The blog went slowly lately : we are doing a huge work on ELIPS 3 right now, with a closed alpha.
In the mean timeI’m now the proud owner of alatest cutting edge Macbook pro 15”…. more on my switch experience later o.
Thomas
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TrackbackI’ll relay here a survey posted by Guilhem, our product manager, to help us assess what is needed for the nest Open-Plug product (for which I don’t sleep a lot lately …)
Open-Plug would like to know about your views on Mobile Applications Development.
Take the survey for a chance to win $250 !
Take the survey now:Â http://openplug.mobileappsdev.sgizmo.com/
Are you or will you be involved in the development and deployment of mobile applications ?
Whether you are a Manager, or are into Business, Development, Technology or Content Creation, then your views are of high interest to us …
In exchange for taking a short survey about your views in Mobile Applications Development, you will have the option of participating in a drawing for US$250 in prize money. The survey should take no more than 5 minutes to complete.
The survey is anonymous and your responses will remain confidential.
All respondents who wish so will receive a summary of the survey results.
To take the survey, please visit: http://openplug.mobileappsdev.sgizmo.com/
Feel free to spread the word about this survey.
Thanks in advance and best regards,
The Open-Plug team
Comments rss TrackbackVideo seen on TED talk, well THIS may be the new human interface we need, after the keyboard, the mouse and the touchscreen.
Services and applications are amazing, watch the whole video and look at the example taken as illustration, kudos to MIT!
Thanks Andreas for twittering it!
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OnLive is a new video games on demand service that may just change the way you play PC games. The brainchild of Rearden Studios founder Steve Perlman, formerly of Atari, Apple, WebTV and more, and Mike McGarvey, formerly of Eidos, the technology looks to revolutionize the way computer games are brought home. Instead of spending hundreds or thousands of dollars on the latest video game hardware that will make games like Crysis playable at nearly maxed settings, let OnLive’s servers handle the processing. All that’s required is a low cost “micro console” or a low end PC and a broadband internet connection…We too were a little suspicious of OnLive’s capability to deliver perceptually lag-free on-demand games. But then we played a hasty online game of Crysis Wars on the service today and became a little less suspicious. It seemed to work.
Cloud computing (see my article here) is coming to Games also. I was/am really skeptical about the lag, and how to make it usable, but if beta testers are reporting that it is working and that big names like EA, THQ, Codemasters, Ubisoft, Atari, Warner Bros., Take-Two, and Epic Games have endorsed it: well it deserves more than a look!
You need 1.5 Mbps to play it in 720p, wow with a fast 3G network it may work also (beware to the lag in that case, but who knows they seem to have some magic, but you don’t need 720p on a phone for now so half the bandwidth should be enough!).
This would work tremendously well for raw video also of course.
OnLive is not alone Gaikai has a slightly different approach, using the Adobe Flash player to stream its games, and seems more focused on MMO (Massively Multiplayer Online Games)
Gaikai is taking an approach to massive worlds that others have to bring virtual worlds like Second Life to mobile devices. Instead of relying on a client-server approach to transfer data about the world, it’s streaming video to the player and recording input and sending it back to the servers over an encrypted channel.
They are renting some CPU/GPU/Bandwidth and Software to a end user with a thin Client … the exact definition of HaaS (Hardware as a service) aka a Cloud Computing based service.
What is really interesting with this kind of technologies is that game console hardware is no more relevant! … OnLive is pushing its own box, low cost:
OnLive’s micro console, a simple, low-cost device that’s about the size of your hand. It’s simple tech—there’s not even a GPU in the device. It simply acts as a video decoding control hub, with two USB inputs and support for four Bluetooth devices, and outputs audio and video via optical and HDMI connections. The micro console is expected to be priced competitively, “significantly less” than any current generation console on the market and potentially “free” with an OnLive service contract.
Well can’t wait to see it coming, and the next big question will be: will it work for Mobile Gaming? Definitively breaking the fragmentation issues for the game developers, no worry about CPU/RAM, etc … only about battery life 
Comments rss TrackbackFor long (see my article about the industry ecosystem) OEM have heavily relied on ODM for production and many times design of their phones…except Nokia which has historically preferred to keep everything internally to manage cost, scaling, distribution and above all margins, but kept around 20% of its production in the hand of tightly controlled ODMs,
In 2008, Nokia outsourced about 17 percent of the manufacturing volume of its mobile phone engines, which include the phone and software that enable its basic operations.
Nokia’s key subcontractors have been Foxconn (2038.HK), China’s BYD (1211.HK), Jabil Circuit (JBL.N) and Elcoteq (ELQAV.HE).
certainly to balance its risks and not put its internal factories and staff exposed to a high demand slow down from the market. This is happening today.
And Nokia:
Nokia Pulls More Than $5 Billion in Business From Contract Manufacturers
We’ve seen some signs already with this Foxconn announcement:
Foxconn Full-Year Profits Drop 83%
Foxconn International Holdings – the mobile phone manufacturing division of Taiwan’s giant Hon Hai Precision Industry has reported a net loss for the second half of last year, which dragged its full year profit down by 83.% to US$121 million – compared with US$721 million a year earlier.
And those industry moves:
TAIWAN ODM handset maker Arima Communications and EMS provider Elcoteq have temporarily set aside merger talks in favor of joining forces to produce low-cost handsets for LG Electronics, company sources told DigiTimes.
SAN JOSE — Flextronics has reportedly laid off about 70 workers in Taiwan and additional cuts are possible, according to a local newspaper report.
The Apply Daily, citing company sources, said most of laid off workers are from the company’s notebook and server operations.
Flextronics acquired the Arima notebook and server business operations in March this year.
Arima is the big SEMC ODM, and is really hurt by SEMC woes.
When time are tough, sub contractors are the first to be cut, but when economy is rising again they are the first to get the benefits: if they were able to survive. Let’s watch at this space to look at the first sign of recovery!
Thomas
Comments rss Trackbacklooks like they are translating to AS3 and running MXMLC! Go Flex.
from Ted On Flash
Again a proof that languages are important (for reuse, etc) and not tied anymore to one runtime.
On a side note it also means that we will be able to code in Java for ELIPS 3.0
Comments rss TrackbackI’m a heavy Google Reader user, and we use it a lot internally at Open-Plug to share technical articles. I’ve already made a Yahoo Pipes (my Pipes are here) to aggregate the Google reader shared feeds of some of my coworkers into one feed we read each other to not read the same article too often.
Yahoo pipes is sooo great , and twitter seems to take momentum so I’ve decided to build a pipe that would automatically tweets the item I’ve read and on which I’ve put a note, so the work I do reading article is immediately available via twitter.
As always just before doing the work, I’ve Googled a little, and of course someone has made it already Internet is fantastic.
Here is the link: http://mat.su/tweeting-google-reader-notes/ basically:
My pipe is working, I’m waiting for the first twitterfeed update.
Update: it works like a charm! This is ubber geek, I tweet from Google reader, well back to work!
Update 2: Reworked the pipe, simplifying it, perhaps I should remove the title to leave only the note?
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Thanks to Nicolas to pointing this out through Twitter (first time I find it useful).
Really a great piece of explanation!
Comments rss Trackback[From three hardware related Nokia PR, blogger Thomas Menguy shows how those announcements fits within the new Nokia strategy]
MWC is the PR moment, and here are three from Nokia showing how the game is changing in Finland.
Nokia selects Broadcom as a next generation 3G chipset supplier.
“Today’s announcement with Broadcom is a further example of Nokia’s commitment to our diversified, multi-supplier chipset strategy,” said Kai Oistamo, Executive Vice President, Devices, Nokia. “This agreement, which targets low cost, high volume markets, demonstrates that we view Broadcom as a reliable supplier to bring the benefits of 3G to Nokia customers around the world.”
Nokia selects Broadcom as a next generation 3G chipset supplier
Nokia and ST-Ericsson announced they are co-operating to provide the Symbian Foundation with a reference platform based on ST-Ericsson’s U8500 single chip
ST-Ericsson, Nokia’s reference platform for Symbian Foundation
Nokia and Qualcomm Incorporated (Nasdaq: QCOM) today announced that the two companies are planning to work together to develop advanced UMTS mobile devices, initially for North America. The companies intend for the devices to be based on S60 software on Symbian OS, the world’s most used software for smartphones, and leverage Qualcomm’s advanced Mobile Station Modem(TM) (MSM(TM)) MSM7xxx-series and MSM8xxx-series chipsets
Nokia and Qualcomm plan to develop advanced mobile devices
What does this mean?
For years Nokia was relying on Texas Instrument to produce its custom 2G/2.5G/3G chipsets. Nokia was designing the core chipset and letting Texas Instrument finishing the integration and physically producing the chips: Nokia was mastering the whole hardware IP of its phones, and was not relying on generic chipsets for the vast majority of its production, with all the margins it implies .
Feeling the wind of change: from one supplier, Nokia is transitioning to three, it has licensed its 3G hardware IP to ST (and presumably to Broadcom, rumors mentioned Infineon also), and will use some “generic†chipsets.
Texas Instrument has really missed the ball here, by stopping 3G investment (well they have made some, but failed delivering), and being mostly ruled by business guys with no technical vision of where the market were going: How a company with 70% of the billion units chipset market may leave it completely in such a short amount of time? Nokia diversification is part of the equation, for sure.
Nokia really seems to shift its focus: relaxing their efforts on the chipset front, they won’t simply try to cut internal cost, they will invest, and my guess (as everyone else ) is of course on Ovi, services, etc.
PR after PR, announcements after announcement, PR after PR, product after product, Nokia is showing how serious it is about reinventing itself again. It won’t happen overnight, but it is coming, and it may be a game changer!
Comments rss TrackbackOuf, we can communicate ! I’ve been deeply involved in this project (well leading it till the end of last year ), and I’m really happy (and proud) to cut and paste the press release here (see below).
What we have done: we’ve delivered and integrated our telephony expertise and assets with Intel on the Moblin Platform. The same code that is implementing the telephony stuffs in all the other Open-Plug products (in production) …is now running the Intel Moblin OS phone capabilities : Call, Video Call, SMS,MMS, SAT…and a lot of other GSM acronyms along with a great modem abstraction technology.
Open-Plug announces telephony capabilities for Intel
“Moorestownâ€-based Mobile Internet Devices
Barcelona, Spain – Mobile World Congress, February 16th 2009 – Open-Plug, the specialist in software development environments for portable devices, today announced that it is working with Intel to integrate its ELIPS Linux Telephony Stack to the Moblin Linux software stack for Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs) based on Intel’s next generation “Moorestown†platform.
Open-Plug 2G & 3G Telephony Stack targets the growing number of telephony-enabled devices. It has been shipped in millions of devices designed by leading handset makers and has been distributed by some of the largest carriers worldwide. With its support of Mobile Internet Devices, Open-Plug is now bringing its advanced cellular telephony and messaging features to this new class of devices that enable users to bring the full Internet experience on-the-go.
The Moorestown platform is Intel’s next generation MID platform designed to extend into Communication MIDs, which are expected to compete in the smart phone market segment with superior Internet based usages while also supporting cellular voice as a critical feature.
"We are very proud to be working with Intel and bringing our telephony capabilities to next generation MIDs,†said Eric Baissus, CEO of Open-Plug. "This cooperation will allow us to play an important role in supporting the growth of the MID market segment in which we strongly believeâ€.
Mobile Internet Devices are making it possible for consumers to carry the rich Internet-based experiences they are used to on a PC. MIDs are expected to come in a range of form factors, have a large display, integrate rich applications and services, and deliver an intuitive user experience. According to research firm Strategy Analytics, sales of Mobile Internet Devices are expected to exceed $17 billion worldwide annually by 2014. ABI Research expects more than 90 million Mobile Internet Devices will ship worldwide by 2012.
“Mobile Internet Devices make it easy for people to stay connected wherever they are,†said Pankaj Kedia, director of global ecosystem programs in Intel Corporation’s Ultra Mobility Group. “Intel’s next generation MID platform, codenamed Moorestown, in combination with Open-Plug’s telephony stack integrated with a Moblin based Linux OS, will set a new threshold for making this connected experience a reality by delivering a compelling Internet experience while supporting voice capabilities on the platform.â€
As the MID category grows and penetrates the consumer market segment, the telephony feature is expected to become increasingly important. To enable the integration of this feature into MIDs designed by handset makers and device manufacturers, Open-Plug is actively working with the broader Moblin ecosystem.
About Open-Plug
Open-Plug creates and commercializes ELIPS, the first open application development environment designed for mass-market mobile phones. Already shipped in millions of devices, ELIPS enables software companies, handset makers and operators to create and deploy mobile applications, rich user interfaces as well as complete software solution, in record time.
Founded in 2002, Open-Plug is a private company financed by leading international venture capital investors. Headquartered in France, the company also operates in Taipei, Taiwan R.O.C. Open-Plug is a member of the LiMo Foundation (Linux Mobile Foundation).
For more information, visit www.open-plug.com
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