EML Wildfire Tech PR Blog

Strong Evolving Technology + Widely Adopted Standard = Opportunity to Innovate

I’ve blogged previously both on the question of innovation and on the need for standardisation. A solid and widely adopted technology gives a perfect platform for innovative new technologies to be developed quickly and easily –a standard provides this base.

The established installed base of billions of Bluetooth devices in the market is one such platform. I blogged earlier this year about the relative pace of wireless innovation, and significant hardware innovations provide the foundation for more rapid innovations, which might be in software. But equally, the flood of innovations might come from the hardware systems or end products designed around the core technology.

For over 10 years I worked with CSR, the very successful British company that made Bluetooth work in a type of integrated chip technology called CMOS, which others said couldn’t be used for a wireless radio.…

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Following the North American wireless show CTIA at the end of May, there are growing signs of momentum in the machine-to-machine (M2M) market. Rethink Wireless reported: “we could definitely see signs of its real adoption”.

To get an industry perspective on this we invited a guest blog from Alan Woolhouse, Director of Weightless Marketing, to share his view on some of the driving applications in M2M and what it’s really going to take to realise this massive opportunity.

You don’t have to be at the forefront of technology to have been touched by the fundamental shifts in the way we are globally embracing Smart Cities, Smart Grid, Smart Meters, Big Data, M2M and the Internet of things.

These developments will continue to evolve way beyond what we can imagine today. But, at the start of 2013, it’s clear that we are already seeing themes and patterns coalesce, and models being deployed to realise the visions that have been building over the last few years.…

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It must have happened to everyone working in PR and marketing. You get a brief, exceed the targets and proudly present the results expecting the feedback to be wonderful. Only to then find yourself answering to someone further up the chain as to why you’ve not delivered on something you were never asked about in the first place.

Now imagine the ‘person further up the chain’ happens to be George Osborne and you’re starting to get an idea of what’s unfolding in the UK telecoms space at the moment.

In case you hadn’t noticed, the UK is a bit short of funds at the moment. With this in mind the Government got very excited at the end of last year and promised that the 4G spectrum auction would be adding a tidy £3.5 billion to the bank.

So it was perhaps a surprise when the auction raised ‘just’ £2.3 billion and particularly when people remembered that the 3G auction raised £22 billion.…

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4G – it’s like 3G, but faster

It’s safe to say any tech PR types hoping to send out mobile news today would have spent the morning swearing – if you’ve managed to miss it, Ofcom has announced the results of the 4G Spectrum auction.

For the most part it’s as expected; the big operators got in on the deal, but there’s a new entrant with BT – likely to use its allocation to supplement mobile broadband services.

There’s a lot of decent write-ups out there already and you’re on a PR blog after all, so I won’t go into the finer points, but what does this mean for us telecoms PR types?

Well the 4G story has been around for a while now, but the main challenges faced by the operators are rolling out their new networks – and then making sure they deliver on what people expect.

I’ve already written about how 4G should give operators the chance to change how they charge, with OTT services (Over the top – think video and extra content on top of the basic voice and data) having a big role to play here.…

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In his blog on this year’s CES, our own @benfieldtown surmised that too much emphasis is being placed on the importance of software, and suggestions of the growing irrelevance of a hardware exhibition were missing the point. “What is all this software running on exactly?”, says it all. The discussion about the source of innovation, and the question of whether the real innovations now come from the virtual (software) or physical (hardware) world, seems to be cropping up more and more often.

Wireless communications is now truly embedded in the entire technology industry and with that in mind, Mobile World Congress 2013, the most significant event in the wireless industry calendar is just around the corner. One of the conference sessions at MWC 13 will see a panel of future innovators pitch to a panel of investors whose job it will be to identify which business plan is likely to have the greatest impact on the communications industry in 2023.…

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