmarks do not necessarily represent real-time application usage. "There's a heckuva lot more reasons to use a programming language than its performance," he said. "As long as the performance is relatively acceptable, if the language provides modern [capabilities] and at least allows you to develop quickly relative to other languages, that's a strong case for continuing to use it."
Gugliotto expects Swift's easier syntax will serve as enticement for its adoption, particularly among programmers who are not adept at building with the C language, which has served as a precursor to using Objective-C.
Swift features modern language capabilities, including closures, generics, multiple return types, and namespaces. The language is likely to live alongside Objective-C for years to come, Gugliotto said. "At some point Apple might pull the plug on Objective-C, and at that point we'll make the switch to Swift. [By then], I'm sure performance will be just fine."

Google engineer: We need more Web programming languages

The creator behind Google Dart showed developers at QCon some other nascent Web development languages

 Web applications may one day surpass desktop applications in function and usability -- if developers have more programming languages to choose from, according to a Google engineer.

"You should have more choices of viable languages," said Gilad Bracha, software engineer at Google, speaking to an audience of programmers Wednesday at the QCon developer conference in New York.
"I think the Web platform could make Web applications as good or better than native applications," Bracha said. "Ultimately it has to do that. Otherwise, the proprietary app stores will come and eat us all."
The benefits of Web applications are well-understood by developers. They don't need to be installed and they can work on any platform that supports the Web.
Unfortunately, one of the chief drawbacks is that they don't operate when not connected to a network.
So the ability to run Web apps offline will be critical given that, at least for the foreseeable future, many users will not have constant access to network connections.
"The Web is always available, except when it is not," Bracha said. "It isn't always available in a way that you can always rely on it. You may have a network that is slow or flaky, or someone may want to charge you."
Therefore any Web programming language, and its associated ecosystem, must have some way of storing a program for offline use, Bracha said. The Web programming language in the future must also make it easier for the programmer to build and test applications.
The chief language used today for the Web is JavaScript, which is deficient in a number of ways, such as support for offline usage of apps. And this may remain the case for a while: JavaScript is based on the ECMAScript standard, which can take years to be updated. "It should be easier to do these things," Bracha said.
There are other programming languages being built for the Web but very few are viable -- meaning they aren't well-engineered, lack key features and don't operate efficiently, Bracha said.
One of the reasons that Google started work on the Dart programming language, which Bracha helped author, is to provide the Web with an industrial-strength programming language.
Google did not design Dart "to replace JavaScript, but to give you options," Bracha said.
Bracha pointed to some other lesser-known and still experimental languages that show promise as well.
One was Elm, a functional programming language for building GUIs (graphical user interfaces). He demonstrated how only a few lines of Elm could allow the end user to draw a circle in a browser window using only a mouse.
Elm is designed in such a way that once the code is placed into its Web editor, the results show up immediately in a preview screen, eliminating the need to save the code and run the program in a separate window.
"Try this in Swing," Bracha said, referring to the Java GUI widget toolkit that can be cumbersome to use. Bracha also co-authored the Java Language Specification, so he has some experience in that language as well.
Bracha also demonstrated Lively.

Lively is even more responsive than Elm. The developer, when viewing a draft of their program in the browser, can simply click on any part of the application on the screen and Lively will bring up to the screen the specific object code that rendered the object.
Even the Lively code editor is an object that can be manipulated, allowing the developer to move and manipulate any of the controls.
This approach is far easier to work with than, say, using a standard IDE (integrated developer environment) such as Eclipse, which would require the user to scan through thousands of lines of code to find the section that needed to be modified.
Bracha showed off other responsive languages, Leisure and Newspeak, the latter of which Bracha created.
"Hopefully, this will give you an idea of the wonderful variety of stuff that is out there," Bracha told the audience. "Competition is good for everyone."

Dropbox Acquires Messaging Start-Up DropTalk

 

Dropbox, the file sharing and cloud storage service provider, has recently bought out an early stage startup called Droptalk. The acquisition comes barely days after the announcement that it has crossed the 300 million user mark. Droptalk was working on developing a tool that allowed users to share links privately with friends via a Chrome extension, which would then be followed up by both iOS and Android applications. Incidentally, none of the products were available publicly as Droptalk had only very recently launched its browser add-on in a limited beta.

The terms of the Dropbox-Droptalk deal were not disclosed. Droptalk was founded a year ago by a team of ex-engineers from Facebook and LinkedIn, with the idea of changing the way people communicated and got their work done. In a post on the Droptalk blog, the team writes, "With Droptalk all your communications happened in the browser, tablet or phone, eliminating the need for emails. What's more is anytime you updated your shared folders in the cloud, everyone else in the conversation could see the updated version and go directly to the document or link right in the very same thread."
Perhaps there are reasons outside the name which spiked up Dropbox's interest in Droptalk. In addition, to web sharing features, the tool also synced via the cloud, where users could see who was uploading what files or updating them to the common folder. This was combined with a message-like interface. Droptalk was working on integrating mobile messaging with cloud storage combined. Droptalk's team, comprising Rakesh Mathur, Ashish Bhardwaj, Anand Prakash, Manveer Chawla and Nirmesh Mehta, will be joining the Dropbox team.
In the blog, which detailed the acquisition of Droptalk, the team further writes, "As part of our transition to Dropbox, we are no longer accepting new beta signups. We would like to thank all the people that took part in our beta and gave us valuable input. We are grateful for your support and we will keep you updated as we join forces with Dropbox to make collaboration easier for everyone. Our team will be joining Dropbox today."
It is important to remember that Dropbox had recently acquired the workplace chat solutions provider Zulip, as well as personal photo-stream app Loom and collaborative document tool Hackpad.