There is but one remedy for the Glass wearer — a bucket of ice water in the face whenever you suspect he has taken you unawares

With the public beta launch of Google Glass, there has been a lot of discussion on why it will or won’t fail. The ultimate benchmark for success is high: After someone has tried Glass, can they imagine life without it?

It’s the wrong question.

Glass is Google’s unintentional public service announcement on the future of privacy. Our traditional bogeyman for privacy was Big Brother and its physical manifestation — closed-circuit TV — but the reality today is closer to what I call Little Sister, and she is socially active, curious, sufficiently tech-savvy, growing up in the land of “free,” getting on with life and creating a digital exhaust that is there for the taking. The sustained conversation around Glass will be sufficient to lead to a societal shift in how we think about the ownership of data, and to extrapolate a bit, the kind of cities we want to live in. For me, the argument that Glass is somehow inherently nefarious misses a more interesting point: It is a physical and obvious manifestation of things that already exist and are widely deployed today, whose lack of physical, obvious presence has limited a mainstream critical discourse.

As a product that is both on-your-face and in-your-face, Glass is set to become a lightning rod for a wider discussion around what constitutes acceptable behavior in public and private spaces. The Glass debate has already started, but these are early days; each new iteration of hardware and functionality will trigger fresh convulsions. In the short term, Glass will trigger anger, name-calling, ridicule and the occasional bucket of thrown water (whether it’s ice water, I don’t know). In the medium term, as societal interaction with the product broadens, signs will appear in public spaces guiding mis/use¹ and lawsuits will fly, while over the longer term, legislation will create boundaries that reflect some form of im/balance between individual, corporate and societal wants, needs and concerns.

So Shoot Me

Of all of the companies and organisations that could bring Glass to market, I’m pleased that Google is the one making a significant investment: A company with a recent record of genuine innovation that stretches/defines social and behavioral norms² with a strong revenue stream and deep enough pockets to have a fighting chance of medium to long-term success. It also helps that the project is considered of strategic importance, and has key executive sponsorship. Less obvious, but no less relevant in this equation, is that the company has a lot to lose, is no longer the media darling, has fucked up enough times in public to know it can do so again (and again), has been humbled by more nimble competitors, has experienced talent drain and understands the impact of this on its culture and its bottom line. Of course, Google can financially afford to fail again: Experimentation and failure is a critical part of its DNA, but while privacy-snafu fines are low, the internal and external cultural costs of Glass failing are high.

All technology challenges the status quo, and if a technology is noticed by consumers/users/constituents at all, it presents for some an opportunity and for others a threat. The perceived and actual threat from Glass comes not from crimes against taste. (Many have commented on the perceived inelegance of the design.) Google’s design team appears to have done a sterling job, if you assume that particular design direction and constraints. Our sense of what is tasteful succeeds or fails as part of a far broader narrative, which they, too, are exploring. Yes, you can find a hundred and one designs of “wearable computing” from the past decade that look similar, but very few are packing the same experience into the same form factor. However, as a connected, sensing object, it is capable of recording and transmitting photos, video and sound directly through content analysis or indirectly through proximate connected devices, other data such as location, temperature, trajectory and so on. In other words, in a worst/best case scenario it could record and measure “everything,” and associate that data to a person. How will this play out?

I want you to try a little experiment. Find somewhere where you can sit and observe people interact with one another. Pick somewhere just out of the throng — the edge of a cafe looking in, a park bench, a doorway close to a market. It’s easier if you choose somewhere you don’t know so well, you’ll have less to unlearn.

Give yourself 30 minutes to view and reflect upon the scene in front of you: Who visits that space, and why; the differences in ritual greetings, and indeed whether or not a person is greeted; how people project who they are; things that signify status and social hierarchy; where objects are placed; the level of interaction with those objects when not in use. What can you see being documented online or off? What can you imagine being documented? Pay particular attention to things that fit your definition of “technology” and reflect upon the things in front of you that once fit this definition but no longer do (my list of were-once-technologies includes the pencil, the wristwatch and the smartphone).

If you’re close enough to other people, you’ll overhear conversations plus bits of conversations that the speakers will allow you to hear, raised, projected, sotto voce and in whispers, combined with body language all serving to emphasize what is said, and the intent of what is communicated. How much of that conversation is directed at the “listener” and how much of it is directed at others in proximity, including you? This rich social choreography is playing out hundreds of billions of times a day across our planet, and is as subtle and delicate as anything appearing in a BBC2 nature documentary.

Of course, people and systems are already capturing (and channeling) content and data in this space in the form of photos, video, background noise on phone or video calls, who is connected to what, and what they are doing. It is likely that Google, Microsoft and Nokia’s Navteq (to name but three) have already systematically mapped this space and are serving up street views online. The difference with Glass is that it threatens surreptitious, unexpected or continuous recording from the perspective of the human-eye/ear view. At this point, it doesn’t matter whether it can support sustained recording for long periods or not; what matters is that the form factor supports this, that it could at some point, and that we all know Google is in the business of selling ads against insight drawn from large volume of data. Continuous, indiscriminate recording in this space is the dragnet fishing of data collection — it’s a destructive technology, a conversation- and privacy-killer.³

Back to our experiment. Take in the scene in front of you. Who owns this space, both legally and figuratively? Who has the rights to do what? By what authority? Who enforces that authority? How do these rights differ for regulars or a first-time visitor? What are the ways people signal the beginning or the end of an activity? And how does that signalling make something more or less acceptable? The obvious clue to activities people have deemed socially unacceptable are often found on hand-scribbled “do not” signs, as in “staff will refuse to serve customers who are on their mobile phone,” or “do not ask for credit.” The more sustained the infringement, the more official-looking the sign.

Today, we falsely assume that our conversations and our images are not by default recorded by other people in proximity.⁴ Not having a persistent record allows us to present a nuanced identity to different people, or groups of people; it provides the space to experiment with what we could be. The risk that what we say will be broadcast, or narrowcasted, to people we don’t know, or may bubble up at some point in the future in the hands of someone serving up ads, fundamentally changes what we want to talk about. The challenge for Glass is that the costs of ownership fall on people in proximity of the wearer, and that its benefits have yet to be proven.

Social Interaction

A number of years ago, while I was working at Nokia, I was asked to explore use cases using an appearance model (a non-working prototype) of a form factor similar to Glass, but clunkier and definitely less refined.⁵ In the first phase of this make-it-up-as-you-go-along-and-see-what-works study, we hired students in Tokyo to act out various scenarios, including content browsing, viewing and game-play using gestures and voice commands, in a range of contexts: At home, on a commuter train, on a long-distance train, in a hotel lobby, in a park, a cafe, and while walking along. The research team then noted interaction issues with the glasses, carefully observing social reactions from people in proximity before finally interviewing the actors/actresses for their own experience.⁶

Fans of Milgram’s New York subway experiment will be happy to note that our actors and actresses felt extremely self-conscious about wearing nonstandard glasses, and awkward about acting out the scenarios, particularly in contexts where there were others in close proximity. A number of the things we learned from this study surprised us:

• Most of what we “see” at any time is out of focus in the periphery where as long as the things going on in peripheral vision don’t trigger a threat response will probably pass the glance test. It will be interesting to see whether Glass is perceived as a threatening object and thus may force others in proximity of a wearer to maintain a hyperawareness of the wearer and their own actions — whereas today they are currently able to relax. This would be, in effect, like a blanket tax on the collective attention of society.⁷
• Spoken interaction is awkward for almost everyone in confined spaces on systems with less than 100 percent accuracy. An interface built around short responses to contextually understood events will be the dominant form of interaction.
• Gesture interaction is just as awkward in close spaces, and in many instances will restrict regular use and/or in a vocabulary of “quiet gestures.” To get a sense of how this plays out, the next time you are on the subway and have people sitting on either side, raise your hands in front of your face or look down and move your hands in your field of vision. Even simple gestures require upper-arm/shoulder movements, which, when you are sitting shoulder to shoulder, impact fellow passengers. A Glass wearer who wants to maintain the social cohesion in that context (and not all will be that self-aware or considerate) can mitigate this by pausing interactions for the moment when they are appropriate, or more likely by avoiding interactions in that context.
• In contexts where social interaction is required — sitting with friends around a table in a cafe, say — Glass will create a situation where people are not sure whether they or the contents of the display are engaging the wearer.
• In-ear or close-to-ear (inductive) audio changes the wearer’s enjoyment of food and drink — a problem for an otherwise prime use case: Watching movies at home, where snacks and beverages might naturally be consumed.
• Humans tend to fall asleep in contexts where they are seated, safe, and there is minimal physical movement — providing opportunities to design for disengagement.
• Humans have a vested interest in tracking changing emotional states of the people around them. This will introduce “Are you lookin’ at me?” moments where others in proximity assume that a smile, tear or frown is triggered by their own presence, and will spur people to send inappropriate content to their Glass-wearing peers, with a weary inevitability that will include this but is far less likely to include this (or is it the other way around?). In some contexts, these moments will lead to confrontation. Read the footnote in this article in the Atlantic, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, and imagine introducing erratic behavior into the equation. Amplify to billions of social interactions a day.

What starts out as a fairly broad set of use cases rapidly starts to narrow.

Tooling Up

I’ve got a confession to make. Frog, the design and innovation consultancy where I work, has recorded thousands of conversations around the world, videotaped many more, tailed people around town and nosed around people’s homes — opening cupboards and drawers, asking personal questions where there were none. All with their permission, and all in the name of research. There are a few things we’ve learned that relate to the broader discussion of what is collected by whom, how and why, and how it is used; you’ll see why these are relevant in a moment.

Any idiot can collect data. The real issue is how to collect data in such a way that meets both moral and legal obligations and still delivers some form of value.

• Ownership. People are naturally suspicious of what they don’t know. The simple act of giving them control over the process or the objects/technologies we carry defuses initial suspicion. A few simple field-research techniques can rapidly build trust. These include handing someone you’ve just met on the street a $5,000 camera and then ignoring them to concentrate on a conversation with their friends. This shows we trust them. And then they trust us.
• Clear On/Off States. Most people have (at least initial) concerns about being recorded. There are numerous effective ways that we in Frog’s design research team emphasize the transition between on and off: From how a camera or other recording device is held when not in use. It is useful to think of a camera as a gun: Understand the impact that bringing it out can have on any given context; only take it out if you’re prepared to use it and be careful where you point it.
• Reciprocity. Today it is easy to maintain a persistent connection between the researcher and the participant — often in the form of a social media account or email address. You’ve asked something of them, and they have the right and now have a channel through which to ask something of you.
• Full circle: We give participants the opportunity to review, delete or own any of the data collected on them by the research team. This is normally carried out at the end of the session, after any reward is handed over (so they are not pressured into letting us keep data) and before any data consent form is signed (so they better understand the implications of what they are signing). A team that knows the data will be reviewed by the participant changes what they collect in the first place; it becomes self-policing. More than any training, this simple principle helps keep teams honest and operating within social norms.

A few simple steps lower the more obviously anti-social aspects of Glass. The evolution of body language that helps communicate Glass’s current state, e.g. pushed above the head to show that it is not in use; a literacy around the spoken commands that communicate the current task that the user is engaged in “take panorama” or “grindr lookup”; and showing whether the camera and other recording mechanisms are in use or disabled.

Glass has four design principles for developers that focus on the Glass wearer’s user experience: “design for Glass,” “don’t get in the way,” “keep it timely,” and “avoid the unexpected.”⁸ As challenging as it is to find a compelling use-case (beyond porn), these principles are aimed at the wrong people — Glass wearers, rather than those in proximity.

Two complementary principles will go some way toward accommodating the concerns of people in proximity and lower social barriers to adoption:

• Proximate Transparency: Allow anyone in proximity to access the same feed that the wearer is recording or seeing and view it through a device of their choosing. Make it easy to identify the Glasses themselves and to trace them back to the wearer. This simple act can help demystify the technology, create a broader sense of ownership of its inclusion in any given space. The reality is that very few people would be interested in jacking in and the act of having an open stream will change the behavior of what is watched. For many this won’t be enough of a step; it is after all an opt-out measure for people who have the technological know how and literacy to — forcing people in proximity to do something for dubious gain.
• Remote Control: allow identifiable people in proximity to control Glass’s recording functionality and have access to the output of what was recorded. Allowing others to demonstrably benefit from the utility of Glass will make it part of the social landscape.

Pedestal or a Pauper’s Grave?

One could argue that the form taken by Glass offers up a lazy futurist’s vision of what might be — take the trajectory of one product (displays becoming smaller/cheaper/more efficient over time) and integrate it with another (eyeglasses), sprinkle in connectivity and real-time access to content and big-data-analytics. Our expectations of what it could be are raised in part because this join-the-dots vision of the future fits neatly into Western un/popular young-male culture, from “The Terminator” through to Halo. Glass has a certain inevitability about it, like the weight of expectation on of child born to a great composer or, if you will, to a middle-aged suicide. As any visitor to Yodobashi camera over the past decade will tell you, the hardware technologies that make Glass hardly feel novel (and for recent competitors, see Sony, Golden-i, or this Telepathy device prototype) but neither do they need to be, because this is all about how they are brought together into a holistic experience.

There are of course alternative visions of this connected future that are far more discrete, taking connected, sensing things and embedding them in the world around us to inform, guide, direct, cajole, tax, enrich us and the things around us. It’s an area worthy of an essay in its own right, but for now, here are a few pointers to people, places and things that have helped inform my sense of this space: Dan Hill at City of Sound; the MIT Senseable City Lab; Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art; Tisch ITP; BERG, Nicholas Nova and Julian Bleecker at the Near Future Laboratory help stretch our understanding of what could be; Curious Rituals in conjuction with students at the Arts Center College of Design in particular is a lovely piece of work; living for more than a decade in Tokyo, Shanghai and frequent trips to the cities that define this century’s urban experience — the Seoul/Nairobi/Mumbai/Rio/Chongqings of this world; products like Nike+, FitBit, Moves (to take one narrow category) through to less well known but arguably more impactful services that for me are at the very center of the internet of things — services like Kilimo Salama and Sarvajal;⁹ through to business units/activities in large corporations such as Cisco, IBM, Disney, and Ericsson with more of a how to make money/make a difference at scale.¹⁰

That Moment in Time

I started this essay by paraphrasing a quote — here is the original in full: “There is but one remedy for the amateur photographer. Put a brick through his camera whenever you suspect he has taken you unawares.” It could be written about Glass today, but is in fact taken from an 1885 edition of “Amateur Photographer”¹¹ magazine, seven years after the introduction of dry plates, a technology that supported more surreptitious photography. (The essay by Bill Jay is worth reading in full.)

The same essay contains another quote from “Amateur Photographer,” twenty five years later, when cameras were becoming smaller, less noticeable: “Our moral character dwindles as our instruments get smaller.” In due course, the technologies to deliver Glass’s emerging functionality will truly disappear from view — this is a window of opportunity for discussion, debate and a reflection.

I’m thankful to Google for putting so much effort into Glass at this moment in time.

That passion? Channel it.

That anger? Channel it.

Jan Chipchase is Executive Creative Director of Global Insights at Frog, a design and innovation consultancy. He has not tried Google Glass, and has no idea whether he has been recorded through one. His first book, “Hidden in Plain Sight,” available from HarperCollins on April 16, explores issues around technology adoption, use and abuse.

¹ This sign did the rounds but is closer to advertising for a pleasantly seedy bar than a warning sign. The suspicion can be real, but the true test comes from reactions to a wider deployment.
² Eric Schmidt’s quote, “Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it,” is an interesting reflection of company culture. It’s refreshing to have a CEO that is this frank about the business they are in and the way they operate, and it’s an interesting assumption that the best way to institutionalize an understanding of creepy is to measure it and place it on a line.
³ If you want to extrapolate the argument around wholesale recording through Glass, it’s actually highly inefficient, particularly once much of that space and context is known. There are other, emerging technologies with far more processing power and unlimited power supply that are in a better position to continuously record.
⁴ There are many examples of what we say and do being recorded: From the obvious conversations in an interrogation room through to corporations tracking employee emails and IM chats, all the way to state agencies. When conducting research in Iran and making a call to the U.S., I assume it is being recorded by both Iranian and U.S. agencies. The only question is who else is listening and what is their motivation, today and at some point in the future.
⁵ I’ve not done a full write up of the research, but it was shared publicly a few years back.
⁶ After the Tokyo study, my then colleague Raphael Grignani ran a comparable study in New York City, with broadly analogous findings.
⁷ The physical toll of having to maintain a state of hyper-awareness is touched on here and here, and while these are extreme examples it is an interesting topic to further explore.
⁸ As Bruce Sterling pointed out, take each of those design principles and flip them to understand the actual experience.
⁹ We are running a study around water consumption and Sarvajal and will be sharing more on the project in due course.
¹⁰ Full disclosure: This list includes both personal and Frog clients.
¹¹ “The Amateur Photographer,” 18 September 1885, p. 871.

California-based Mediaroom, which employs around 400 people worldwide, provides a platform for video distribution deployed with the world’s largest Internet Protocol TV operators, Ericsson said.

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Once again, the Japanese phone maker has found little carrier support, and is instead selling its device unlocked. That means that the Xperia ZL will sell for a whopping $719 ($40 more for the LTE version).

For that price, you get a device with some pretty nice specs, including a five-inch screen, a 13-megapixel camera, 1.5GHz quad-core chip, etc. Other features include Near Field Communication (NFC) and a battery-improving Stamina mode that turns off power-draining applications when the screen is dark.

And, of course, you aren’t tied to a contract.

The phone is set to be available for presale Monday on Sony’s online store, and will be coming soon to “select online retailers,” Sony said.

Sony also plans for its Xperia Tablet Z to hit the U.S. in May. On the tablet side, however, the company has the benefit that most devices are sold without a subsidy.

Globally, Sony is hoping that the Z series will help revive the company’s mobile business.

Sony bought out its former joint venture partner, Ericsson, and has now reintegrated the mobile business with other parts of its electronics business, but it has yet to see a hoped-for boost in business.

For Sony, it was a much-needed vote of confidence for one of the company’s most important new products in recent memory. The Xperia Z, which went on sale in Japan on Feb. 9, is Sony’s first smartphone developed from the ground up by its engineers and designers since a pricey divorce from its mobile phone partner Ericsson last year.

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The company’s strategy is to gather enough intellectual property around LTE in one pool that device makers can go to to license technology for their products.

However, many big names — and important LTE patent holders — still aren’t on the list. Some key holders, folks such as Ericsson and Qualcomm, are unlikely to join, since licensing is an integral part of their business.

But Via hopes to get enough of the rest of the big patent holders to make its pool attractive to device makers.

Via won’t say if any companies have actually yet licensed the patents.

Although China Mobile and Deutsche Telekom aren’t seen as among the top holders of LTE-related patents, Via hopes they could inspire others to sign up.

Via Licensing CEO Roger Ross said that he is hopeful that companies such as Huawei, LG or Apple might decide to join the patent-licensing pool.

“I don’t want to be overly optimistic,” he said, but added, “I think we are going to get some of those very large patent holders.”

The U.S. International Trade Commission said Thursday that it has agreed to investigate Samsung for possible trade violations, following a complaint by Ericsson. The network-equipment manufacturer alleges that Samsung has infringed a number of its mobile technology patents by continuing to sell a number of smartphones, tablets and TVs without a proper patent-licensing agreement. And it wants the ITC to ban their importation.

Further complicating matters: A similar complaint brought by Samsung against Ericsson late last year. In it, Samsung argued that some of Ericsson’s telecommunications network equipment violate a handful of Samsung patents.

It’s worth noting that most of the patents at issue in this spat are standards-essential ones, which their holders are obligated to license under fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms. Both Ericsson and Samsung allege one another have refused to do so. And those allegations come at a time of increased regulatory scrutiny of standards-essential patents. Indeed, in its recent consent decree with Google, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission told Google that it cannot seek to ban competing products using patents it licensed under a FRAND agreement.

Samsung said it filed a complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission after Ericsson, a Swedish maker of mobile-network infrastructure, earlier this month went to the commission to seek a ban on the import to the U.S. of some of Samsung’s wireless products, including devices in its popular Galaxy range of tablets and smartphones.

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Ericsson, the world’s largest maker of mobile-network equipment, will take an 8 billion Swedish kronor ($1.22 billion) charge in the fourth quarter. Last week, Franco-Italian chip maker STMicroelectronics said it plans to exit the struggling cellphone-chip joint venture, which has faced a plummeting business making chips for cheap phones and trouble getting traction with smartphone makers.

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Ericsson said the suit follows two years of failed negotiations with Samsung, during which the South Korean company sought to significantly reduce the licensing fees it pays to license Ericsson’s IP under so-called fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory (FRAND) terms.

“Ericsson has tried long and hard to amicably come to an agreement with Samsung and to sign a license agreement on FRAND terms,” Ericsson’s chief intellectual property officer, Kasim Alfalahi, said in a statement. “We have turned to litigation as a last resort.”

Samsung, for its part, says that it would like to license Ericsson’s patents on FRAND terms, but that’s not what the company is offering. “Ericsson has demanded prohibitively higher royalty rates to renew the same patent portfolio,” Samsung said in a statement of its own. “As we cannot accept such extreme demands, we will take all necessary legal measures to protect against Ericsson’s excessive claims.”

Better get those ready, Samsung, because Ericsson isn’t messing around here. It alleges that Samsung has sold “hundreds of millions” of unlicensed devices since the expiration of its previous agreement, and it’s seeking damages on all of them, as well as an injunction against the infringing products themselves.

Ross

Among the companies banding together are AT&T, Clearwire, Hewlett-Packard, KDDI, NTT DOCOMO, SK Telecom, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, and ZTE. The effort is coordinated by Via Licensing, a spinoff of Dolby Laboratories that is in the business of managing patent pools.

Via Licensing isn’t disclosing the exact pricing for the LTE patents, which varies based on volume, but it is on the order of a few dollars per device.

One of the major challenges, though, is that the group only accounts for a small part of the patents essential to incorporating the LTE standard.

Via Licensing president Roger Ross said that it is difficult to put a precise estimate on how much of the intellectual property is behind the LTE standard, but estimates maybe 20 percent is represented by current partners. Via hopes eventually to have entities representing up to half of all the related intellectual property.

“We expect participation in this program to grow significantly once the patent pool is announced, even in the next few weeks,” said John Ehler, director of wireless programs for Via.

Some big names aren’t part of the group, though, including Qualcomm, Ericsson and Nokia. Nokia, for its part, says it has already licensed its LTE essential patents to more than 40 companies, noting that it has more than 400 families of patents related to the technology.

“This has been estimated by independent sources to represent around 50 percent of the total patents declared essential to LTE by all companies,” Nokia said. (Clearly, if you ask all the parties what percentage of LTE patents they hold, you will get an answer that adds up to more than 100 percent.)

Nokia CEO Stephen Elop told AllThingsD on Tuesday that he sees intellectual property licensing as one of five key businesses for the company, alongside basic phones, Windows phones, location services and network infrastructure.

While Nokia is actively licensing its LTE patents, there is concern that other parties might use their LTE patents as bargaining power in an increasingly litigious wireless industry that has seen an array of lawsuits.

Ross said that it is frustrating to see so much litigation over standards-essential patents, especially when intellectual property holders are supposed to commit to reasonable licensing of their technology as part of the standards-setting processes.

Licensing efforts such as Via’s offer a way for the industry to save money while still allowing companies to get paid for their intellectual property.

“Every dollar companies don’t have to spend on litigation is a dollar they can spend on LTE innovation,” Ross said.

The job cut comes after Sony took full control of its mobile phone joint venture with Sweden’s Telefon AB L.M. Ericsson earlier this year.

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And even when you have sufficient storage, you run into another problem: No matter how good they are, the systems you buy have a way of getting clogged up as data gets pushed through the pipes. Between you and your storage system are gateways that direct traffic to those storage systems, and they tend to get bogged down.

Last week, I met with a company from Sweden called Compuverde, which has a solution to that problem. Basically, it’s software that redistributes the traffic flowing in and out of the pipes and evens it out. In essence, all the storage hardware gets a more orderly and equally distributed stream of data coming in and flowing out, and, as a result, it runs a lot more efficiently. That’s one piece of the puzzle.

But there’s a more interesting problem. A lot of the data getting created is basically copies and then copies of copies for the purposes of backup, and then backups for backups. It’s inefficient, and makes for a world where storage gets both energy-hungry and expensive, and therefore expensive to operate.

Compuverde attacks this problem, too. Its Object Store product is software that ties basic commodity hardware together and makes it act like a much more expensive and fail-safe storage environment. The result, the company says, is a rock-solid storage environment that can handle hundreds of petabytes of data, and that’s more efficient and cheaper to own and operate than the higher-end storage systems from the likes of EMC and NetApp.

Stefan Bernbo, Compuverde’s CEO, says the company has customers who have tried out its software who have seen a 400 percent improvement in efficiency. It’s kind of a bold claim, but at the company’s HQ in the city of Karlskrona, in southern Sweden, it operates a big 13-petabyte storage array that prospective customers can try out on their own and see the results in action.

The company is being bankrolled for now by its executive chairman Mikael Blomqvist, a seasoned Swedish entrepreneur who founded a cable-isolation company called Roxtec, which he later sold to Mellby Gård, a Sweden-based industrial concern.

T-Mobile is also looking to free up space in another part of its spectrum that should finally allow iPhone users to run on its network at full speed. The company has about a million iPhone subscribers, even though those devices can only run at slow 2G speeds. T-Mobile USA does not sell the iPhone itself.

At a dinner event in New Orleans on Monday, CTO Neville Ray said that the effort to reclaim some of its 1900 MHz spectrum should reach a critical mass in the fourth quarter of this year, allowing the company to more aggressively court AT&T subscribers that are no longer under contract.

Ray declined to comment on whether the company would directly target iPhone users in a big marketing push planned for later this year.

“It would make sense,” Ray agreed, but added, “We’re not there yet.”

The company announced on Monday night two of the companies that will help it build out its next-generation network: Ericsson and Nokia Siemens Networks.

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That’s also what the folks at Article One Partners thought, so they conducted a study, along with Thomson Reuters, to see who holds what with regard to patents on 4G LTE technology.

When it comes to the patents rated “highly essential,” the study found that Nokia, Qualcomm, Samsung and LG held nearly half of the patents. When adding in the proviso of the patents also being highly novel, the study found that Nokia, Qualcomm, Samsung and Ericsson collectively own 55 percent of the highly essential and most novel patents.

While things are still shifting, the results should help companies better understand where they fit when it comes to the next generation of wireless technology.

“One of the things companies can use this kind of work is for landscaping,” Article One investor and director Marshall Phelps said in an interview. If a company notices it doesn’t have much intellectual property in an area that most people see as essential, Phelps said, “that might tell you where you have holes in your portfolio.”

Of course, the real problem remains — namely that most of the major wireless companies are suing one another rather than licensing each other’s technology.

“It’s a circular firing squad,” Phelps said. “The industry is not mature enough yet to figure out how to deal with each other.”

Right now, for example, Apple is suing Samsung and HTC, Microsoft is suing Barnes & Noble and Motorola, and Oracle is suing Google, to name just a few of the major legal actions gripping the industry.

Over time, though, Phelps expects that the wireless companies will figure out a way to license technology in such a way that companies can both partner and compete.

“In the high-tech world, litigation has rarely stopped anyone from competing,” said Phelps, who led intellectual property licensing at Microsoft, and at IBM before that. Phelps said that is especially true in smartphones, which necessarily must use thousands of patents worth of technology.

Phelps said he doesn’t blame companies that are struggling in the marketplace but asserting their patents.

“It’s an asset, like your building is,” he said. “If you are not using it, you should be.”

And the values of those IP buildings are skyrocketing, as evidenced by Google’s pending $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola Mobility, among other deals.

“What you see with these giant purchases are companies that don’t feel they are in a good position trying to buttress their position,” Phelps said. “Everybody knows right now IP is really critical, and if you don’t got it, you better get it.”

I’m told Nicira has just made another key hire, again from Cisco Systems. Bruce Davie, a longtime Cisco employee and a Cisco Fellow, has joined Nicira as its Chief Service Provider Architect.

Davie is pretty well known in networking circles, and is one of the co-inventors of MPLS, or multiprotocol label switching, which is a fundamental basis for the high-end business class Internet service that many carriers deliver.

Davie joined Cisco in 1995, and has been a Cisco Fellow since 1998. Since 1997, he has worked in the Internet Technologies Division at Cisco, and leads a group that represents the company before the Internet Engineering Task Force. If there’s anyone who truly understands how the Internet’s pipes really work, he’s probably among them.

Before Cisco, Davie worked at Bellcore, a.k.a. Bell Communications Research, the old research and development arm of the regional phone companies, or “Baby Bells,” that resulted from the 1982 court-ordered breakup of the old AT&T. Bellcore is still around; it eventually became Telcordia and ended up in the hands of Swedish telecom concern Ericsson, in a deal that closed earlier this month.

Davie has a B.E. from Melbourne University, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Edinburgh University. He is the author of three books on networking, and lots of technical papers. He is also an active participant on both the Internet Engineering Task Force and the Internet Research Task Force; a senior member of the IEEE; and has, in recent years, been a visiting lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Davie would appear to be the eighth person at Nicira (by my likely incomplete count) with a Cisco connection. Its CEO is Steve Mullaney, a veteran networking executive who has worked at Palo Alto Networks, ShoreTel and Cisco. Its CTO and co-founder, Martin Casado, did his Ph.D. on the technology the company plans to bring to market. Its other founders, Nick McKeown and Scott Shenker, are electrical engineering profs at Stanford and Berkeley, respectively. Last January, the outfit also hired Rob Enns, a veteran of Juniper Networks, as its VP of engineering.

There’s still no official word about what Nicira is doing, but all these hires are making it look ever more interesting by the day. Nicira is working on technology aimed at “virtualizing the network.” Data center networks today are too inflexible, complex and costly, especially in the age of the cloud, when everything is on-demand, flexible and cheap. Nicira’s Web site says the product is a software solution that runs on existing networks, requires no new hardware and is aimed directly at large-scale cloud data centers. Interesting, indeed.

Rather than use one phone to capture video or an immersive still picture, Joergen Geerds, Dan Finkler and Mark Sevenoff used six Sony Ericsson Xperia neo phones in a custom mount to record a ride down Slickrock Trail in Utah’s Moab Desert.

The group used a 3D printer to create the mount that held the six phones and recorded video on each phone, then stitched it all together. The result is an interactive video, playable on the Web, that allows viewers to replay the ride from all different angles, shifting smoothly from one position to another as the video plays.

The Moab outing is the centerpiece of an Xperia Studio project sponsored by Sony Ericsson that aims to show the creative possibilities of its products.

For Geerds, the panorama format was familiar as his main business is shooting large nighttime cityscapes. But, video was news.

“With the video I figured I wanted to go in a different direction, and bring more humanity in it,” Geerds said in an interview. That’s when Geerds got connected with Finkler, a New York-based developer, who created the bluetooth remote control software and Sevenoff, who did the actual bike riding.

One of the challenges with shooting video was that Geerds couldn’t find any commercial software for stitching together the panoramic videos. Instead, Geerds relied on the software he uses for processing stills. That meant breaking each video into a collection of hundreds of thousands of jpeg images.

“It certainly was the most complex project I’ve ever worked on,” Geerds said.

The hardest part, Geerds said, was learning to use the software to do the 3D printing that allowed the fabrication of the custom rigging used to mount the cameras on the bike.

The shoot itself was done the week of Sept. 19. Geerds said most things went relatively smoothly, although he found out later that one of the six cameras did get a bit wobbly on the ride down.

One surprise was that the phones’ battery life held up pretty well.

“We had tons of replacement batteries with us,” Geerds said, but they ended up not needing most of them, getting two to three hours of battery life from each camera phone. A bigger issue, he said, was running out of space on SD cards.

Another key was Finkler’s remote control software, which allowed the video recording to be stopped and re-started remotely using a seventh smartphone.

“We are trying to put more features into the software, and will probably release it on github once it’s more polished,” Geerds said.

He flatly refused to tip his hand at last week’s AsiaD conference. But on Thursday, Sony announced that it is indeed buying out Ericsson in the two companies’ Sony Ericsson joint venture.

Under the terms of the deal, Sony will pay Ericsson 1.05 billion euros; will enter a broad patent cross-licensing deal, giving all of Sony’s products license to Ericsson’s patents; and will take ownership of five patent families directly related to wireless handsets.

Although Hirai refused last week to say whether Sony would buy out the joint venture, he did say it was essential for the company to have control and influence over the unit’s products. And what better way to get control and influence than by taking full ownership?

In their statement announcing the deal, the two companies noted that a lot has changed since the venture was set up 10 years ago, and that, given the shift to smartphones, there is less overlap than there once was with the rest of Ericsson’s business.

Sony also said the move will help it offer more integrated products.

“We can more rapidly and more widely offer consumers smartphones, laptops, tablets and televisions that seamlessly connect with one another and open up new worlds of online entertainment,” Sony CEO Howard Stringer said in a statement.

Regardless of who owns it, the handset business has its work cut out for it, having dropped in status to a relatively minor player in the global smartphone business, despite having some nice Android-based hardware.

By wresting full control of Sony Ericsson, a 50-50 joint venture created in 2001 that is the world’s sixth-largest cellphone manufacturer, Sony aims to integrate the smartphone business with that of its tablets, hand-held game machines, and personal computers to save on costs and better synchronize development of mobile devices, the people said.

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A consortium of six companies last month paid $4.5 billion to acquire a portfolio of 6,000 patents auctioned by the bankrupt Canadian telecom equipment maker Nortel Networks, thwarting Google’s interest. The final amount, five times Google’s original $900 million “stalking horse” bid, stunned observers and raised concerns about how the consortium intended to use them.

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So how is the company feeling after losing the auction to a consortium including several rivals that have Android in their legal crosshairs?

Well, not too good, thanks for asking.

“This outcome is disappointing for anyone who believes that open innovation benefits users and promotes creativity and competition,” Google Senior VP and General Counsel Kent Walker said in a statement provided to AllThingsD. “We will keep working to reduce the current flood of patent litigation that hurts both innovators and consumers.”

The patents sold for $4.5 billion to a group made up of Apple, EMC, Ericsson, Microsoft, Research In Motion and Sony. The collection of more than 6,000 patents covers a range of technologies, including lots in wireless and networking and some related to 4G wireless technology.

Google and its Android partners are, of course, finding themselves entwined in a host of legal battles. Apple is suing Taiwanese phone maker HTC, while Oracle is suing Google directly.

Microsoft has sued Motorola and Barnes & Noble over their use of the open source operating system, while seeking Android royalties from any company that will pay. HTC has already agreed to a deal with Microsoft, as have three smaller players, in moves announced this week.

Given all that, open source patent watcher Florian Mueller said he was surprised Google didn’t cough up whatever was necessary to get its hands on Nortel’s patents.

“No major industry player is as needy in terms of patents as Google,” Mueller said, noting that there are some 45 patent infringement lawsuits already surrounding Android. Still, he noted, “By purchasing Nortel’s portfolio, Google couldn’t have solved all of Android’s patent issues in one fell swoop.”

Mueller said the patents wouldn’t have helped much against Oracle, for example. “But Google lost an unprecedented opportunity to acquire a major bargaining chip that would strengthen it at the mobile industry’s intellectual property negotiating table.”

“Following a very robust auction, we are pleased at the outcome of the auction of this extensive patent portfolio,” Nortel Chief Strategy Officer George Riedel said in a statement. “The size and dollar value for this transaction is unprecedented, as was the significant interest in the portfolio among major companies around the world.”

The winning bid requires approval of both U.S. and Canadian courts, which the company will seek at a joint hearing expected to take place on July 11. Nortel said it will work with the winning bidders in an effort to close the sale in the third quarter.

The consortium won the bidding, but a number of other players had publicly expressed interest or were believed to be interested in the patents, including one of the eventual winners — Ericsson — and Google, which had placed the initial $900 million bid to begin the auction process. Google had justified its initial bid by saying that patents are necessary given the increasingly litigious environment these days.

Google, as well as its hardware partners, face a number of lawsuits related to Android. Apple, for example, has sued HTC, while Oracle has sued Google directly and Microsoft also has claimed Android hardware infringes on its patents, suing both Motorola and Barnes and Noble.

The patents covered a broad range of areas, Nortel said, including all manner of telecommunications and networking technologies — wireless and 4G wireless, among others — as well as additional areas such as Internet search and social networking.

Even with the cash haul, Nortel said it still doesn’t expect to have any remaining value for common shareholders once it completes its bankruptcy protection hearings.

Because it came late in the last quarter, the company said, the business impact on that period’s financial results was minimal.

“The impact on Q2 and beyond remains uncertain,” Bill Glasier, the company’s chief financial officer, said on a conference call following the company’s earnings report.

Among the components most affected by the quake were camera modules, batteries and displays, Sony Ericsson said. The company said it is working with suppliers to move to areas not impacted by the quake and, where necessary, to add secondary component suppliers.

Sony Ericsson has been working to boost its share of the global phone market by focusing on Android-based smartphones, but said that sales growth could be hampered by the quake.

The company has about 11 percent of the total Android market globally, but has a very small share in North America–a key smartphone market. Further growth depends on improving its fortunes here, CEO Bert Nordberg reiterated on the conference call. At the same time, Nordberg said that rebuilding the U.S. position must be done step by step with committed carriers as opposed to building a bunch of devices and hoping they will sell.

Verizon is due to launch the company’s Xperia Play–the so-called PlayStation Phone–sometime this spring. Sony Ericsson didn’t give any further details on the timing.

The Franco-American company has hired advisers and in recent days began to examine options for the business, which has about $1.5 billion in annual sales. Besides a sale to a single buyer, other options include an initial public offering. The range of possible buyers for the business could include tech companies like Microsoft Corp. or Hewlett-Packard Co., or other telecom-gear makers like Ericsson and private-equity firms. Valuations of the business vary, but one person said it’s worth well over $1 billion and possibly more than $2 billion.

Besides office telephones, Alcatel-Lucent’s enterprise business sells switches and other networking gear, plus hardware and software used in the call centers. The business is growing and profitable, one person said, but it accounts for less than 10% of the company’s annual revenue, which last year was $21.5 billion.

While the Consumer Electronics Show and other big events feature acres of tiny booths crammed one against another, Mobile World Congress features a different kind of bigness. The show is spread out over eight big buildings in a historic area of town. Every couple of buildings are set several flights of stairs up from the last one, with the final two buildings just a stone’s throw from the grand National Palace.

Connecting the buildings and lining the promenade between them are various smaller trailers and bungalows.

Unlike the cramped booths at CES, the spread-out nature of Mobile World Congress allows even moderate-size companies a good amount of space to show their wares. Even those with bungalows outside a main hall stand a good chance of attracting visitors. Companies that went with that approach included Acer and INQ Mobile, which was touting its new Android phone with quick access to Facebook and Spotify.

That said, some folks’ presence at Mobile World Congress is clearly bigger than others.

One booth that stands out is Google’s first-ever Android booth, tucked in the corner of Hall 8, just inside the entrance.

The two-story pavilion features many of Google’s partners showing Android applications, as well as a place to create one’s own Android mini-me, plus a sushi-bar-style conveyor belt featuring the many phone and tablet designs based on the Google operating system. Among the designs that scrolled by while I was standing there were well-known names such as Samsung and HTC, as well as less-familiar brands such as China’s ZTE and Alcatel, which is new to Android.

Perhaps the pièce de résistance of the booth is a slide that allows children of all chronological ages to relive their youth and glide down from the top floor back to the bottom. The most popular thing, though, was a series of collectible pins being passed out throughout Mobile World Congress by various Android partners. They were a hot commodity, and by Tuesday afternoon most booths were completely out of their supply of pins, placing green candy inside the dishes instead.

While impressive, the Android booth was not the largest by any stretch. One of the more massive setups I saw was the Ericsson booth, which occupied nearly all of Hall 6. A small Sony Ericsson booth was open to the public. Behind a security gate, though, was a massive spread for the many partners of both Ericsson and Sony Ericsson. It featured two bars and two kiosks serving various tapas.

There were meeting rooms and patio tables for more-casual interactions. On display were all kinds of Ericsson technologies ranging from its core infrastructure gear to all kinds of other products and research projects.

A few caught my eye, including a mobile payment section that featured a “Museum of Money” talking about days gone by when people used paper currency with all its flaws. Under glass were such relics as money, piggy banks and counterfeit-detection pens, while Ericsson showed off its many payment technologies.

In another corner, Ericsson was showing off a vending machine that is paid, not with cash or credit card, but via SMS message. Ericsson has a unit that serves as an intermediary between the vendor and the carrier to manage the transaction.

The cellphone maker is hoping that its PlayStation phone, combined with several other new smartphones, will help lift the company to the top of the Android race as opposed to being just one of the pack.

In an interview at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Sony Ericsson CTO Jan Uddenfeldt told Mobilized that the company intends to capitalize on Sony technologies beyond gaming, particularly in the areas of screens and cameras.

“We think we have a really competitive edge,” said Uddenfeldt. The Xperia Arc, for example, uses the Bravia Engine that comes from Sony’s television heritage. “We will introduce 3-D technology and that will come from Sony, of course.

Uddenfeldt said that the company is now leading on Android as well, being the first company outside of Google itself to release a Gingerbread-based phone, with its Arc that was announced at CES. At Mobile World Congress, it announced the Xperia Play and two other phones.

“From being a little bit of a laggard when it comes to Android releases, we are now the leader,” he said. “We intend to really stay that way. Our intention is to be the number one player in this Android world.”

First and foremost, Uddenfeldt said the company has to be a leader when it comes to using both the latest version of Android and the newest chips and other hardware. “It is a technology race, so it is very important to be on the latest technology,” he said.

With Xperia Play, Uddenfeldt said, the company has something that takes advantage of the latest and greatest version of Android but also does something unique.

“We don’t see anyone else doing this in the near future,” he said. In addition to being PlayStation certified, it will also work with a lot of Android games, including many customized just for the Play.

“Most of the games that we will launch are actually non-Sony-based games, Android games,” he said, referring to deals with Gameloft and EA Sports to create Xperia Play-optimized titles. “There’s going to be like 50 games when we launch the product in March or April.”

Though most Americans wouldn’t know it, Sony Ericsson is a top-three global player in Android phones, with about 20 percent market share, he said. Until recently, Uddenfeldt said, the company would tend to introduce phones first in Europe and Asia, bringing them to the U.S. several months later–and that, he said, “was absolutely not the right strategy.”

“The U.S. is now the leading market,” he said. “The U.S. is the country where the most advanced products are being launched first. That was not the case two or three years ago.”

Sony Ericsson is realizing this and is changing, he said, noting that Verizon will be among the first carriers to offer the Play. “We will work very closely with AT&T in launching different products as well,” he added.

The company is also shifting more of its design and engineering to the U.S., Uddenfeldt said, noting that the Redwood Shores, Calif., office where he works, established just two years ago, now has about 300 workers doing everything from product design and engineering to business development.

“It’s the right place to be,” he said. “We have Android there. We have Facebook.”

Uddenfeldt has a unique perspective, having been with Sony Ericsson for only six months but at the same time being a 30-year Ericsson veteran and being based in Silicon Valley for the past several years. He’s also not afraid to admit that the company has made mistakes, including in the past year as it tried to move from proprietary Walkman and Cybershot phones to a fully Android-based lineup.

“I don’t think Sony Ericsson fully understood the importance of being on the latest Android release,” he said. “That kind of hindered a little bit the growth of the company during last year.”

However, he said, with the move to Android, the company has stemmed its losses and has now had four profitable quarters. This year, he said, it is time for growth.